The Short Stories of HG Wells - ALEJANDRIA DIGITAL (Blog

Title: The Short Stories of H. G. Wells (1927)
Author: H. G. Wells
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.: 0609221h.html
Language: English
Date first posted: August 2007
Date most recently updated: August 2007
* * *
PRODUCTION NOTES:
'The Beautiful Suit' is also known as 'A Moonlight Fable'.
'The Red Room' is also known as 'The Ghost of Fear'.
'In The Modern Vein: An Unsympathetic Love Story' is also known as 'A
Bardlet's Romance'. In this story I have replaced "published on three
several occasions" with "published on three separate occasions".
'The Sad Story of a Dramatic Critic' is also known as 'The Obliterated
Man'.
'The Reconciliation' is also known as 'The Bulla'.
'The Man Who Could Work Miracles' is also known as 'The Miracle Maker'.
Subtitles that appear before the titles such as 'Story The First,'
'Story the Second,' and so on, have been removed.
* * *
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The Short Stories of H. G. Wells
1
by
H G Wells
CONTENTS
THE TIME MACHINE AND OTHER STORIES
The Time Machine
The Empire of the Ants
A Vision of Judgment
The Land Ironclads
The Beautiful Suit
The Door in the Wall
The Pearl of Love The Country of the Blind
THE STOLEN BACILLUS AND OTHER STORIES
The Stolen Bacillus
The Flowering of the Strange Orchid
In the Avu Observatory
The Triumphs of a Taxidermist
A Deal In Ostriches
Through a Window
The Temptation of Harringay
The Flying Man
The Diamond Maker
Aepyornis Island
The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes
The Lord of the Dynamos
The Hammerpond Park Burglary
The Moth
The Treasure in the Forest
THE PLATTNER STORY AND OTHERS
The Plattner Story
The Argonauts of the Air
The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham
In the Abyss
The Apple
Under the Knife
The Sea Raiders
Pollock and the Porroh Man
The Red Room
The Cone
2
The Purple Pileus
The Jilting of Jane
In The Modern Vein: An Unsympathetic Love Story
A Catastrophe
The Lost Inheritance
The Sad Story of a Dramatic Critic
A Slip Under the Microscope
The Reconciliation
My First Aeroplane
Little Mother up the Morderberg
The Story of the Last Trump
The Grisly Folk
TALES OF TIME AND SPACE
The Crystal Egg
The Star
A Story of the Stone Age
A Story of the Days to Come
The Man who Could Work Miracles
TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM
Filmer
The Magic Shop
The Valley of Spiders
The Truth About Pyecraft
Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland
The Inexperienced Ghost
Jimmy Goggles the God
The New Accelerator
Mr. Ledbetter's Vacation
The Stolen Body
Mr. Brisher's Treasure
Miss Winchelsea's Heart
A Dream of Armageddon
THE TIME MACHINE AND OTHER
STORIES
THE TIME MACHINE
1.
3
The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding
a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale
face was flushed and animated. The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of
the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and
passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us
rather than submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner
atmosphere, when thought roams gracefully free of the trammels of precision.
And he put it to us in this way--marking the points with a lean forefinger--as we
sat and lazily admired his earnestness over this new paradox (as we thought it)
and his fecundity.
"You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that
are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at
school is founded on a misconception."
"Is not that rather a large thing to expect us to begin upon?" said Filby, an
argumentative person with red hair.
"I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground for it.
You will soon admit as much as I need from you. You know of course that a
mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence. They taught you
that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions."
"That is all right," said the Psychologist.
"Nor, having only length, breadth, and thickness, can a cube have a real
existence."
"There I object," said Filby. "Of course a solid body may exist. All real things--"
"So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an instantaneous cube exist?"
"Don't follow you," said Filby.
"Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?"
Filby became pensive. "Clearly," the Time Traveller proceeded, "any real body
must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness,
and--Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain
to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four
dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time.
There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former
4
three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves
intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of
our lives."
"That," said a very young man, making spasmodic efforts to relight his cigar over
the lamp; "that...very clear indeed."
"Now, it is very remarkable that this is so extensively overlooked," continued the
Time Traveller, with a slight accession of cheerfulness. "Really this is what is
meant by the Fourth Dimension, though some people who talk about the Fourth
Dimension do not know they mean it. It is only another way of looking at Time.
There is no difference between time and any of the three dimensions of space
except that our consciousness moves along it. But some foolish people have got
hold of the wrong side of that idea. You have all heard what they have to say
about this Fourth Dimension?"
"I have not," said the Provincial Mayor.
"It is simply this. That Space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as
having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and Thickness,
and is always definable by reference to three planes, each at right angles to the
others. But some philosophical people have been asking why three dimensions
particularly--why not another direction at right angles to the other three--? And
have even tried to construct a Four-Dimension geometry. Professor Simon
Newcomb was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a
month or so ago. You know how on a flat surface, which has only two
dimensions, we can represent a figure of a three-dimensional solid, and similarly
they think that by models of thee dimensions they could represent one of four--if
they could master the perspective of the thing. See?"
"I think so," murmured the Provincial Mayor; and knitting his brows, he lapsed
into an introspective state, his lips moving as one who repeats mystic words.
"Yes, I think I see it now," he said after some time, brightening in a quite
transitory manner.
"Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry of Four
Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For instance, here is
a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen,
another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were,
Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a
fixed and unalterable thing.
5
"Scientific people," proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause required for the
proper assimilation of this, "know very well that Time is only a kind of Space.
Here is a popular scientific diagram, a weather record. This line I trace with my
finger shows the movement of the barometer. Yesterday it was so high, yesterday
night it fell, then this morning it rose again, and so gently upward to here. Surely
the mercury did not trace this line in any of the dimensions of Space generally
recognized? But certainly it traced such a line, and that line, therefore, we must
conclude was along the Time-Dimension."
"But," said the Medical Man, staring hard at a coal in the fire, "if Time is really
only a fourth dimension of Space, why is it, and why has it always been, regarded
as something different? And why cannot we move in Time as we move about in
the other dimensions of Space?"
The Time Traveller smiled. "Are you sure we can move freely in Space? Right
and left we can go, backward and forward freely enough, and men always have
done so. I admit we move freely in two dimensions. But how about up and
down? Gravitation limits us there."
"Not exactly," said the Medical Man. "There are balloons."
"But before the balloons, save for spasmodic jumping and the inequalities of the
surface, man had no freedom of vertical movement."
"Still they could move a little up and down," said the Medical Man.
"Easier, far easier down than up."
"And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the present
moment."
"My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where the whole
world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present movement.
Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are
passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the
grave. Just as we should travel down if we began our existence fifty miles above
the earth's surface."
"But the great difficulty is this," interrupted the Psychologist. "You can move
about in all directions of Space, but you cannot move about in Time."
6
"That is the germ of my great discovery. But you are wrong to say that we cannot
move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go
back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump
back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length
of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the
ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can
go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately
he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even
turn about and travel the other way?"
"Oh, this," began Filby, "is all--"
"Why not?" said the Time Traveller.
"It's against reason," said Filby.
"What reason?" said the Time Traveller.
"You can show black is white by argument," said Filby, "but you will never
convince me."
"Possibly not," said the Time Traveller. "But now you begin to see the object of
my investigations into the geometry of Four Dimensions. Long ago I had a vague
inkling of a machine--"
"To travel through Time!" exclaimed the Very Young Man.
"That shall travel indifferently in any direction of Space and Time, as the driver
determines."
Filby contented himself with laughter.
"But I have experimental verification," said the Time Traveller.
"It would be remarkably convenient for the historian," the Psychologist
suggested. "One might travel back and verify the accepted account of the Battle
of Hastings, for instance!"
"Don't you think you would attract attention?" said the Medical Man. "Our
ancestors had no great tolerance for anachronisms."
"One might get one's Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato," the Very
Young Man thought.
7
"In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German
scholars have improved Greek so much."
"Then there is the future," said the Very Young Man. "Just think! One might
invest all one's money, leave it to accumulate at interest, and hurry on ahead!"
"To discover a society," said I, "erected on a strictly communistic basis."
"Of all the wild extravagant theories!" began the Psychologist.
"Yes, so it seemed to me, and so I never talked of it until--"
"Experimental verification!" cried I. "You are going to verify that?"
"The experiment!" cried Filby, who was getting brain-weary.
"Let's see your experiment anyhow," said the Psychologist, "though it's all
humbug, you know."
The Time Traveller smiled round at us. Then still smiling faintly, and with his
hands deep in his trousers pockets, he walked slowly out of the room, and we
heard his slippers shuffling down the long passage to his laboratory.
The Psychologist looked at us. "I wonder what he's got?"
"Some sleight-of-hand trick or other," said the Medical Man, and Filby tried to
tell us about a conjurer he had seen at Burslem; but before he had finished his
preface the Time Traveller came back, and Filby's anecdote collapsed.
The thing the Time Traveller held in his hand was a glittering metallic
framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately made. There
was ivory in it, and some transparent crystalline substance. And now I must be
explicit, for this that follows--unless his explanation is to be accepted--is an
absolutely unaccountable thing. He took one of the small octagonal tables that
were scattered about the room, and set it in front of the fire, with two legs on the
hearth rug. On this table he placed the mechanism. Then he drew up a chair, and
sat down. The only other object on the table was a small shaded lamp, the bright
light of which fell upon the model. There were also perhaps a dozen candles
about, two in brass candlesticks upon the mantel and several in sconces, so that
the room was brilliantly illuminated. I sat in a low armchair nearest the fire, and I
drew this forward so as to be almost between the Time Traveller and the
fireplace. Filby sat behind him, looking over his shoulder. The Medical Man and
8
the Provincial Mayor watched him in profile from the right, the Psychologist
from the left. The Very Young Man stood behind the Psychologist. We were all
on the alert. It appears incredible to me that any kind of trick, however subtly
conceived and however adroitly done, could have been played upon us under
these conditions.
The Time Traveller looked at us, and then at the mechanism. "Well?" said the
Psychologist.
"This little affair," said the Time Traveller, resting his elbows upon the table and
pressing his hands together above the apparatus, "is only a model. It is my plan
for a machine to travel through time. You will notice that it looks singularly
askew, and that there is an odd twinkling appearance about this bar, as though it
was in some way unreal." He pointed to the part with his finger. "Also, here is
one little white lever, and here is another."
The Medical Man got up out of his chair and peered into the thing. "It's
beautifully made," he said.
"It took two years to make," retorted the Time Traveller. Then when we had all
imitated the action of the Medical Man, he said: "Now I want you clearly to
understand that this lever, being pressed over, sends the machine gliding into the
future, and this other reverses the motion. This saddle represents the seat of a
time traveller. Presently I am going to press the lever, and off the machine will
go. It will vanish, pass into future Time, and disappear. Have a good look at the
thing. Look at the table too, and satisfy yourselves there is no trickery. I don't
want to waste this model, and then be told I'm a quack."
There was a minute's pause perhaps. The Psychologist seemed about to speak to
me, but changed his mind. Then the Time Traveller put forth his finger towards
the lever. "No," he said suddenly. "Lend me your hand." And turning to the
Psychologist, he took that individual's hand in his own and told him to put out his
forefinger. So that it was the Psychologist himself who sent forth the model Time
Machine on its interminable voyage. We all saw the lever turn. I am absolutely
certain there was no trickery. There was a breath of wind, and the lamp flame
jumped. One of the candles on the mantel was blown out, and the little machine
suddenly swung round, became indistinct, was seen as a ghost for a second
perhaps, as an eddy of faintly glittering brass and ivory; and it was gone-vanished! Save for the lamp the table was bare.
Everyone was silent for a minute. Then Filby said he was damned.
9
The Psychologist recovered from his stupor, and suddenly looked under the table.
At that the Time Traveller laughed cheerfully. "Well?" he said, with a
reminiscence of the Psychologist. Then, getting up, he went to the tobacco jar on
the mantel, and with his back to us began to fill his pipe.
We stared at each other. "Look here," said the Medical Man, "are you in earnest
about this? Do you seriously believe that, that machine has travelled into time?"
"Certainly," said the Time Traveller, stooping to light a spill at the fire. Then he
turned, lighting his pipe, to look at the Psychologist's face. (The Psychologist, to
show that he was not unhinged, helped himself to a cigar and tried to light it
uncut.) "What is more, I have a big machine nearly finished in there--" he
indicated the laboratory-- "and when that is put together I mean to have a journey
on my own account."
"You mean to say that, that machine has travelled into the future?" said Filby.
"Into the future or the past--I don't, for certain, know which."
After an interval the Psychologist had an inspiration. "It must have gone into the
past if it has gone anywhere," he said.
"Why?" said the Time Traveller.
"Because I presume that it has not moved in space, and if it travelled into the
future it would still be here all this time, since it must have travelled through this
time."
"But," I said, "if it travelled into the past it would have been visible when we
came first into this room; and last Thursday when we were here; and the
Thursday before that; and so forth!"
"Serious objections," remarked the Provincial Mayor, with an air of impartiality,
turning towards the Time Traveller.
"Not a bit," said the Time Traveller, and to the Psychologist: "You think. You
can explain that. It's presentation below the threshold, you know, diluted
presentation."
"Of course," said the Psychologist, and reassured us. "That's a simple point of
psychology. I should have thought of it. It's plain enough, and helps the paradox
delightfully. We cannot see it, nor can we appreciate this machine, any more than
10
we can the spoke of a wheel spinning, or a bullet flying through the air. If it is
travelling through time fifty times or a hundred times faster than we are, if it gets
through a minute while we get through a second, the impression it creates will of
course be only one-fiftieth or one-hundredth of what it would make if it were not
travelling in time. That's plain enough." He passed his hand through the space in
which the machine had been. "You see?" he said, laughing.
We sat and stared at the vacant table for a minute or so. Then the Time Traveller
asked us what we thought of it all.
"It sounds plausible enough to-night," said the Medical Man; "but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning."
"Would you like to see the Time Machine itself?" asked the Time Traveller. And
therewith, taking the lamp in his hand, he led the way down the long, draughty
corridor to his laboratory. I remember vividly the flickering light, his queer,
broad head in silhouette, the dance of the shadows, how we all followed him,
puzzled but incredulous, and how there in the laboratory we beheld a larger
edition of the little mechanism which we had seen vanish from before our eyes.
Parts were of nickel, parts of ivory, parts had certainly been filed or sawn out of
rock crystal. The thing was generally complete, but the twisted crystalline bars
lay unfinished upon the bench beside some sheets of drawings, and I took one up
for a better look at it. Quartz it seemed to be.
"Look here," said the Medical Man, "are you perfectly serious? Or is this a trick-like that ghost you showed us last Christmas?"
"Upon that machine," said the Time Traveller, holding the lamp aloft, "I intend to
explore time. Is that plain? I was never more serious in my life."
None of us quite knew how to take it.
I caught Filby's eye over the shoulder of the Medical Man, and he winked at me
solemnly.
2.
I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the Time Machine. The fact
is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed:
you never felt that you saw all round him; you always suspected some subtle
reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness. Had Filby shown
the model and explained the matter in the Time Traveller's words, we should
11
have shown him far less scepticism. For we should have perceived his motives; a
pork butcher could understand Filby. But the Time Traveller had more than a
touch of whim among his elements, and we distrusted him. Things that would
have made the frame of a less clever man seemed tricks in his hands. It is a
mistake to do things too easily. The serious people who took him seriously never
felt quite sure of his deportment; they were somehow aware that trusting their
reputations for judgment with him was like furnishing a nursery with egg-shell
china. So I don't think any of us said very much about time travelling in the
interval between that Thursday and the next, though its odd potentialities ran, no
doubt, in most of our minds: its plausibility, that is, its practical incredibleness,
the curious possibilities of anachronism and of utter confusion it suggested. For
my own part, I was particularly preoccupied with the trick of the model. That I
remember discussing with the Medical Man, whom I met on Friday at the
Linnaean. He said he had seen a similar thing at Tubingen, and laid considerable
stress on the blowing out of the candle. But how the trick was done he could not
explain.
The next Thursday I went again to Richmond--I suppose I was one of the Time
Traveller's most constant guests--and arriving late, found four or five men
already assembled in his drawing-room. The Medical Man was standing before
the fire with a sheet of paper in one hand and his watch in the other. I looked
round for the Time Traveller, and--"It's half past seven now," said the Medical
Man. "I suppose we'd better have dinner?"
"Where's ----?" said I, naming our host.
"You've just come? It's rather odd. He's unavoidably detained. He asks me in this
note to lead off with dinner at seven if he's not back. Says he'll explain when he
comes."
"It seems a pity to let the dinner spoil," said the Editor of a well-known daily
paper; and thereupon the Doctor rang the bell.
The Psychologist was the only person besides the Doctor and myself who had
attended the previous dinner. The other men were Blank, the Editor
aforementioned, a certain journalist, and another--a quiet, shy man with a beard-whom I didn't know, and who, as far as my observation went, never opened his
mouth all the evening. There was some speculation at the dinner table about the
Time Traveller's absence, and I suggested time travelling, in a half jocular spirit.
The Editor wanted that explained to him, and the Psychologist volunteered a
wooden account of the "ingenious paradox and trick" we had witnessed that day
week. He was in the midst of his exposition when the door from the corridor
12
opened slowly and without noise. I was facing the door, and saw it first. "Hallo!"
I said. "At last!" And the door opened wider, and the Time Traveller stood before
us. I gave a cry of surprise. "Good heavens! Man, what's the matter?" cried the
Medical Man, who saw him next. And the whole tableful turned towards the
door.
He was in an amazing plight. His coat was dusty and dirty, and smeared with
green, down the sleeves; his hair disordered, and as it seemed to me greyer-either with dust and dirt or because its colour had actually faded. His face was
ghastly pale; his chin had a brown cut on it--a cut half healed; his expression was
haggard and drawn, as by intense suffering. For a moment he hesitated in the
doorway, as if he had been dazzled by the light. Then he came into the room. He
walked with just such a limp as I have seen in footsore tramps. We stared at him
in silence, expecting him to speak.
He said not a word, but came painfully to the table, and made a motion towards
the wine. The Editor filled a glass of champagne, and pushed it towards him. He
drained it, and it seemed to do him good: for he looked round the table, and the
ghost of his old smile flickered across his face. "What on earth have you been up
to, man?" said the Doctor. The Time Traveller did not seem to hear. "Don't let me
disturb you," he said, with a certain faltering articulation. "I'm all right." He
stopped, held out his glass for more, and took it off at a draught. "That's good,"
he said. His eyes grew brighter, and a faint colour came into his cheeks. His
glance flickered over our faces with a certain dull approval, and then went round
the warm and comfortable room. Then he spoke again, still as it were feeling his
way among his words. "I'm going to wash and dress, and then I'll come down and
explain things... Save me some of that mutton. I'm starving for a bit of meat."
He looked across at the Editor, who was a rare visitor, and hoped he was all right.
The Editor began a question. "Tell you presently," said the Time Traveller. "I'm-funny! Be all right in a minute."
He put down his glass, and walked towards the staircase door. Again I remarked
his lameness and the soft padding sound of his footfall, and standing up in my
place, I saw his feet as he went out. He had nothing on them but a pair of tattered
bloodstained socks. Then the door closed upon him. I had half a mind to follow,
till I remembered how he detested any fuss about himself. For a minute, perhaps,
my mind was wool gathering. Then, "Remarkable Behaviour of an Eminent
Scientist," I heard the Editor say, thinking (after his wont) in headlines. And this
brought my attention back to the bright dinner table.
13
"What's the game?" said the Journalist. "Has he been doing the Amateur Cadger?
I don't follow." I met the eye of the Psychologist, and read my own interpretation
in his face. I thought of the Time Traveller limping painfully upstairs. I don't
think any one else had noticed his lameness.
The first to recover completely from this surprise was the Medical Man, who
rang the bell--the Time Traveller hated to have servants waiting at dinner--for a
hot plate. At that the Editor turned to his knife and fork with a grunt, and the
Silent Man followed suit. The dinner was resumed. Conversation was
exclamatory for a little while, with gaps of wonderment; and then the Editor got
fervent in his curiosity. "Does our friend eke out his modest income with a
crossing? Or has he his Nebuchadnezzar phases?" he inquired. "I feel assured it's
this business of the Time Machine," I said, and took up the Psychologist's
account of our previous meeting. The new guests were frankly incredulous. The
Editor raised objections. "What was this time travelling? A man couldn't cover
himself with dust by rolling in a paradox, could he?" And then, as the idea came
home to him, he resorted to caricature. Hadn't they any clothes-brushes in the
Future? The Journalist too, would not believe at any price, and joined the Editor
in the easy work of heaping ridicule on the whole thing. They were both the new
kind of journalist--very joyous, irreverent young men. "Our Special
Correspondent in the Day after To-morrow reports," the Journalist was saying--or
rather shouting--when the Time Traveller came back. He was dressed in ordinary
evening clothes, and nothing save his haggard look remained of the change that
had startled me.
"I say," said the Editor hilariously, "these chaps here say you have been
travelling into the middle of next week! Tell us all about little Rosebery, will
you? What will you take for the lot?"
The Time Traveller came to the place reserved for him without a word. He
smiled quietly, in his old way. "Where's my mutton?" he said. "What a treat it is
to stick a fork into meat again!"
"Story!" cried the Editor.
"Story be damned!" said the Time Traveller. "I want something to eat. I won't say
a word until I get some peptone into my arteries. Thanks. And the salt."
"One word," said I. "Have you been time travelling?"
"Yes," said the Time Traveller, with his mouth full, nodding his head.
14
"I'd give a shilling a line for a verbatim note," said the Editor. The Time
Traveller pushed his glass towards the Silent Man and rang it with his finger nail;
at which the Silent Man, who had been staring at his face, started convulsively,
and poured him wine. The rest of the dinner was uncomfortable. For my own
part, sudden questions kept on rising to my lips, and I dare say it was the same
with the others. The Journalist tried to relieve the tension by telling anecdotes of
Hettie Potter. The Time Traveller devoted his attention to his dinner, and
displayed the appetite of a tramp. The Medical Man smoked a cigarette, and
watched the Time Traveller through his eyelashes. The Silent Man seemed even
more clumsy than usual, and drank champagne with regularity and determination
out of sheer nervousness. At last the Time Traveller pushed his plate away, and
looked round us. "I suppose I must apologize," he said. "I was simply starving.
I've had a most amazing time." He reached out his hand for a cigar, and cut the
end. "But come into the smoking-room. It's too long a story to tell over greasy
plates." And ringing the bell in passing, he led the way into the adjoining room.
"You have told Blank, and Dash, and Chose about the machine?" he said to me,
leaning back in his easy chair and naming the three new guests.
"But the thing's a mere paradox," said the Editor.
"I can't argue to-night. I don't mind telling you the story, but I can't argue. I will,"
he went on, "tell you the story of what has happened to me, if you like, but you
must refrain from interruptions. I want to tell it. Badly. Most of it will sound like
lying. So be it! It's true--every word of it, all the same. I was in my laboratory at
four o'clock, and since then...I've lived eight days...such days as no human being
ever lived before! I'm nearly worn out, but I shan't sleep till I've told this thing
over to you. Then I shall go to bed. But no interruptions! Is it agreed?"
"Agreed," said the Editor, and the rest of us echoed "Agreed." And with that the
Time Traveller began his story as I have set it forth. He sat back in his chair at
first, and spoke like a weary man. Afterwards he got more animated. In writing it
down I feel with only too much keenness the inadequacy of pen and ink--and
above all, my own inadequacy--to express its quality. You read, I will suppose,
attentively enough; but you cannot see the speaker's white, sincere face in the
bright circle of the little lamp, nor hear the intonation of his voice. You cannot
know how his expression followed the turns of his story! Most of us hearers were
in shadow, for the candles in the smoking-room had not been lighted, and only
the face of the Journalist and the legs of the Silent Man from the knees
downward were illuminated. At first we glanced now and again at each other.
After a time we ceased to do that, and looked only at the Time Traveller's face.
15
3.
"I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the Time Machine, and
showed you the actual thing itself, incomplete in the workshop. There it is now, a
little travel-worn, truly; and one of the ivory bars is cracked, and a brass rail bent;
but the rest of it's sound enough. I expected to finish it on Friday, but on Friday,
when the putting together was nearly done, I found that one of the nickel bars
was exactly one inch too short, and this I had to get remade; so that the thing was
not complete until this morning. It was at ten o'clock to-day that the first of all
Time Machines began its career. I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put
one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a
suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will
come next as I felt then. I took the starting lever in one hand and the stopping one
in the other, pressed the first, and almost immediately the second. I seemed to
reel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling; and looking round, I saw the
laboratory exactly as before. Had anything happened? For a moment I suspected
that my intellect had tricked me. Then I noted the clock. A moment before, as it
seemed, it had stood at a minute or so past ten; now it was nearly half past three!
"I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and
went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy and went dark. Mrs. Watchett came
in and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose
it took her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot
across the room like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The
night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. Tomorrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and
faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness
descended on my mind.
"I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are
excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a
switchback--of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation
too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping
of a black wing. The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall
away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every
minute, and every minute marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had been
destroyed and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of
scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving
things. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The
twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye.
Then in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her
16
quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently,
as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into
one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a
splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a
streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I
could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in
the blue.
"The landscape was misty and vague. I was still on the hillside upon which this
house now stands, and the shoulder rose above me grey and dim. I saw trees
growing and changing like puffs of vapour, now brown, now green; they grew,
spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge buildings rise up faint and fair,
and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed changed--melting
and flowing under my eyes. The little hands upon the dials that registered my
speed raced round faster and faster. Presently I noted that the sun belt swayed up
and down, from solstice to solstice, in a minute or less, and that consequently my
pace was over a year a minute; and minute by minute the white snow flashed
across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of
spring.
"The unpleasant sensations of the start were less poignant now. They merged at
last into a kind of hysterical exhilaration. I remarked indeed a clumsy swaying of
the machine, for which I was unable to account. But my mind was too confused
to attend to it, so with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into
futurity. At first I scarce thought of stopping, scarce thought of anything but
these new sensations. But presently a fresh series of impressions grew up in my
mind--a certain curiosity and therewith a certain dread--until at last they took
complete possession of me. What strange developments of humanity, what
wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilization, I thought, might not
appear when I came to look nearly into the dim elusive world that raced and
fluctuated before my eyes! I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me,
more massive than any buildings of our own time, and yet, as it seemed, built of
glimmer and mist. I saw a richer green flow up the hillside, and remain there,
without any wintry intermission. Even through the veil of my confusion the earth
seemed very fair. And so my mind came round to the business of stopping.
"The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some substance in the
space which I, or the machine, occupied. So long as I travelled at a high velocity
through time, this scarcely mattered; I was, so to speak, attenuated--was slipping
like a vapour through the interstices of intervening substances! But to come to a
stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in
my way; meant bringing my atoms into such intimate contact with those of the
17
obstacle that a profound chemical reaction--possibly a far-reaching explosion-would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all possible dimensions-into the Unknown. This possibility had occurred to me again and again while I
was making the machine; but then I had cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable
risk--one of the risks a man has got to take! Now the risk was inevitable, I no
longer saw it in the same cheerful light. The fact is that insensibly, the absolute
strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of the machine, above
all, the feeling of prolonged falling, had absolutely upset my nerve. I told myself
that I could never stop, and with a gust of petulance I resolved to stop forthwith.
Like an impatient fool, I lugged over the lever, and incontinently the thing went
reeling over, and I was flung headlong through the air.
"There was the sound of a clap of thunder in my ears. I may have been stunned
for a moment. A pitiless hail was hissing round me, and I was sitting on soft turf
in front of the overset machine. Everything still seemed grey, but presently I
remarked that the confusion in my ears was gone. I looked round me. I was on
what seemed to be a little lawn in a garden, surrounded by rhododendron bushes,
and I noticed that their mauve and purple blossoms were dropping in a shower
under the beating of the hailstones. The rebounding, dancing hail hung in a cloud
over the machine, and drove along the ground like smoke. In a moment I was wet
to the skin. 'Fine hospitality,' said I, 'to a man who has travelled innumerable
years to see you.'
"Presently I thought what a fool I was to get wet. I stood up and looked round
me. A colossal figure, carved apparently in some white stone, loomed indistinctly
beyond the rhododendrons through the hazy downpour. But all else of the world
was invisible.
"My sensations would be hard to describe. As the columns of hail grew thinner, I
saw the white figure more distinctly. It was very large, for a silver birch-tree
touched its shoulder. It was of white marble, in shape something like a winged
sphinx, but the wings, instead of being carried vertically at the sides, were spread
so that it seemed to hover. The pedestal, it appeared to me, was of bronze, and
was thick with verdigris. It chanced that the face was towards me; the sightless
eyes seemed to watch me; there was the faint shadow of a smile on the lips. It
was greatly weather-worn, and that imparted an unpleasant suggestion of disease.
I stood looking at it for a little space--half a minute perhaps, or half an hour. It
seemed to advance and to recede as the hail drove before it denser or thinner. At
last I tore my eyes from it for a moment and saw that the hail curtain had worn
threadbare, and that the sky was lightening with the promise of the sun.
18
"I looked up again at the crouching white shape, and the full temerity of my
voyage came suddenly upon me. What might appear when that hazy curtain was
altogether withdrawn? What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty
had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its
manliness and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and
overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old-world savage animal, only the
more dreadful and disgusting for our common likeness--a foul creature to be
incontinently slain.
"Already I saw other vast shapes--huge buildings with intricate parapets and tall
columns, with a wooded hillside dimly creeping in upon me through the
lessening storm. I was seized with a panic fear. I turned frantically to the Time
Machine, and strove hard to readjust it. As I did so the shafts of the sun smote
through the thunderstorm. The grey downpour was swept aside and vanished like
the trailing garments of a ghost. Above me, in the intense blue of the summer
sky, some faint brown shreds of cloud whirled into nothingness. The great
buildings about me stood out clear and distinct, shining with the wet of the
thunderstorm, and picked out in white by the unmelted hailstones piled along
their courses. I felt naked in a strange world. I felt as perhaps a bird may feel in
the clear air, knowing the hawk wings above and will swoop. My fear grew to
frenzy. I took a breathing space, set my teeth, and again grappled fiercely, wrist
and knee, with the machine. It gave under my desperate onset and turned over. It
struck my chin violently. One hand on the saddle, the other on the lever, I stood
panting heavily in attitude to mount again.
"But with this recovery of a prompt retreat my courage recovered. I looked more
curiously and less fearfully at this world of the remote future. In a circular
opening, high up in the wall of the nearer house, I saw a group of figures clad in
rich soft robes. They had seen me, and their faces were directed towards me.
"Then I heard voices approaching me. Coming through the bushes by the White
Sphinx were the heads and shoulders of men running. One of these emerged in a
pathway leading straight to the little lawn upon which I stood with my machine.
He was a slight creature--perhaps four feet high--clad in a purple tunic, girdled at
the waist with a leather belt. Sandals or buskins--I could not clearly distinguish
which--were on his feet; his legs were bare to the knees, and his head was bare.
Noticing that, I noticed for the first time how warm the air was.
"He struck me as being a very beautiful and graceful creature, but indescribably
frail. His flushed face reminded me of the more beautiful kind of consumptive-that hectic beauty of which we used to hear so much. At the sight of him I
suddenly regained confidence. I took my hands from the machine."
19
4.
"In another moment we were standing face to face, I and this fragile thing out of
futurity. He came straight up to me and laughed into my eyes. The absence from
his bearing of any sign of fear struck me at once. Then he turned to the two
others who were following him and spoke to them in a strange and very sweet
and liquid tongue."
"There were others coming, and presently a little group of perhaps eight or ten of
these exquisite creatures were about me. One of them addressed me. It came into
my head, oddly enough, that my voice was too harsh and deep for them. So I
shook my head, and pointing to my ears, shook it again. He came a step forward,
hesitated, and then touched my hand. Then I felt other soft little tentacles upon
my back and shoulders. They wanted to make sure I was real. There was nothing
in this at all alarming. Indeed there was something in these pretty little people
that inspired confidence--a graceful gentleness, a certain childlike ease. And
besides, they looked so frail that I could fancy myself flinging the whole dozen
of them about like nine-pins. But I made a sudden motion to warn them when I
saw their little pink hands feeling at the Time Machine. Happily then, when it
was not too late, I thought of a danger I had hitherto forgotten, and reaching over
the bars of the machine I unscrewed the little levers that would set it in motion,
and put these in my pocket. Then I turned again to see what I could do in the way
of communication.
"And then, looking more nearly into their features, I saw some further
peculiarities in their Dresden-china type of prettiness. Their hair, which was
uniformly curly, came to a sharp end at the neck and cheek; there was not the
faintest suggestion of it on the face, and their ears were singularly minute. The
mouths were small, with bright red, rather thin lips, and the little chins ran to a
point. The eyes were large and mild; and--this may seem egotism on my part--I
fancied even that there was a certain lack of the interest, I might have expected,
in them.
"As they made no effort to communicate with me, but simply stood round me
smiling and speaking in soft cooing notes to each other, I began the conversation.
I pointed to the Time Machine and to myself. Then hesitating for a moment how
to express time, I pointed to the sun. At once a quaintly pretty little figure in
chequered purple and white followed my gesture, and then astonished me by
imitating the sound of thunder.
"For a moment I was staggered, though the import of his gesture was plain
enough. The question had come into my mind abruptly: were these creatures
20
fools? You may hardly understand how it took me. You see I had always
anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd {or
so}, would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything. Then one of
them suddenly asked me a question that showed him to be on the intellectual
level of one of our five-year-old children--asked me, in fact, if I had come from
the sun in a thunderstorm! It let loose the judgment I had suspended upon their
clothes, their frail light limbs, and fragile features. A flow of disappointment
rushed across my mind. For a moment I felt that I had built the Time Machine in
vain.
"I nodded, pointed to the sun, and gave them such a vivid rendering of a
thunderclap as startled them. They all withdrew a pace or so and bowed. Then
came one laughing towards me, carrying a chain of beautiful flowers altogether
new to me, and put it about my neck. The idea was received with melodious
applause; and presently they were all running to and fro for flowers, and
laughingly flinging them upon me until I was almost smothered with blossom.
You who have never seen the like can scarcely imagine what delicate and
wonderful flowers countless years of culture had created. Then someone
suggested that their plaything should be exhibited in the nearest building, and so I
was led past the sphinx of white marble, which had seemed to watch me all the
while with a smile at my astonishment, towards a vast grey edifice of fretted
stone. As I went with them the memory of my confident anticipations of a
profoundly grave and intellectual posterity came, with irresistible merriment, to
my mind.
"The building had a huge entry, and was altogether of colossal dimensions. I was
naturally most occupied with the growing crowd of little people, and with the big
open portals that yawned before me shadowy and mysterious. My general
impression of the world I saw over their heads was a tangled waste of beautiful
bushes and flowers, a long-neglected and yet weedless garden. I saw a number of
tall spikes of strange white flowers, measuring a foot perhaps across the spread of
the waxen petals. They grew scattered, as if wild, among the variegated shrubs,
but as I say, I did not examine them closely at this time. The Time Machine was
left deserted on the turf among the rhododendrons.
"The arch of the doorway was richly carved, but naturally I did not observe the
carving very narrowly, though I fancied I saw suggestions of old Phoenician
decorations as I passed through, and it struck me that they were very badly
broken and weather-worn. Several more brightly clad people met me in the
doorway, and so we entered, I, dressed in dingy nineteenth-century garments,
looking grotesque enough, garlanded with flowers, and surrounded by an eddying
21
mass of bright, soft-coloured robes and shining white limbs, in a melodious whirl
of laughter and laughing speech.
"The big doorway opened into a proportionately great hall hung with brown. The
roof was in shadow, and the windows, partially glazed with coloured glass and
partially unglazed, admitted a tempered light. The floor was made up of huge
blocks of some very hard white metal, not plates nor slabs--, blocks, and it was so
much worn, as I judged by the going to and fro of past generations, as to be
deeply channelled along the more frequented ways. Transverse to the length were
innumerable tables made of slabs of polished stone, raised perhaps a foot from
the floor, and upon these were heaps of fruits. Some I recognized as a kind of
hypertrophied raspberry and orange, but for the most part they were strange.
"Between the tables was scattered a great number of cushions. Upon these my
conductors seated themselves, signing for me to do likewise. With a pretty
absence of ceremony they began to eat the fruit with their hands, flinging peel
and stalks, and so forth, into the round openings in the sides of the tables. I was
not loath to follow their example, for I felt thirsty and hungry. As I did so I
surveyed the hall at my leisure.
"And perhaps the thing that struck me most was its dilapidated look. The stainedglass windows, which displayed only a geometrical pattern, were broken in many
places, and the curtains that hung across the lower end were thick with dust. And
it caught my eye that the corner of the marble table near me was fractured.
Nevertheless, the general effect was extremely rich and picturesque. There were
perhaps, a couple of hundred people dining in the hall, and most of them, seated
as near to me as they could come, were watching me with interest, their little
eyes shining over the fruit they were eating. All were clad in the same soft and
yet strong, silky material.
"Fruit, by the by, was all their diet. These people of the remote future were strict
vegetarians, and while I was with them, in spite of some carnal cravings, I had to
be frugivorous also. Indeed I found afterwards that horses, cattle, sheep, dogs,
had followed the Ichthyosaurus into extinction. But the fruits were very
delightful; one in particular, that seemed to be in season all the time I was there-a floury thing in a three-sided husk--was especially good, and I made it my
staple. At first I was puzzled by all these strange fruits, and by the strange
flowers I saw, but later I began to perceive their import.
"However I am telling you of my fruit dinner in the distant future now. So soon
as my appetite was a little checked, I determined to make a resolute attempt to
learn the speech of these new men of mine. Clearly that was the next thing to do.
22
The fruits seemed a convenient thing to begin upon, and holding one of these up I
began a series of interrogative sounds and gestures. I had some considerable
difficulty in conveying my meaning. At first my efforts met with a stare of
surprise or inextinguishable laughter, but presently a fair-haired little creature
seemed to grasp my intention and repeated a name. They had to chatter and
explain the business at great length to each other, and my first attempts to make
the exquisite little sounds of their language caused an immense amount of
amusement. However, I felt like a schoolmaster amidst children, and persisted,
and presently I had a score of noun substantives at least at my command; and
then I got to demonstrative pronouns, and even the verb "to eat." But it was slow
work, and the little people soon tired and wanted to get away from my
interrogations, so I determined, rather of necessity, to let them give their lessons
in little doses when they felt inclined. And very little doses, I found they were
before long, for I never met people more indolent or more easily fatigued.
"A queer thing I soon discovered about my little hosts, and that was their lack of
interest. They would come to me with eager cries of astonishment, like children,
but like children they would soon stop examining me and wander away after
some other toy. The dinner and my conversational beginnings ended, I noted for
the first time that almost all those who had surrounded me at first were gone. It is
odd too, how speedily I came to disregard these little people. I went out through
the portal into the sunlit world again as soon as my hunger was satisfied. I was
continually meeting more of these men of the future, who would follow me a
little distance, chatter and laugh about me, and having smiled and gesticulated in
a friendly way, leave me again to my own devices.
"The calm of evening was upon the world as I emerged from the great hall, and
the scene was lit by the warm glow of the setting sun. At first things were very
confusing. Everything was so entirely different from the world I had known-even the flowers. The big building I had left was situated on the slope of a broad
river valley, but the Thames had shifted perhaps a mile from its present position.
I resolved to mount to the summit of a crest perhaps a mile and a half away, from
which I could get a wider view of this our planet in the year Eight Hundred and
Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One A.D. For that, I should explain, was the
date the little dials of my machine recorded.
"As I walked I was watching for every impression that could possibly help to
explain the condition of ruinous splendour in which I found the world--for
ruinous it was. A little way up the hill, for instance, was a great heap of granite,
bound together by masses of aluminium, a vast labyrinth of precipitous walls and
crumpled heaps, amidst which were thick heaps of very beautiful pagoda-like
plants--nettles possibly--but wonderfully tinted with brown about the leaves, and
23
incapable of stinging. It was evidently the derelict remains of some vast structure,
to what end built I could not determine. It was here that I was destined, at a later
date, to have a very strange experience--the first intimation of a still stranger
discovery--but of that I will speak in its proper place.
"Looking round with a sudden thought, from a terrace on which I rested for a
while, I realized that there were no small houses to be seen. Apparently the single
house, and possibly even the household, had vanished. Here and there among the
greenery were palace-like buildings, but the house and the cottage, which form
such characteristic features of our own English landscape, had disappeared.
"'Communism,' said I to myself.
"And on the heels of that came another thought. I looked at the half-dozen little
figures that were following me. Then in a flash, I perceived that all had the same
form of costume, the same soft hairless visage, and the same girlish rotundity of
limb. It may seem strange perhaps, that I had not noticed this before. But
everything was so strange. Now I saw the fact plainly enough. In costume, and in
all the differences of texture and bearing that now mark off the sexes from each
other, these people of the future were alike. And the children seemed to my eyes
to be but the miniatures of their parents. I judged then, that the children of that
time were extremely precocious, physically at least, and I found afterwards
abundant verification of my opinion.
"Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I felt that this
close resemblance of the sexes was after all what one would expect; for the
strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the institution of the family, and
the differentiation of occupations are mere militant necessities of an age of
physical force; where population is balanced and abundant, much child-bearing
becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the State; where violence comes but
rarely and offspring are secure, there is less necessity--indeed there is no
necessity--for an efficient family, and the specialization of the sexes with
reference to their children's needs disappears. We see some beginnings of this
even in our own time, and in this future age it was complete. This I must remind
you, was my speculation at the time. Later I was to appreciate how far it fell short
of the reality.
"While I was musing upon these things, my attention was attracted by a pretty
little structure, like a well under a cupola. I thought in a transitory way of the
oddness of wells still existing, and then resumed the thread of my speculations.
There were no large buildings towards the top of the hill, and as my walking
24
powers were evidently miraculous, I was presently left alone for the first time.
With a strange sense of freedom and adventure I pushed on up to the crest.
"There I found a seat of some yellow metal that I did not recognize, corroded in
places with a kind of pinkish rust and half smothered in soft moss, the arm-rests
cast and filed into the resemblance of griffins' heads. I sat down on it, and I
surveyed the broad view of our old world under the sunset of that long day. It
was as sweet and fair a view as I have ever seen. The sun had already gone below
the horizon and the west was flaming gold, touched with some horizontal bars of
purple and crimson. Below was the valley of the Thames, in which the river lay
like a band of burnished steel. I have already spoken of the great palaces dotted
about among the variegated greenery, some in ruins and some still occupied.
Here and there rose a white or silvery figure in the waste garden of the earth, here
and there came the sharp vertical line of some cupola or obelisk. There were no
hedges, no signs of proprietary rights, no evidences of agriculture; the whole
earth had become a garden.
"So watching, I began to put my interpretation upon the things I had seen, and as
it shaped itself to me that evening, my interpretation was something in this way.
(Afterwards I found I had got only a half-truth--or only a glimpse of one facet of
the truth.)
"It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. The ruddy
sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the first time I began to
realize an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present
engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is
the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of
ameliorating the conditions of life--the true civilizing process that makes life
more and more secure--had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united
humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams
had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the
harvest was what I saw!
"After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of to-day are still in the rudimentary
stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little department of the field of
human disease, but even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and
persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there
and cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greater
number to fight out a balance as they can. We improve our favourite plants and
animals--and how few they are--gradually by selective breeding; now a new and
better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more
convenient breed of cattle. We improve them gradually, because our ideals are
25
vague and tentative, and our knowledge is very limited; because Nature too, is
shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some day all this will be better organized, and
still better. That is the drift of the current in spite of the eddies. The whole world
will be intelligent, educated, and co-operating; things will move faster and faster
towards the subjugation of Nature. In the end, wisely and carefully we shall
readjust the balance of animal and vegetable me to suit our human needs.
"This adjustment, I say, must have been done, and done well; done indeed for all
Time, in the space of Time across which my machine had leaped. The air was
free from gnats, the earth from weeds or fungi; everywhere were fruits and sweet
and delightful flowers; brilliant butterflies flew hither and thither. The ideal of
preventive medicine was attained. Diseases had been stamped out. I saw no
evidence of any contagious diseases during all my stay. And I shall have to tell
you later that even the processes of putrefaction and decay had been profoundly
affected by these changes.
"Social triumphs too, had been effected. I saw mankind housed in splendid
shelters, gloriously clothed, and as yet I had found them engaged in no toil. There
were no signs of struggle, neither social nor economical struggle. The shop, the
advertisement, traffic, all that commerce which constitutes the body of our world,
was gone. It was natural on that golden evening that I should jump at the idea of
a social paradise. The difficulty of increasing population had been met, I guessed,
and population had ceased to increase.
"But with this change in condition comes inevitably adaptations to the change.
What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human
intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the
active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall; conditions that
put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon self-restraint,
patience, and decision. And the institution of the family, and the emotions that
arise therein, the fierce jealousy, the tenderness for offspring, parental selfdevotion, all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers of the
young. Now, where are these imminent dangers? There is a sentiment arising,
and it will grow, against connubial jealousy, against fierce maternity, against
passion of all sorts; unnecessary things now, and things that make us
uncomfortable, savage survivals, discords in a refined and pleasant life.
"I thought of the physical slightness of the people, their lack of intelligence, and
those big abundant ruins, and it strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of
Nature. For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic,
and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under
which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.
26
"Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy,
that with us is strength, would become weakness. Even in our own time certain
tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant source of
failure. Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great help-may even be hindrances--to a civilized man. And in a state of physical balance
and security, power, intellectual as well as physical, would be out of place. For
countless years I judged there had been no danger of war or solitary violence, no
danger from wild beasts, no wasting disease to require strength of constitution,
no need of toil. For such a life, what we should call the weak are as well
equipped as the strong, are indeed no longer weak. Better equipped indeed they
are, for the strong would be fretted by an energy for which there was no outlet.
No doubt the exquisite beauty of the buildings I saw was the outcome of the last
surgings of the now purposeless energy of mankind before it settled down into
perfect harmony with the conditions under which it lived--the flourish of that
triumph which began the last great peace. This has ever been the fate of energy in
security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and decay.
"Even this artistic impetus would at last die away--had almost died in the Time I
saw. To adorn themselves with flowers, to dance, to sing in the sunlight: so much
was left of the artistic spirit, and no more. Even that would fade in the end into a
contented inactivity. We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity,
and it seemed to me, that here was that hateful grindstone broken at last!
"As I stood there in the gathering dark I thought that in this simple explanation I
had mastered the problem of the world--mastered the whole secret of these
delicious people. Possibly the checks they had devised for the increase of
population had succeeded too well, and their numbers had rather diminished than
kept stationary. That would account for the abandoned ruins. Very simple was
my explanation, and plausible enough--as most wrong theories are!"
5.
"As I stood there musing over this, too perfect triumph of man, the full moon,
yellow and gibbous, came up out of an overflow of silver light in the north-east.
The bright little figures ceased to move about below, a noiseless owl flitted by,
and I shivered with the chill of the night. I determined to descend and find where
I could sleep.
"I looked for the building I knew. Then my eye travelled along to the figure of
the White Sphinx upon the pedestal of bronze, growing distinct as the light of the
rising moon grew brighter. I could see the silver birch against it. There was the
tangle of rhododendron bushes, black in the pale light, and there was the little
27
lawn. I looked at the lawn again. A queer doubt chilled my complacency. "No,"
said I stoutly to myself, "that was not the lawn. But it was the lawn. For the white
leprous face of the sphinx was towards it. Can you imagine what I felt as this
conviction came home to me? But you cannot. The Time Machine was gone!
"At once, like a lash across the face, came the possibility of losing my own age,
of being left helpless in this strange new world. The bare thought of it was an
actual physical sensation. I could feel it grip me at the throat and stop my
breathing. In another moment I was in a passion of fear and running with great
leaping strides down the slope. Once I fell headlong and cut my face; I lost no
time in stanching the blood, but jumped up and ran on, with a warm trickle down
my cheek and chin. All the time I ran I was saying to myself: 'They have moved
it a little, pushed it under the bushes out of the way.' Nevertheless, I ran with all
my might. All the time, with the certainty that sometimes comes with excessive
dread, I knew that such assurance was folly, knew instinctively that the machine
was removed out of my reach. My breath came with pain. I suppose I covered the
whole distance from the hill crest to the little lawn, two miles perhaps, in ten
minutes. And I am not a young man. I cursed aloud, as I ran, at my confident
folly in leaving the machine, wasting good breath thereby. I cried aloud, and
none answered. Not a creature seemed to be stirring in that moonlit world.
"When I reached the lawn my worst fears were realized. Not a trace of the thing
was to be seen. I felt faint and cold when I faced the empty space among the
black tangle of bushes. I ran round it furiously, as if the thing might be hidden in
a corner, and then stopped abruptly, with my hands clutching my hair. Above me
towered the sphinx, upon the bronze pedestal, white, shining, leprous, in the light
of the rising moon. It seemed to smile in mockery of my dismay.
"I might have consoled myself by imagining the little people had put the
mechanism in some shelter for me, had I not felt assured of their physical and
intellectual inadequacy. That is what dismayed me: the sense of some hitherto
unsuspected power, through whose intervention my invention had vanished. Yet
for one thing I felt assured: unless some other age had produced its exact
duplicate, the machine could not have moved in time. The attachment of the
levers--I will show you the method later--prevented any one from tampering with
it in that way when they were removed. It had moved, and was hid, only in space.
But then, where could it be?
"I think I must have had a kind of frenzy. I remember running violently in and
out among the moonlit bushes all round the sphinx, and startling some white
animal that, in the dim light, I took for a small deer. I remember too, late that
night, beating the bushes with my clenched fist until my knuckles were gashed
28
and bleeding from the broken twigs. Then sobbing and raving in my anguish of
mind, I went down to the great building of stone. The big hall was dark, silent,
and deserted. I slipped on the uneven floor, and fell over one of the malachite
tables, almost breaking my shin. I lit a match and went on past the dusty curtains,
of which I have told you.
"There I found a second great hall covered with cushions, upon which, perhaps a
score or so of the little people were sleeping. I have no doubt they found my
second appearance strange enough, coming suddenly out of the quiet darkness
with inarticulate noises and the splutter and flare of a match. For they had
forgotten about matches. "Where is my Time Machine?" I began, bawling like an
angry child, laying hands upon them and shaking them up together. It must have
been very queer to them. Some laughed, most of them looked sorely frightened.
When I saw them standing round me, it came into my head that I was doing as
foolish a thing as it was possible for me to do under the circumstances, in trying
to revive the sensation of fear. For, reasoning from their daylight behaviour, I
thought that fear must be forgotten.
"Abruptly, I dashed down the match, and knocking one of the people over in my
course, went blundering across the big dining-hall again, out under the
moonlight. I heard cries of terror and their little feet running and stumbling this
way and that. I do not remember all I did as the moon crept up the sky. I suppose
it was the unexpected nature of my loss that maddened me. I felt hopelessly cut
off from my own kind--a strange animal in an unknown world. I must have raved
to and fro, screaming and crying upon God and Fate. I have a memory of horrible
fatigue, as the long night of despair wore away; of looking in this impossible
place and that; of groping among moonlit ruins and touching strange creatures in
the black shadows; at last, of lying on the ground near the sphinx and weeping
with absolute wretchedness. I had nothing left but misery. Then I slept, and when
I woke again it was full day, and a couple of sparrows were hopping round me on
the turf within reach of my arm.
"I sat up in the freshness of the morning, trying to remember how I had got there,
and why I had such a profound sense of desertion and despair. Then things came
clear in my mind. With the plain, reasonable daylight, I could look my
circumstances fairly in the face. I saw the wild folly of my frenzy overnight, and
I could reason with myself. 'Suppose the worst?' I said. 'Suppose the machine
altogether lost--perhaps destroyed? It behoves me to be calm and patient, to learn
the way of the people, to get a clear idea of the method of my loss, and the means
of getting materials and tools; so that in the end, perhaps, I may make another.'
That would be my only hope, perhaps but better than despair. And after all, it was
a beautiful and curious world.
29
"But probably, the machine had only been taken away. Still I must be calm and
patient, find its hiding-place, and recover it by force or cunning. And with that I
scrambled to my feet and looked about me, wondering where I could bathe. I felt
weary, stiff, and travel-soiled. The freshness of the morning made me desire an
equal freshness. I had exhausted my emotion. Indeed as I went about my
business, I found myself wondering at my intense excitement overnight. I made a
careful examination of the ground about the little lawn. I wasted some time in
futile questionings, conveyed, as well as I was able, to such of the little people as
came by. They all failed to understand my gestures; some were simply stolid,
some thought it was a jest and laughed at me. I had the hardest task in the world
to keep my hands off their pretty laughing faces. It was a foolish impulse, but the
devil begotten of fear and blind anger was ill curbed and still eager to take
advantage of my perplexity. The turf gave better counsel. I found a groove ripped
in it, about midway between the pedestal of the sphinx and the marks of my feet
where, on arrival, I had struggled with the overturned machine. There were other
signs of removal about, with queer narrow footprints like those I could imagine
made by a sloth. This directed my closer attention to the pedestal. It was, as I
think I have said, of bronze. It was not a mere block, but highly decorated with
deep framed panels on either side. I went and rapped at these. The pedestal was
hollow. Examining the panels with care I found them discontinuous with the
frames. There were no handles or keyholes, but possibly the panels, if they were
doors, as I supposed, opened from within. One thing was clear enough to my
mind. It took no very great mental effort to infer that my Time Machine was
inside that pedestal. But how it got there was a different problem.
"I saw the heads of two orange-clad people coming through the bushes and under
some blossom-covered apple-trees towards me. I turned smiling to them and
beckoned them to me. They came, and then pointing to the bronze pedestal, I
tried to intimate my wish to open it. But at my first gesture towards this they
behaved very oddly. I don't know how to convey their expression to you.
Suppose you were to use a grossly improper gesture to a delicate-minded
woman--it is how she would look. They went off as if they had received the last
possible insult. I tried a sweet-looking little chap in white next, with exactly the
same result. Somehow, his manner made me feel ashamed of myself. But as you
know, I wanted the Time Machine, and I tried him once more. As he turned off,
like the others, my temper got the better of me. In three strides I was after him,
had him by the loose part of his robe round the neck, and began dragging him
towards the sphinx. Then I saw the horror and repugnance of his face, and all of a
sudden I let him go.
"But I was not beaten yet. I banged with my fist at the bronze panels. I thought I
heard something stir inside--to be explicit, I thought I heard a sound like a
30
chuckle--but I must have been mistaken. Then I got a big pebble from the river,
and came and hammered till I had flattened a coil in the decorations, and the
verdigris came off in powdery flakes. The delicate little people must have heard
me hammering in gusty outbreaks a mile away on either hand, but nothing came
of it. I saw a crowd of them upon the slopes, looking furtively at me. At last, hot
and tired, I sat down to watch the place. But I was too restless to watch long; I
am too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to
wait inactive for twenty-four hours--that is another matter.
"I got up after a time, and began walking aimlessly through the bushes towards
the hill again. 'Patience,' said I to myself. 'If you want your machine again you
must leave that sphinx alone. If they mean to take your machine away, it's little
good your wrecking their bronze panels, and if they don't, you will get it back as
soon as you can ask for it. To sit among all those unknown things before a puzzle
like that is hopeless. That way lies monomania. Face this world. Learn its ways,
watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find
clues to it all.' Then suddenly the humour of the situation came into my mind: the
thought of the years I had spent in study and toil to get into the future age, and
now my passion of anxiety to get out of it. I had made myself the most
complicated and the most hopeless trap that ever a man devised. Although it was
at my own expense, I could not help myself. I laughed aloud.
"Going through the big palace, it seemed to me that the little people avoided me.
It may have been my fancy, or it may have had something to do with my
hammering at the gates of bronze. Yet I felt tolerably sure of the avoidance. I was
careful however, to show no concern and to abstain from any pursuit of them,
and in the course of a day or two things got back to the old footing. I made what
progress I could in the language, and in addition I pushed my explorations here
and there. Either I missed some subtle point or their language was excessively
simple--almost exclusively composed of concrete substantives and verbs. There
seemed to be few, if any, abstract terms, or little use of figurative language. Their
sentences were usually simple and of two words, and I failed to convey or
understand any but the simplest propositions. I determined to put the thought of
my Time Machine and the mystery of the bronze doors under the sphinx as much
as possible in a corner of memory, until my growing knowledge would lead me
back to them in a natural way. Yet a certain feeling, you may understand,
tethered me in a circle of a few miles round the point of my arrival.
"So far as I could see, all the world displayed the same exuberant richness as the
Thames valley. From every hill I climbed I saw the same abundance of splendid
buildings, endlessly varied in material and style, the same clustering thickets of
evergreens, the same blossom-laden trees and tree-ferns. Here and there water
31
shone like silver, and beyond, the land rose into blue undulating hills, and so
faded into the serenity of the sky. A peculiar feature, which presently attracted
my attention, was the presence of certain circular wells, several, as it seemed to
me, of a very great depth. One lay by the path up the hill, which I had followed
during my first walk. Like the others, it was rimmed with bronze, curiously
wrought, and protected by a little cupola from the rain. Sitting by the side of
these wells, and peering down into the shafted darkness, I could see no gleam of
water, nor could I start any reflection with a lighted match. But in all of them I
heard a certain sound: a thud--thud--thud, like the beating of some big engine;
and I discovered, from the flaring of my matches, that a steady current of air set
down the shafts. Further, I threw a scrap of paper into the throat of one, and
instead of fluttering slowly down, it was at once sucked swiftly out of sight.
"After a time too, I came to connect these wells with tall towers standing here
and there upon the slopes; for above them there was often just such a flicker in
the air as one sees on a hot day above a sun-scorched beach. Putting things
together, I reached a strong suggestion of an extensive system of subterranean
ventilation, whose true import it was difficult to imagine. I was at first inclined to
associate it with the sanitary apparatus of these people. It was an obvious
conclusion, but it was absolutely wrong.
"And here I must admit that I learned very little of drains and bells and modes of
conveyance, and the like conveniences, during my time in this real future. In
some of these visions of Utopias and coming times which I have read, there is a
vast amount of detail about building, and social arrangements, and so forth. But
while such details are easy enough to obtain when the whole world is contained
in one's imagination, they are altogether inaccessible to a real traveller amid such
realities as I found here. Conceive the tale of London which a negro, fresh from
Central Africa, would take back to his tribe! What would he know of railway
companies, of social movements, of telephone and telegraph wires, of the Parcels
Delivery Company, and postal orders and the like? Yet we, at least, should be
willing enough to explain these things to him! And even of what he knew, how
much could he make his untravelled friend either apprehend or believe? Then
think how narrow the gap between a negro and a white man of our own times,
and how wide the interval between myself and these of the Golden Age! I was
sensible of much which was unseen, and which contributed to my comfort; but
save for a general impression of automatic organization, I fear I can convey very
little of the difference to your mind.
"In the matter of sepulture, for instance, I could see no signs of crematoria nor
anything suggestive of tombs. But it occurred to me that, possibly, there might be
cemeteries (or crematoria) somewhere beyond the range of my explorings. This
32
again, was a question I deliberately put to myself, and my curiosity was at first
entirely defeated upon the point. The thing puzzled me, and I was led to make a
further remark, which puzzled me still more: that aged and infirm among this
people there were none.
"I must confess that my satisfaction with my first theories of an automatic
civilization and a decadent humanity did not long endure. Yet I could think of no
other. Let me put {mention} my difficulties. The several big palaces I had
explored were mere living places, great dining-halls and sleeping apartments. I
could find no machinery, no appliances of any kind. Yet these people were
clothed in pleasant fabrics that must at times need renewal, and their sandals,
though undecorated, were fairly complex specimens of metal-work. Somehow
such things must be made. And the little people displayed no vestige of a creative
tendency. There were no shops, no workshops, no sign of importations among
them. They spent all their time in playing gently, in bathing in the river, in
making love in a half-playful fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping. I could not see
how things were kept going.
"Then again, about the Time Machine: something, I knew not what, had taken it
into the hollow pedestal of the White Sphinx. Why? For the life of me I could not
imagine. Those waterless wells, too, those flickering pillars. I felt I lacked a clue.
I felt--how shall I put it? Suppose you found an inscription, with sentences here
and there in excellent plain English, and interpolated therewith, others made up
of words, of letters even, absolutely unknown to you? Well on the third day of
my visit, that was how the world of Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven
Hundred and One presented itself to me!
"That day too, I made a friend--of a sort. It happened that, as I was watching
some of the little people bathing in a shallow, one of them was seized with cramp
and began drifting downstream. The main current ran rather swiftly, but not too
strongly for even a moderate swimmer. It will give you an idea, therefore, of the
strange deficiency in these creatures, when I tell you that none made the slightest
attempt to rescue the weakly crying little thing which was drowning before their
eyes. When I realized this, I hurriedly slipped off my clothes, and wading in at a
point lower down, I caught the poor mite and drew her safe to land. A little
rubbing of the limbs soon brought her round, and I had the satisfaction of seeing
she was all right before I left her. I had got to such a low estimate of her kind that
I did not expect any gratitude from her. In that however, I was wrong.
"This happened in the morning. In the afternoon I met my little woman, as I
believe it was, as I was returning towards my centre from an exploration, and she
received me with cries of delight and presented me with a big garland of flowers33
-evidently made for me and me alone. The thing took my imagination. Very
possibly I had been feeling desolate. At any rate I did my best to display my
appreciation of the gift. We were soon seated together in a little stone arbour,
engaged in conversation, chiefly of smiles. The creature's friendliness affected
me exactly as a child's might have done. We passed each other flowers, and she
kissed my hands. I did the same to hers. Then I tried talk, and found that her
name was Weena, which though I don't know what it meant, somehow seemed
appropriate enough. That was the beginning of a queer friendship which lasted a
week, and ended--as I will tell you!
"She was exactly like a child. She wanted to be with me always. She tried to
follow me everywhere, and on my next journey out and about it went to my heart
to tire her down, and leave her at last, exhausted and calling after me rather
plaintively. But the problems of the world had to be mastered. I had not, I said to
myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation. Yet her distress
when I left her was very great, her expostulations at the parting were sometimes
frantic, and I think, altogether, I had as much trouble as comfort from her
devotion. Nevertheless she was, somehow, a very great comfort. I thought it was
mere childish affection that made her cling to me. Until it was too late, I did not
clearly know what I had inflicted upon her when I left her. Nor until it was too
late did I clearly understand what she was to me. For by merely seeming fond of
me, and showing in her weak, futile way that she cared for me, the little doll of a
creature presently gave my return to the neighbourhood of the White Sphinx
almost the feeling of coming home; and I would watch for her tiny figure of
white and gold so soon as I came over the hill.
"It was from her too, that I learned that fear had not yet left the world. She was
fearless enough in the daylight, and she had the oddest confidence in me; for
once, in a foolish moment, I made threatening grimaces at her, and she simply
laughed at them. But she dreaded the dark, dreaded shadows, dreaded black
things. Darkness to her was the one thing dreadful. It was a singularly passionate
emotion, and it set me thinking and observing. I discovered then, among other
things, that these little people gathered into the great houses after dark, and slept
in droves. To enter upon them without a light was to put them into a tumult of
apprehension. I never found one out of doors, or one sleeping alone within doors,
after dark. Yet I was still such a blockhead that I missed the lesson of that fear,
and in spite of Weena's distress I insisted upon sleeping away from these
slumbering multitudes.
"It troubled her greatly, but in the end her odd affection for me triumphed, and
for five of the nights of our acquaintance, including the last night of all, she slept
with her head pillowed on my arm. But my story slips away from me as I speak
34
of her. It must have been the night before her rescue that I was awakened about
dawn. I had been restless, dreaming most disagreeably that I was drowned, and
that sea-anemones were feeling over my face with their soft palps. I woke with a
start, and with an odd fancy that some greyish animal had just rushed out of the
chamber. I tried to get to sleep again, but I felt restless and uncomfortable. It was
that dim grey hour when things are just creeping out of darkness, when
everything is colourless and clear cut, and yet unreal. I got up, and went down
into the great hall, and so out upon the flagstones in front of the palace. I thought
I would make a virtue of necessity, and see the sunrise.
"The moon was setting, and the dying moonlight and the first pallor of dawn
were mingled in a ghastly half-light. The bushes were inky black, the ground a
sombre grey, the sky colourless and cheerless. And up the hill I thought I could
see ghosts. There several times, as I scanned the slope, I saw white figures.
Twice I fancied I saw a solitary white, ape-like creature running rather quickly up
the hill, and once near the ruins I saw a leash of them carrying some dark body.
They moved hastily. I did not see what became of them. It seemed that they
vanished among the bushes. The dawn was still indistinct, you must understand. I
was feeling that chill, uncertain, early-morning feeling you may have known. I
doubted my eyes.
"As the eastern sky grew brighter, and the light of the day came on and its vivid
colouring returned upon the world once more, I scanned the view keenly. But I
saw no vestige of my white figures. They were mere creatures of the half-light.
'They must have been ghosts,' I said; 'I wonder whence they dated.' For a queer
notion of Grant Allen's came into my head, and amused me. If each generation
die and leave ghosts, he argued, the world at last will get overcrowded with them.
On that theory they would have grown innumerable some Eight Hundred
Thousand Years hence, and it was no great wonder to see four at once. But the
jest was unsatisfying, and I was thinking of these figures all the morning, until
Weena's rescue drove them out of my head. I associated them in some indefinite
way with the white animal I had startled in my first passionate search for the
Time Machine. But Weena was a pleasant substitute. Yet all the same, they were
soon destined to take far deadlier possession of my mind.
"I think I have said how much hotter than our own was the weather of this
Golden Age. I cannot account for it. It may be that the sun was hotter, or the
earth nearer the sun. It is usual to assume that the sun will go on cooling steadily
in the future. But people, unfamiliar with such speculations as those of the
younger Darwin, forget that the planets must ultimately fall back one by one into
the parent body. As these catastrophes occur, the sun will blaze with renewed
35
energy; and it may be that some inner planet had suffered this fate. Whatever the
reason, the fact remains that the sun was very much hotter than we know it.
"Well, one very hot morning--my fourth, I think--as I was seeking shelter from
the heat and glare in a colossal ruin near the great house where I slept and fed,
there happened this strange thing: Clambering among these heaps of masonry, I
found a narrow gallery, whose end and side windows were blocked by fallen
masses of stone. By contrast with the brilliancy outside, it seemed at first
impenetrably dark to me. I entered it groping, for the change from light to
blackness made spots of colour swim before me. Suddenly I halted spellbound. A
pair of eyes, luminous by reflection against the daylight without, was watching
me out of the darkness.
"The old instinctive dread of wild beasts came upon me. I clenched my hands and
steadfastly looked into the glaring eyeballs. I was afraid to turn. Then the thought
of the absolute security in which humanity appeared to be living came to my
mind. And then I remembered that strange terror of the dark. Overcoming my
fear to some extent, I advanced a step and spoke. I will admit that my voice was
harsh and ill-controlled. I put out my hand and touched something soft. At once
the eyes darted sideways, and something white ran past me. I turned with my
heart in my mouth, and saw a queer little ape-like figure, its head held down in a
peculiar manner, running across the sunlit space behind me. It blundered against
a block of granite, staggered aside, and in a moment was hidden in a black
shadow beneath another pile of ruined masonry.
"My impression of it is, of course, imperfect; but I know it was a dull white, and
had strange large greyish-red eyes; also that there was flaxen hair on its head and
down its back. But as I say, it went too fast for me to see distinctly. I cannot even
say whether it ran on all-fours, or only with its forearms held very low. After an
instant's pause I followed it into the second heap of ruins. I could not find it at
first; but after a time in the profound obscurity, I came upon one of those round
well-like openings of which I have told you, half closed by a fallen pillar. A
sudden thought came to me. Could this Thing have vanished down the shaft? I lit
a match, and looking down, I saw a small, white, moving creature, with large
bright eyes which regarded me steadfastly as it retreated. It made me shudder. It
was so like a human spider! It was clambering down the wall, and now I saw for
the first time a number of metal foot and hand rests forming a kind of ladder
down the shaft. Then the light burned my fingers and fell out of my hand, going
out as it dropped, and when I had lit another the little monster had disappeared.
"I do not know how long I sat peering down that well. It was not for some time
that I could succeed in persuading myself that the thing I had seen was human.
36
But gradually, the truth dawned on me: that Man had not remained one species,
but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful children of the
Upper World were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this
bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir
to all the ages.
"I thought of the flickering pillars and of my theory of an underground
ventilation. I began to suspect their true import. And what, I wondered, was this
Lemur doing in my scheme of a perfectly balanced organization? How was it
related to the indolent serenity of the beautiful Upper-worlders? And what was
hidden down there, at the foot of that shaft? I sat upon the edge of the well telling
myself that, at any rate, there was nothing to fear, and that there I must descend
for the solution of my difficulties. And withal I was absolutely afraid to go! As I
hesitated, two of the beautiful Upper-World people came running in their
amorous sport across the daylight into the shadow. The male pursued the female,
flinging flowers at her as he ran.
"They seemed distressed to find me, my arm against the overturned pillar,
peering down the well. Apparently it was considered bad form to remark these
apertures; for when I pointed to this one, and tried to frame a question about it, in
their tongue, they were still more visibly distressed and turned away. But they
were interested by my matches, and I struck some to amuse them. I tried them
again about the well, and again I failed. So presently I left them, meaning to go
back to Weena, and see what I could get from her. But my mind was already in
revolution; my guesses and impressions were slipping and sliding to a new
adjustment. I had now a clue to the import of these wells, to the ventilating
towers, to the mystery of the ghosts; to say nothing of a hint at the meaning of the
bronze gates and the fate of the Time Machine! And very vaguely there came a
suggestion towards the solution of the economic problem that had puzzled me.
"Here was the new view. Plainly this second species of Man was subterranean.
There were three circumstances in particular which made me think that its rare
emergence above ground was the outcome of a long-continued underground
habit. In the first place, there was the bleached look common in most animals that
live largely in the dark--the white fish of the Kentucky caves, for instance. Then
those large eyes, with that capacity for reflecting light, are common features of
nocturnal things--witness the owl and the cat. And last of all, that evident
confusion in the sunshine, that hasty yet fumbling awkward flight towards dark
shadow, and that peculiar carriage of the head while in the light--all reinforced
the theory of an extreme sensitiveness of the retina.
37
"Beneath my feet then, the earth must be tunnelled enormously, and these
tunnellings were the habitat of the new race. The presence of ventilating shafts
and wells along the hill slopes--everywhere, in fact except along the river valley-showed how universal were its ramifications. What so natural, then as to
assume, that it was in this artificial underworld that such work, as was necessary
to the comfort of the daylight race, was done? The notion was so plausible that I
at once accepted it, and went on to assume the how of this splitting of the human
species. I dare say you will anticipate the shape of my theory; though, for myself,
I very soon felt that it fell far short of the truth.
"At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as
daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and
social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the
whole position. No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to you--and wildly
incredible--! And yet even now there are existing circumstances to point that
way. There is a tendency to utilize underground space for the less ornamental
purposes of civilization; there is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for
instance, there are new electric railways, there are subways, there are
underground workrooms and restaurants, and they increase and multiply.
Evidently I thought, this tendency had increased till Industry had gradually lost
its birthright in the sky. I mean that it had gone deeper and deeper into larger and
ever larger underground factories, spending a still-increasing amount of its time
therein, till in the end--! Even now, does not an East-end worker live in such
artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the
earth?
"Again, the exclusive tendency of richer people--due, no doubt to the increasing
refinement of their education, and the widening gulf between them and the rude
violence of the poor--is already leading to the closing, in their interest, of
considerable portions of the surface of the land. About London, for instance,
perhaps half the prettier country is shut in, against intrusion. And this same
widening gulf--which is due to the length and expense of the higher educational
process and the increased facilities for and temptations towards refined habits on
the part of the rich--will make that exchange between class and class, that
promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting of our species
along lines of social stratification, less and less frequent. So in the end, above
ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and
below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the
conditions of their labour. Once they were there, they would no doubt have to
pay rent, and not a little of it, for the ventilation of their caverns; and if they
refused, they would starve or be suffocated for arrears. Such of them as were so
constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die; and in the end, the
38
balance being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the
conditions of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Upper-World
people were to theirs. As it seemed to me, the refined beauty and the etiolated
pallor followed naturally enough.
"The great triumph of Humanity I had dreamed of took a different shape in my
mind. It had been no such triumph of moral education and general co-operation
as I had imagined. Instead I saw a real aristocracy, armed with a perfected
science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system of to-day. Its
triumph had not been simply a triumph over Nature, but a triumph over Nature
and the fellowman. This I must warn you, was my theory at the time. I had no
convenient cicerone in the pattern of the Utopian books. My explanation may be
absolutely wrong. I still think it is the most plausible one. But even on this
supposition the balanced civilization that was at last attained must have long
since passed its zenith, and was now far fallen into decay. The too-perfect
security of the Upper-Worlders had led them to a slow movement of
degeneration, to a general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence. That I
could see clearly enough already. What had happened to the Undergrounders I
did not yet suspect; but from what I had seen of the Morlocks--that by the by,
was the name by which these creatures were called--I could imagine that the
modification of the human type was even far more profound than among the
'Eloi,' the beautiful race that I already knew.
"Then came troublesome doubts. Why had the Morlocks taken my Time
Machine? For I felt sure it was they who had taken it. Why too, if the Eloi were
masters, could they not restore the machine to me? And why were they so
terribly afraid of the dark? I proceeded, as I have said, to question Weena about
this Under World, but here again I was disappointed. At first she would not
understand my questions, and presently she refused to answer them. She shivered
as though the topic was unendurable. And when I pressed her, perhaps a little
harshly, she burst into tears. They were the only tears, except my own, I ever saw
in that Golden Age. When I saw them I ceased abruptly to trouble about the
Morlocks, and was only concerned in banishing these signs of the human
inheritance from Weena's eyes. And very soon she was smiling and clapping her
hands, while I solemnly burned a match."
6.
"It may seem odd to you, but it was two days before I could follow up the newfound clue in what was manifestly the proper way. I felt a peculiar shrinking
from those pallid bodies. They were just the half-bleached colour of the worms
and things one sees preserved in spirit in a zoological museum. And they were
39
filthily cold to the touch. Probably my shrinking was largely due to the
sympathetic influence of the Eloi, whose disgust of the Morlocks I now began to
appreciate.
"The next night I did not sleep well. Probably my health was a little disordered. I
was oppressed with perplexity and doubt. Once or twice I had a feeling of intense
fear for which I could perceive no definite reason. I remember creeping
noiselessly into the great hall where the little people were sleeping in the
moonlight--that night Weena was among them--and feeling reassured by their
presence. It occurred to me even then, that in the course of a few days the moon
must pass through its last quarter, and the nights grow dark, when the
appearances of these unpleasant creatures from below, these whitened Lemurs,
this new vermin that had replaced the old, might be more abundant. And on both
these days I had the restless feeling of one who shirks an inevitable duty. I felt
assured that the Time Machine was only to be recovered by boldly penetrating
these underground mysteries. Yet I could not face the mystery. If only I had, had
a companion it would have been different. But I was so horribly alone, and even
to clamber down into the darkness of the well appalled me. I don't know if you
will understand my feeling, but I never felt quite safe at my back.
"It was this restlessness, this insecurity perhaps, that drove me further and further
afield in my exploring expeditions. Going to the south-westward towards the
rising country that is now called Combe Wood, I observed far off, in the direction
of nineteenth-century Banstead, a vast green structure, different in character from
any I had hitherto seen. It was larger than the largest of the palaces or ruins I
knew, and the facade had an Oriental look: the face of it having the lustre, as well
as the pale-green tint, a kind of bluish-green, of a certain type of Chinese
porcelain. This difference in aspect suggested a difference in use, and I was
minded to push on and explore. But the day was growing late, and I had come
upon the sight of the place after a long and tiring circuit; so I resolved to hold
over the adventure for the following day, and I returned to the welcome and the
caresses of little Weena. But next morning I perceived clearly enough that my
curiosity regarding the Palace of Green Porcelain was a piece of self-deception,
to enable me to shirk, by another day, an experience I dreaded. I resolved I would
make the descent without further waste of time, and started out in the early
morning towards a well near the ruins of granite and aluminium.
"Little Weena ran with me. She danced beside me to the well, but when she saw
me lean over the mouth and look downward, she seemed strangely disconcerted.
'Good-bye, Little Weena,' I said, kissing her; and then putting her down, I began
to feel over the parapet for the climbing hooks. Rather hastily, I may as well
confess, for I feared my courage might leak away! At first she watched me in
40
amazement. Then she gave a most piteous cry, and running to me, she began to
pull at me with her little hands. I think her opposition nerved me rather to
proceed. I shook her off, perhaps a little roughly, and in another moment I was in
the throat of the well. I saw her agonized face over the parapet, and smiled to
reassure her. Then I had to look down at the unstable hooks to which I clung."
"I had to clamber down a shaft of perhaps two hundred yards. The descent was
effected by means of metallic bars projecting from the sides of the well, and
these being adapted to the needs of a creature much smaller and lighter than
myself, I was speedily cramped and fatigued by the descent. And not simply
fatigued! One of the bars bent suddenly under my weight, and almost swung me
off into the blackness beneath. For a moment I hung by one hand, and after that
experience I did not dare to rest again. Though my arms and back were presently
acutely painful, I went on clambering down the sheer descent with as quick a
motion as possible. Glancing upward, I saw the aperture, a small blue disk, in
which a star was visible, while little Weena's head showed as a round black
projection. The thudding sound of a machine below grew louder and more
oppressive. Everything save that little disk above was profoundly dark, and when
I looked up again Weena had disappeared."
"I was in an agony of discomfort. I had some thought of trying to go up the shaft
again, and leave the Under World alone. But even while I turned this over in my
mind I continued to descend. At last, with intense relief, I saw dimly coming up,
a foot to the right of me, a slender loophole in the wall. Swinging myself in, I
found it was the aperture of a narrow horizontal tunnel in which I could lie down
and rest. It was not too soon. My arms ached, my back was cramped, and I was
trembling with the prolonged terror of a fall. Besides this, the unbroken darkness
had had a distressing effect upon my eyes. The air was full of the throb and hum
of machinery pumping air down the shaft.
"I do not know how long I lay. I was roused by a soft hand touching my face.
Starting up in the darkness I snatched at my matches, and hastily striking one, I
saw three stooping white creatures similar to the one I had seen above ground in
the ruin, hastily retreating before the light. Living as they did, in what appeared
to me impenetrable darkness, their eyes were abnormally large and sensitive, just
as are the pupils of the abysmal fishes, and they reflected the light in the same
way. I have no doubt they could see me in that rayless obscurity, and they did not
seem to have any fear of me apart from the light. But so soon as I struck a match
in order to see them, they fled incontinently, vanishing into dark gutters and
tunnels, from which their eyes glared at me in the strangest fashion.
41
"I tried to call them, but the language they had was apparently different from that
of the Overworld people; so that I was needs left to my own unaided efforts, and
the thought of flight before exploration was even then in my mind. But I said to
myself, 'You are in for it now,' and feeling my way along the tunnel, I found the
noise of machinery grow louder. Presently the walls fell away from me, and I
came to a large open space, and striking another match, saw that I had entered a
vast arched cavern, which stretched into utter darkness beyond the range of my
light. The view I had of it was as much as one could see in the burning of a
match.
"Necessarily my memory is vague. Great shapes like big machines rose out of the
dimness, and cast grotesque black shadows, in which dim spectral Morlocks
sheltered from the glare. The place, by the by, was very stuffy and oppressive,
and the faint halitus of freshly shed blood was in the air. Some way down the
central vista was a little table of white metal, laid with what seemed a meal. The
Morlocks at any rate were carnivorous! Even at the time, I remember wondering
what large animal could have survived to furnish the red joint I saw. It was all
very indistinct: the heavy smell, the big unmeaning shapes, the obscene figures
lurking in the shadows, and only waiting for the darkness to come at me again!
Then the match burned down, and stung my fingers, and fell, a wriggling red spot
in the blackness.
"I have thought since how particularly ill-equipped I was for such an experience.
When I had started with the Time Machine, I had started with the absurd
assumption that the men of the Future would certainly be infinitely ahead of
ourselves in all their appliances. I had come without arms, without medicine,
without anything to smoke--at times I missed tobacco frightfully--even without
enough matches. If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that
glimpse of the Under World in a second, and examined it at leisure. But as it was,
I stood there with only the weapons and the powers that Nature had endowed me
with--hands, feet, and teeth; these, and four safety-matches that still remained to
me.
"I was afraid to push my way in among all this machinery in the dark, and it was
only with my last glimpse of light I discovered that my store of matches had run
low. It had never occurred to me until that moment that there was any need to
economize them, and I had wasted almost half the box in astonishing the UpperWorlders, to whom fire was a novelty. Now as I say, I had four left, and while I
stood in the dark, a hand touched mine, lank fingers came feeling over my face,
and I was sensible of a peculiar unpleasant odour. I fancied I heard the breathing
of a crowd of those dreadful little beings about me. I felt the box of matches in
my hand being gently disengaged, and other hands behind me plucking at my
42
clothing. The sense of these unseen creatures examining me was indescribably
unpleasant. The sudden realization of my ignorance of their ways of thinking and
doing came home to me very vividly in the darkness. I shouted at them as loudly
as I could. They started away, and then I could feel them approaching me again.
They clutched at me more boldly, whispering odd sounds to each other. I
shivered violently, and shouted again--rather discordantly. This time they were
not so seriously alarmed, and they made a queer laughing noise as they came
back at me. I will confess I was horribly frightened. I determined to strike
another match and escape under the protection of its glare. I did so, and eking out
the flicker with a scrap of paper from my pocket, I made good my retreat to the
narrow tunnel. But I had scarce entered this when my light was blown out and in
the blackness I could hear the Morlocks rustling like wind among leaves, and
pattering like the rain, as they hurried after me.
"In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no mistaking that
they were trying to haul me back. I struck another light, and waved it in their
dazzled faces. You can scarce imagine how nauseatingly inhuman they looked-those pale, chinless faces and great, lidless, pinkish-grey eyes--! As they stared in
their blindness and bewilderment. But I did not stay to look, I promise you: I
retreated again, and when my second match had ended, I struck my third. It had
almost burned through when I reached the opening into the shaft. I lay down on
the edge, for the throb of the great pump below made me giddy. Then I felt
sideways for the projecting hooks, and, as I did so, my feet were grasped from
behind, and I was violently tugged backward. I lit my last match...and it
incontinently went out. But I had my hand on the climbing bars now, and kicking
violently, I disengaged myself from the clutches of the Morlocks and was
speedily clambering up the shaft, while they stayed peering and blinking up at
me: all but one little wretch who followed me for some way, and well-nigh
secured my boot as a trophy.
"That climb seemed interminable to me. With the last twenty or thirty feet of it a
deadly nausea came upon me. I had the greatest difficulty in keeping my hold.
The last few yards was a frightful struggle against this faintness. Several times
my head swam, and I felt all the sensations of falling. At last, however I got over
the well-mouth somehow, and staggered out of the ruin into the blinding sunlight.
I fell upon my face. Even the soil smelt sweet and clean. Then I remember
Weena kissing my hands and ears, and the voices of others among the Eloi. Then
for a time, I was insensible."
7.
43
"Now indeed, I seemed in a worse case than before. Hitherto, except during my
night's anguish at the loss of the Time Machine, I had felt a sustaining hope of
ultimate escape, but that hope was staggered by these new discoveries. Hitherto I
had merely thought myself impeded by the childish simplicity of the little people,
and by some unknown forces which I had only to understand to overcome; but
there was an altogether new element in the sickening quality of the Morlocks--a
something inhuman and malign. Instinctively I loathed them. Before I had felt as
a man might feel who had fallen into a pit: my concern was with the pit and how
to get out of it. Now I felt like a beast in a trap, whose enemy would come upon
him soon.
"The enemy I dreaded may surprise you. It was the darkness of the new moon.
Weena had put this into my head by some at first incomprehensible remarks
about the Dark Nights. It was not now such a very difficult problem to guess
what the coming Dark Nights might mean. The moon was on the wane: each
night there was a longer interval of darkness. And I now understood to some
slight degree at least the reason of the fear of the little Upper-World people for
the dark. I wondered vaguely what foul villainy it might be that the Morlocks did
under the new moon. I felt pretty sure now that my second hypothesis was all
wrong. The Upper-World people might once have been the favoured aristocracy,
and the Morlocks their mechanical servants: but that had long since passed away.
The two species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down
towards, or had already arrived at, an altogether new relationship. The Eloi, like
the Carolingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They still
possessed the earth on sufferance: since the Morlocks, subterranean for
innumerable generations, had come at last to find the daylit surface intolerable.
And the Morlocks made their garments, I inferred, and maintained them in their
habitual needs, perhaps through the survival of an old habit of service. They did
it as a standing horse paws with his foot, or as a man enjoys killing animals in
sport: because ancient and departed necessities had impressed it on the organism.
But clearly, the old order was already in part reversed. The Nemesis of the
delicate ones was creeping on apace. Ages ago, thousands of generations ago,
man had thrust his brother man out of the ease and the sunshine. And now that
brother was coming back--changed! Already the Eloi had begun to learn one old
lesson anew. They were becoming reacquainted with Fear. And suddenly there
came into my head the memory of the meat I had seen in the Under World. It
seemed odd how it floated into my mind: not stirred up as it were by the current
of my meditations, but coming in almost like a question from outside. I tried to
recall the form of it. I had a vague sense of something familiar, but I could not
tell what it was at the time.
44
"Still, however helpless the little people in the presence of their mysterious Fear,
I was differently constituted. I came out of this age of ours, this ripe prime of the
human race, when Fear does not paralyse and mystery has lost its terrors. I at
least would defend myself. Without further delay I determined to make myself
arms and a fastness where I might sleep. With that refuge as a base, I could face
this strange world with some of that confidence I had lost in realizing to what
creatures night by night I lay exposed. I felt I could never sleep again until my
bed was secure from them. I shuddered with horror to think how they must
already have examined me.
"I wandered during the afternoon along the valley of the Thames, but found
nothing that commended itself to my mind as inaccessible. All the buildings and
trees seemed easily practicable to such dexterous climbers as the Morlocks, to
judge by their wells, must be. Then the tall pinnacles of the Palace of Green
Porcelain and the polished gleam of its walls came back to my memory; and in
the evening, taking Weena like a child upon my shoulder, I went up the hills
towards the south-west. The distance, I had reckoned, was seven or eight miles,
but it must have been nearer eighteen. I had first seen the place on a moist
afternoon when distances are deceptively diminished. In addition, one of my
shoes was loose, and a nail was working through the sole--they were comfortable
old shoes I wore about indoors--so that I was lame. And it was already long past
sunset when I came in sight of the palace, silhouetted black against the pale
yellow of the sky.
"Weena had been hugely delighted when I began to carry her, but after a while
she desired me to let her down, and ran along by the side of me, occasionally
darting off on either hand to pick flowers to stick in my pockets. My pockets had
always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had concluded that they were an
eccentric kind of vase for floral decoration. At least she utilized them for that
purpose. And that reminds me! In changing my jacket I found..."
The Time Traveller paused, put his hand into his pocket, and silently placed two
withered flowers, not unlike very large white mallows, upon the little table. Then
he resumed his narrative.
"As the hush of evening crept over the world and we proceeded over the hill crest
towards Wimbledon, Weena grew tired and wanted to return to the house of grey
stone. But I pointed out the distant pinnacles of the Palace of Green Porcelain to
her, and contrived to make her understand that we were seeking a refuge there
from her Fear. You know that great pause that comes upon things before the
dusk? Even the breeze stops in the trees. To me there is always an air of
expectation about that evening stillness. The sky was clear, remote, and empty
45
save for a few horizontal bars far down in the sunset. Well, that night, the
expectation took the colour of my fears. In that darkling calm my senses seemed
preternaturally sharpened. I fancied I could even feel the hollowness of the
ground beneath my feet: could indeed, almost see through it the Morlocks on
their ant-hill going hither and thither and waiting for the dark. In my excitement I
fancied that they would receive my invasion of their burrows as a declaration of
war. And why had they taken my Time Machine?
"So we went on in the quiet, and the twilight deepened into night. The clear blue
of the distance faded, and one star after another came out. The ground grew dim
and the trees black. Weena's fears and her fatigue grew upon her. I took her in my
arms and talked to her and caressed her. Then as the darkness grew deeper, she
put her arms round my neck, and closing her eyes, tightly pressed her face
against my shoulder. So we went down a long slope into a valley, and there in the
dimness I almost walked into a little river. This I waded, and went up the
opposite side of the valley, past a number of sleeping houses, and by a statue--a
Faun, or some such figure, minus the head. Here too were acacias. So far I had
seen nothing of the Morlocks, but it was yet early in the night, and the darker
hours before the old moon rose were still to come.
"From the brow of the next hill I saw a thick wood spreading wide and black
before me. I hesitated at this. I could see no end to it, either to the right or the
left. Feeling tired--my feet, in particular, were very sore--I carefully lowered
Weena from my shoulder as I halted, and sat down upon the turf. I could no
longer see the Palace of Green Porcelain, and I was in doubt of my direction. I
looked into the thickness of the wood and thought of what it might hide. Under
that dense tangle of branches one would be out of sight of the stars. Even were
there no other lurking danger--a danger I did not care to let my imagination loose
upon--there would still be all the roots to stumble over and the tree-boles to strike
against.
"I was very tired too, after the excitements of the day; so I decided that I would
not face it, but would pass the night upon the open hill.
"Weena, I was glad to find, was fast asleep. I carefully wrapped her in my jacket,
and sat down beside her to wait for the moonrise. The hillside was quiet and
deserted, but from the black of the wood there came now and then a stir of living
things. Above me shone the stars, for the night was very clear. I felt a certain
sense of friendly comfort in their twinkling. All the old constellations had gone
from the sky, however: that slow movement which is imperceptible in a hundred
human lifetimes, had long since rearranged them in unfamiliar groupings. But the
Milky Way, it seemed to me, was still the same tattered streamer of star-dust as
46
of yore. Southward (as I judged it) was a very bright red star that was new to me;
it was even more splendid than our own green Sirius. And amid all these
scintillating points of light one bright planet shone kindly and steadily like the
face of an old friend."
"Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of
terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable
drift of their movements out of the unknown past, into the unknown future. I
thought of the great precessional cycle that the pole of the earth describes. Only
forty times had that silent revolution occurred during all the years that I had
traversed. And during these few revolutions all the activity, all the traditions, the
complex organizations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the
mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence. Instead
were these frail creatures who had forgotten their high ancestry, and the white
Things of which I went in terror. Then I thought of the Great Fear that was
between the two species, and for the first time, with a sudden shiver, came the
clear knowledge of what the meat I had seen might be. Yet it was too horrible! I
looked at little Weena sleeping beside me, her face white and starlike under the
stars, and forthwith dismissed the thought.
"Through that long night I held my mind off the Morlocks as well as I could, and
whiled away the time by trying to fancy I could find signs of the old
constellations in the new confusion. The sky kept very clear, except for a hazy
cloud or so. No doubt I dozed at times. Then, as my vigil wore on, came a
faintness in the eastward sky, like the reflection of some colourless fire, and the
old moon rose, thin and peaked and white. And close behind, and overtaking it,
and overflowing it, the dawn came, pale at first, and then growing pink and
warm. No Morlocks had approached us. Indeed I had seen none upon the hill that
night. And in the confidence of renewed day it almost seemed to me that my fear
had been unreasonable. I stood up and found my foot with the loose heel swollen
at the ankle and painful under the heel; so I sat down again, took off my shoes,
and flung them away.
"I awakened Weena, and we went down into the wood, now green and pleasant
instead of black and forbidding. We found some fruit wherewith to break our
fast. We soon met others of the dainty ones, laughing and dancing in the sunlight
as though there was no such thing in nature as the night. And then I thought once
more of the meat that I had seen. I felt assured now of what it was, and from the
bottom of my heart I pitied this last feeble rill from the great flood of humanity.
Clearly at some time in the Long-Ago of human decay the Morlocks' food had
run short. Possibly they had lived on rats and suchlike vermin. Even now man is
far less discriminating and exclusive in his food than he was--far less than any
47
monkey. His prejudice against human flesh is no deep-seated instinct. And so
these inhuman sons of men--! I tried to look at the thing in a scientific spirit.
After all, they were less human and more remote than our cannibal ancestors of
three or four thousand years ago. And the intelligence that would have made this
state of things a torment had gone. Why should I trouble myself? These Eloi
were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon-probably saw to the breeding of. And there was Weena dancing at my side!
"Then I tried to preserve myself from the horror that was coming upon me, by
regarding it as a rigorous punishment of human selfishness. Man had been
content to live in ease and delight upon the labours of his fellowman, had taken
Necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the fullness of time Necessity had
come home to him. I even tried a Carlyle-like scorn of this wretched aristocracy
in decay. But this attitude of mind was impossible. However great their
intellectual degradation, the Eloi had kept too much of the human form not to
claim my sympathy, and to make me perforce a sharer in their degradation and
their Fear.
"I had at that time very vague ideas as to the course I should pursue. My first was
to secure some safe place of refuge, and to make myself such arms of metal or
stone as I could contrive. That necessity was immediate. In the next place, I
hoped to procure some means of fire, so that I should have the weapon of a torch
at hand, for nothing, I knew, would be more efficient against these Morlocks.
Then I wanted to arrange some contrivance to break open the doors of bronze
under the White Sphinx. I had in mind a battering-ram. I had a persuasion that if I
could enter those doors and carry a blaze of light before me I should discover the
Time Machine and escape. I could not imagine the Morlocks were strong enough
to move it far away. Weena I had resolved to bring with me to our own time. And
turning such schemes over in my mind I pursued our way towards the building
which my fancy had chosen as our dwelling."
8.
"I found the Palace of Green Porcelain, when we approached it about noon,
deserted and falling into ruin. Only ragged vestiges of glass remained in its
windows, and great sheets of the green facing had fallen away from the corroded
metallic framework. It lay very high upon a turfy down, and looking northeastward before I entered it, I was surprised to see a large estuary, or even creek,
where I judged Wandsworth and Battersea must once have been. I thought then-though I never followed up the thought--of what might have happened, or might
be happening, to the living things in the sea.
48
"The material of the Palace proved on examination to be indeed porcelain, and
along the face of it I saw an inscription in some unknown character. I thought,
rather foolishly, that Weena might help me to interpret this, but I only learned
that the bare idea of writing had never entered her head. She always seemed to
me, I fancy, more human than she was, perhaps because her affection was so
human.
"Within the big valves of the door--which were open and broken--we found,
instead of the customary hall, a long gallery lit by many side windows. At the
first glance I was reminded of a museum. The tiled floor was thick with dust, and
a remarkable array of miscellaneous objects was shrouded in the same grey
covering. Then I perceived, standing strange and gaunt in the centre of the hall,
what was clearly the lower part of a huge skeleton. I recognized by the oblique
feet that it was some extinct creature after the fashion of the Megatherium. The
skull and the upper bones lay beside it in the thick dust, and in one place, where
rain-water had dropped through a leak in the roof, the thing itself had been worn
away. Further in the gallery was the huge skeleton barrel of a Brontosaurus. My
museum hypothesis was confirmed. Going towards the side I found what
appeared to be sloping shelves, and clearing away the thick dust, I found the old
familiar glass cases of our own time. But they must have been air-tight to judge
from the fair preservation of some of their contents.
"Clearly we stood among the ruins of some latter-day South Kensington! Here,
apparently, was the Palaeontological Section, and a very splendid array of fossils
it must have been, though the inevitable process of decay that had been staved off
for a time, and had, through the extinction of bacteria and fungi, lost ninety-nine
hundredths of its force, was nevertheless, with extreme sureness if with extreme
slowness at work again upon all its treasures. Here and there I found traces of the
little people in the shape of rare fossils broken to pieces or threaded in strings
upon reeds. And the cases had in some instances been bodily removed--by the
Morlocks as I judged. The place was very silent. The thick dust deadened our
footsteps. Weena, who had been rolling a sea-urchin down the sloping glass of a
case, presently came, as I stared about me, and very quietly took my hand and
stood beside me.
"And at first I was so much surprised by this ancient monument of an intellectual
age, that I gave no thought to the possibilities it presented. Even my
preoccupation about the Time Machine receded a little from my mind.
"To judge from the size of the place, this Palace of Green Porcelain had a great
deal more in it than a Gallery of Palaeontology; possibly historical galleries; it
might be, even a library! To me, at least in my present circumstances, these
49
would be vastly more interesting than this spectacle of old-time geology in
decay. Exploring, I found another short gallery running transversely to the first.
This appeared to be devoted to minerals, and the sight of a block of sulphur set
my mind running on gunpowder. But I could find no saltpetre; indeed, no nitrates
of any kind. Doubtless they had deliquesced ages ago. Yet the sulphur hung in
my mind, and set up a train of thinking. As for the rest of the contents of that
gallery, though on the whole they were the best preserved of all I saw, I had little
interest. I am no specialist in mineralogy, and I went on down a very ruinous
aisle running parallel to the first hall I had entered. Apparently this section had
been devoted to natural history, but everything had long since passed out of
recognition. A few shrivelled and blackened vestiges of what had once been
stuffed animals, desiccated mummies in jars that had once held spirit, a brown
dust of departed plants: that was all! I was sorry for that, because I should have
been glad to trace the patent readjustments by which the conquest of animated
nature had been attained. Then we came to a gallery of simply colossal
proportions, but singularly ill-lit, the floor of it running downward at a slight
angle from the end at which I entered. At intervals white globes hung from the
ceiling--many of them cracked and smashed--which suggested that originally the
place had been artificially lit. Here I was more in my element, for rising on either
side of me were the huge bulks of big machines, all greatly corroded and many
broken down, but some still fairly complete. You know I have a certain weakness
for mechanism, and I was inclined to linger among these; the more so as for the
most part they had the interest of puzzles, and I could make only the vaguest
guesses at what they were for. I fancied that if I could solve their puzzles I should
find myself in possession of powers that might be of use against the Morlocks.
"Suddenly Weena came very close to my side. So suddenly that she startled me.
Had it not been for her I do not think I should have noticed that the floor of the
gallery sloped at all.* The end I had come in at was quite above ground, and was
lit by rare slit-like windows. As you went down the length, the ground came up
against these windows, until at last there was a pit like the 'area' of a London
house before each, and only a narrow line of daylight at the top. I went slowly
along, puzzling about the machines, and had been too intent upon them to notice
the gradual diminution of the light, until Weena's increasing apprehensions drew
my attention. Then I saw that the gallery ran down at last into a thick darkness. I
hesitated, and then, as I looked round me, I saw that the dust was less abundant
and its surface less even. Further away towards the dimness, it appeared to be
broken by a number of small narrow footprints. My sense of the immediate
presence of the Morlocks revived at that. I felt that I was wasting my time in the
academic examination of machinery. I called to mind that it was already far
advanced in the afternoon, and that I had still no weapon, no refuge, and no
50
means of making a fire. And then down in the remote blackness of the gallery I
heard a peculiar pattering, and the same odd noises I had heard down the well."
[* It may be, of course, that the floor did not slope, but that the museum was built
into the side of a hill.--Editor.]
"I took Weena's hand. Then struck with a sudden idea, I left her and turned to a
machine from which projected a lever not unlike those in a signal-box.
Clambering upon the stand, and grasping this lever in my hands, I put all my
weight upon it sideways. Suddenly Weena, deserted in the central aisle, began to
whimper. I had judged the strength of the lever pretty correctly, for it snapped
after a minute's strain, and I rejoined her with a mace in my hand more than
sufficient, I judged, for any Morlock skull I might encounter. And I longed very
much to kill a Morlock or so. Very inhuman, you may think, to want to go killing
one's own descendants! But it was impossible, somehow, to feel any humanity in
the things. Only my disinclination to leave Weena, and a persuasion that if I
began to slake my thirst for murder my Time Machine might suffer, restrained
me from going straight down the gallery and killing the brutes I heard.
"Well, mace in one hand and Weena in the other, I went out of that gallery and
into another and still larger one, which at the first glance reminded me of a
military chapel hung with tattered flags. The brown and charred rags that hung
from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books.
They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left
them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that
told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have
moralised upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me
with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre
wilderness of rotting paper testified. At the time I will confess that I thought
chiefly of the philosophical transactions and my own seventeen papers upon
physical optics.
"Then, going up a broad staircase, we came to what may once have been a
gallery of technical chemistry. And here I had not a little hope of useful
discoveries. Except at one end where the roof had collapsed, this gallery was well
preserved. I went eagerly to every unbroken case. And at last, in one of the really
air-tight cases, I found a box of matches. Very eagerly I tried them. They were
perfectly good. They were not even damp. I turned to Weena. 'Dance,' I cried to
her in her own tongue. For now I had a weapon indeed against the horrible
creatures we feared. And so, in that derelict museum, upon the thick soft
carpeting of dust, to Weena's huge delight, I solemnly performed a kind of
composite dance, whistling 'The Land of the Leal' as cheerfully as I could. In part
51
it was a modest cancan, in part a step-dance, in part a skirt-dance (so far as my
tail-coat permitted), and in part original. For I am naturally inventive, as you
know.
"Now, I still think that for this box of matches to have escaped the wear of time
for immemorial years was a most strange, as for me it was a most fortunate thing.
Yet oddly enough, I found a far unlikelier substance, and that was camphor. I
found it in a sealed jar, that by chance, I suppose, had been really hermetically
sealed. I fancied at first that it was paraffin wax, and smashed the glass
accordingly. But the odour of camphor was unmistakable. In the universal decay
this volatile substance had chanced to survive, perhaps through many thousands
of centuries. It reminded me of a sepia painting I had once seen done from the
ink of a fossil Belemnite that must have perished and become fossilised millions
of years ago. I was about to throw it away, but I remembered that it was
inflammable and burned with a good bright flame--was in fact, an excellent
candle--and I put it in my pocket. I found no explosives, however nor any means
of breaking down the bronze doors. As yet my iron crowbar was the most helpful
thing I had chanced upon. Nevertheless I left that gallery greatly elated.
"I cannot tell you all the story of that long afternoon. It would require a great
effort of memory to recall my explorations in at all the proper order. I remember
a long gallery of rusting stands of arms, and how I hesitated between my crowbar
and a hatchet or a sword. I could not carry both however, and my bar of iron
promised best against the bronze gates. There were numbers of guns, pistols, and
rifles. The most were masses of rust, but many were of some new metal, and still
fairly sound. But any cartridges or powder there may once have been had rotted
into dust. One corner I saw was charred and shattered; perhaps, I thought, by an
explosion among the specimens. In another place was a vast array of idols-Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian, Phoenician, every country on earth I should think.
And here, yielding to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a
steatite monster from South America that particularly took my fancy.
"As the evening drew on, my interest waned. I went through gallery after gallery,
dusty, silent, often ruinous, the exhibits sometimes mere heaps of rust and lignite,
sometimes fresher. In one place I suddenly found myself near the model of a tinmine, and then by the merest accident I discovered, in an air-tight case, two
dynamite cartridges! I shouted 'Eureka!' and smashed the case with joy. Then
came a doubt. I hesitated. Then, selecting a little side gallery, I made my essay. I
never felt such a disappointment as I did in waiting five, ten, fifteen minutes for
an explosion that never came. Of course the things were dummies, as I might
have guessed from their presence. I really believe that had they not been so, I
should have rushed off incontinently and blown Sphinx, bronze doors, and (as it
52
proved) my chances of finding the Time Machine, all together into nonexistence.
"It was after that, I think, that we came to a little open court within the palace. It
was turfed, and had three fruit-trees. So we rested and refreshed ourselves.
Towards sunset I began to consider our position. Night was creeping upon us,
and my inaccessible hiding-place had still to be found. But that troubled me very
little now. I had in my possession a thing that was, perhaps, the best of all
defences against the Morlocks--I had matches! I had the camphor in my pocket
too, if a blaze were needed. It seemed to me that the best thing we could do
would be to pass the night in the open, protected by a fire. In the morning there
was the getting of the Time Machine. Towards that, as yet, I had only my iron
mace. But now, with my growing knowledge, I felt very differently towards
those bronze doors. Up to this, I had refrained from forcing them, largely because
of the mystery on the other side. They had never impressed me as being very
strong, and I hoped to find my bar of iron not altogether inadequate for the
work."
9.
"We emerged from the palace while the sun was still in part above the horizon. I
was determined to reach the White Sphinx early the next morning, and ere the
dusk I purposed pushing through the woods that had stopped me on the previous
journey. My plan was to go as far as possible that night, and then, building a fire,
to sleep in the protection of its glare. Accordingly, as we went along I gathered
any sticks or dried grass I saw, and presently had my arms full of such litter.
Thus loaded, our progress was slower than I had anticipated, and besides Weena
was tired. And I began to suffer from sleepiness too; so that it was full night
before we reached the wood. Upon the shrubby hill of its edge Weena would
have stopped, fearing the darkness before us; but a singular sense of impending
calamity, that should indeed have served me as a warning, drove me onward. I
had been without sleep for a night and two days, and I was feverish and irritable.
I felt sleep coming upon me, and the Morlocks with it.
"While we hesitated, among the black bushes behind us, and dim against their
blackness, I saw three crouching figures. There was scrub and long grass all
about us, and I did not feel safe from their insidious approach. The forest, I
calculated, was rather less than a mile across. If we could get through it to the
bare hillside, there as it seemed to me, was an altogether safer resting-place; I
thought that with my matches and my camphor I could contrive to keep my path
illuminated through the woods. Yet it was evident that if I was to flourish
matches with my hands I should have to abandon my firewood; so, rather
53
reluctantly, I put it down. And then it came into my head that I would amaze our
friends behind by lighting it. I was to discover the atrocious folly of this
proceeding, but it came to my mind as an ingenious move for covering our
retreat."
"I don't know if you have ever thought what a rare thing flame must be in the
absence of man and in a temperate climate. The sun's heat is rarely strong enough
to burn, even when it is focused by dewdrops, as is sometimes the case in more
tropical districts. Lightning may blast and blacken, but it rarely gives rise to
widespread fire. Decaying vegetation may occasionally smoulder with the heat of
its fermentation, but this rarely results in flame. In this decadence, too, the art of
fire-making had been forgotten on the earth. The red tongues that went licking up
my heap of wood were an altogether new and strange thing to Weena.
"She wanted to run to it and play with it. I believe she would have cast herself
into it had I not restrained her. But I caught her up, and in spite of her struggles,
plunged boldly before me into the wood. For a little way the glare of my fire lit
the path. Looking back presently, I could see, through the crowded stems, that
from my heap of sticks the blaze had spread to some bushes adjacent, and a
curved line of fire was creeping up the grass of the hill. I laughed at that, and
turned again to the dark trees before me. It was very black, and Weena clung to
me convulsively, but there was still, as my eyes grew accustomed to the
darkness, sufficient light for me to avoid the stems. Overhead it was simply
black, except where a gap of remote blue sky shone down upon us here and there.
I struck none of my matches because I had no hand free. Upon my left arm I
carried my little one, in my right hand I had my iron bar.
"For some way I heard nothing but the crackling twigs under my feet, the faint
rustle of the breeze above, and my own breathing and the throb of the bloodvessels in my ears. Then I seemed to know of a pattering about me. I pushed on
grimly. The pattering grew more distinct, and then I caught the same queer sound
and voices I had heard in the Under World. There were evidently several of the
Morlocks, and they were closing in upon me. Indeed, in another minute I felt a
tug at my coat, then something at my arm. And Weena shivered violently, and
became quite still.
"It was time for a match. But to get one I must put her down. I did so, and as I
fumbled with my pocket, a struggle began in the darkness about my knees,
perfectly silent on her part and with the same peculiar cooing sounds from the
Morlocks. Soft little hands too, were creeping over my coat and back, touching
even my neck. Then the match scratched and fizzed. I held it flaring, and saw the
white backs of the Morlocks in flight amid the trees. I hastily took a lump of
54
camphor from my pocket, and prepared to light it as soon as the match should
wane. Then I looked at Weena. She was lying clutching my feet and quite
motionless, with her face to the ground. With a sudden fright I stooped to her.
She seemed scarcely to breathe. I lit the block of camphor and flung it to the
ground, and as it split and flared up and drove back the Morlocks and the
shadows, I knelt down and lifted her. The wood behind seemed full of the stir
and murmur of a great company!
"She seemed to have fainted. I put her carefully upon my shoulder and rose to
push on, and then there came a horrible realization. In manoeuvring with my
matches and Weena, I had turned myself about several times, and now I had not
the faintest idea in what direction lay my path. For all I knew, I might be facing
back towards the Palace of Green Porcelain. I found myself in a cold sweat. I had
to think rapidly what to do. I determined to build a fire and encamp where we
were. I put Weena, still motionless, down upon a turfy bole, and very hastily, as
my first lump of camphor waned, I began collecting sticks and leaves. Here and
there out of the darkness round me the Morlocks' eyes shone like carbuncles.
"The camphor flickered and went out. I lit a match, and as I did so, two white
forms that had been approaching Weena dashed hastily away. One was so
blinded by the light that he came straight for me, and I felt his bones grind under
the blow of my fist. He gave a whoop of dismay, staggered a little way, and fell
down. I lit another piece of camphor, and went on gathering my bonfire.
Presently I noticed how dry was some of the foliage above me, for since my
arrival on the Time Machine, a matter of a week, no rain had fallen. So instead of
casting about among the trees for fallen twigs, I began leaping up and dragging
down branches. Very soon I had a choking smoky fire of green wood and dry
sticks, and could economize my camphor. Then I turned to where Weena lay
beside my iron mace. I tried what I could to revive her, but she lay like one dead.
I could not even satisfy myself whether or not she breathed.
"Now the smoke of the fire beat over towards me, and it must have made me
heavy of a sudden. Moreover, the vapour of camphor was in the air. My fire
would not need replenishing for an hour or so. I felt very weary after my
exertion, and sat down. The wood too, was full of a slumbrous murmur that I did
not understand. I seemed just to nod and open my eyes. But all was dark, and the
Morlocks had their hands upon me. Flinging off their clinging fingers I hastily
felt in my pocket for the match-box, and--it had gone! Then they gripped and
closed with me again. In a moment I knew what had happened. I had slept, and
my fire had gone out, and the bitterness of death came over my soul. The forest
seemed full of the smell of burning wood. I was caught by the neck, by the hair,
by the arms, and pulled down. It was indescribably horrible in the darkness to
55
feel all these soft creatures heaped upon me. I felt as if I was in a monstrous
spider's web. I was overpowered, and went down. I felt little teeth nipping at my
neck. I rolled over, and as I did so my hand came against my iron lever. It gave
me strength. I struggled up, shaking the human rats from me, and holding the bar
short, I thrust where I judged their faces might be. I could feel the succulent
giving of flesh and bone under my blows, and for a moment I was free.
"The strange exultation that so often seems to accompany hard fighting came
upon me. I knew that both I and Weena were lost, but I determined to make the
Morlocks pay for their meat. I stood with my back to a tree, swinging the iron bar
before me. The whole wood was full of the stir and cries of them. A minute
passed. Their voices seemed to rise to a higher pitch of excitement, and their
movements grew faster. Yet none came within reach. I stood glaring at the
blackness. Then suddenly came hope. What if the Morlocks were afraid? And
close on the heels of that came a strange thing. The darkness seemed to grow
luminous. Very dimly I began to see the Morlocks about me--three battered at my
feet--and then I recognized, with incredulous surprise, that the others were
running, in an incessant stream, as it seemed, from behind me, and away through
the wood in front. And their backs seemed no longer white, but reddish. As I
stood agape, I saw a little red spark go drifting across a gap of starlight between
the branches, and vanish. And at that I understood the smell of burning wood, the
slumbrous murmur that was growing now into a gusty roar, the red glow, and the
Morlocks' flight.
"Stepping out from behind my tree and looking back, I saw through the black
pillars of the nearer trees, the flames of the burning forest. It was my first fire
coming after me. With that I looked for Weena, but she was gone. The hissing
and crackling behind me, the explosive thud as each fresh tree burst into flame,
left little time for reflection. My iron bar still gripped, I followed in the Morlocks'
path. It was a close race. Once the flames crept forward so swiftly on my right as
I ran that I was outflanked and had to strike off to the left. But at last I emerged
upon a small open space, and as I did so, a Morlock came blundering towards
me, and past me, and went on straight into the fire!
"And now I was to see the most weird and horrible thing, I think, of all that I
beheld in that future age. This whole space was as bright as day with the
reflection of the fire. In the centre was a hillock or tumulus, surmounted by a
scorched hawthorn. Beyond this was another arm of the burning forest, with
yellow tongues already writhing from it, completely encircling the space with a
fence of fire. Upon the hillside were some thirty or forty Morlocks, dazzled by
the light and heat, and blundering hither and thither against each other in their
bewilderment. At first I did not realize their blindness, and struck furiously at
56
them with my bar, in a frenzy of fear, as they approached me, killing one and
crippling several more. But when I had watched the gestures of one of them
groping under the hawthorn against the red sky, and heard their moans, I was
assured of their absolute helplessness and misery in the glare, and I struck no
more of them.
"Yet every now and then one would come straight towards me, setting loose a
quivering horror that made me quick to elude him. At one time the flames died
down somewhat, and I feared the foul creatures would presently be able to see
me. I was thinking of beginning the fight by killing some of them before this
should happen; but the fire burst out again brightly, and I stayed my hand. I
walked about the hill among them and avoided them, looking for some trace of
Weena. But Weena was gone.
"At last I sat down on the summit of the hillock, and watched this strange
incredible company of blind things groping to and fro, and making uncanny
noises to each other, as the glare of the fire beat on them. The coiling uprush of
smoke streamed across the sky, and through the rare tatters of that red canopy,
remote as though they belonged to another universe, shone the little stars. Two or
three Morlocks came blundering into me, and I drove them off with blows of my
fists, trembling as I did so.
"For the most part of that night I was persuaded it was a nightmare. I bit myself
and screamed in a passionate desire to awake. I beat the ground with my hands,
and got up and sat down again, and wandered here and there, and again sat down.
Then I would fall to rubbing my eyes and calling upon God to let me awake.
Thrice I saw Morlocks put their heads down in a kind of agony and rush into the
flames. But at last, above the subsiding red of the fire, above the streaming
masses of black smoke and the whitening and blackening tree stumps, and the
diminishing numbers of these dim creatures, came the white light of the day.
"I searched again for traces of Weena, but there were none. It was plain that they
had left her poor little body in the forest. I cannot describe how it relieved me to
think that it had escaped the awful fate to which it seemed destined. As I thought
of that, I was almost moved to begin a massacre of the helpless abominations
about me, but I contained myself. The hillock, as I have said, was a kind of island
in the forest. From its summit I could now make out through a haze of smoke the
Palace of Green Porcelain, and from that I could get my bearings for the White
Sphinx. And so, leaving the remnant of these damned souls still going hither and
thither and moaning, as the day grew clearer, I tied some grass about my feet and
limped on across smoking ashes and among black stems, that still pulsated
internally with fire, towards the hiding-place of the Time Machine. I walked
57
slowly, for I was almost exhausted, as well as lame, and I felt the intensest
wretchedness for the horrible death of little Weena. It seemed an overwhelming
calamity. Now in this old familiar room, it is more like the sorrow of a dream
than an actual loss. But that morning it left me absolutely lonely again--terribly
alone. I began to think of this house of mine, of this fireside, of some of you, and
with such thoughts came a longing that was pain.
"But as I walked over the smoking ashes under the bright morning sky, I made a
discovery. In my trouser pocket were still some loose matches. The box must
have leaked before it was lost."
10.
"About eight or nine in the morning I came to the same seat of yellow metal from
which I had viewed the world upon the evening of my arrival. I thought of my
hasty conclusions upon that evening and could not refrain from laughing bitterly
at my confidence. Here was the same beautiful scene, the same abundant foliage,
the same splendid palaces and magnificent ruins, the same silver river running
between its fertile banks. The gay robes of the beautiful people moved hither and
thither among the trees. Some were bathing in exactly the place where I had
saved Weena, and that suddenly gave me a keen stab of pain. And like blots upon
the landscape rose the cupolas above the ways to the Under World. I understood
now what all the beauty of the Overworld people covered. Very pleasant was
their day, as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the field. Like the cattle, they
knew of no enemies and provided against no needs. And their end was the same.
"I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had
committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a
balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained
its hopes--to come to this at last. Once life and property must have reached
almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the
toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been
no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had
followed.
"It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation
for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its
environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until
habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change
and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to
meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.
58
"So, as I see it, the Upper-World man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness,
and the Under-World to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect state had
lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection--absolute permanency.
Apparently as time went on, the feeding of the UnderWorld, however it was
effected, had become disjointed. Mother Necessity, who had been staved off for a
few thousand years, came back again, and she began below. The Under-World
being in contact with machinery, which however perfect, still needs some little
thought outside habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if
less of every other human character, than the Upper. And when other meat failed
them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden. So I say I saw it in my
last view of the world of Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and
One. It may be as wrong an explanation as mortal wit could invent. It is how the
thing shaped itself to me, and as that I give it to you.
"After the fatigues, excitements, and terrors of the past days, and in spite of my
grief, this seat and the tranquil view and the warm sunlight were very pleasant. I
was very tired and sleepy, and soon my theorizing passed into dozing. Catching
myself at that, I took my own hint, and spreading myself out upon the turf I had a
long and refreshing sleep.
"I awoke a little before sunsetting. I now felt safe against being caught napping
by the Morlocks, and stretching myself, I came on down the hill towards the
White Sphinx. I had my crowbar in one hand, and the other hand played with the
matches in my pocket.
"And now came a most unexpected thing. As I approached the pedestal of the
sphinx I found the bronze valves were open. They had slid down into grooves.
"At that I stopped short before them, hesitating to enter.
"Within was a small apartment, and on a raised place in the corner of this was the
Time Machine. I had the small levers in my pocket. So here, after all my
elaborate preparations for the siege of the White Sphinx, was a meek surrender. I
threw my iron bar away, almost sorry not to use it.
"A sudden thought came into my head as I stooped towards the portal. For once,
at least, I grasped the mental operations of the Morlocks. Suppressing a strong
inclination to laugh, I stepped through the bronze frame and up to the Time
Machine. I was surprised to find it had been carefully oiled and cleaned. I have
suspected since that the Morlocks had even partially taken it to pieces while
trying in their dim way to grasp its purpose.
59
"Now as I stood and examined it, finding a pleasure in the mere touch of the
contrivance, the thing I had expected happened. The bronze panels suddenly slid
up and struck the frame with a clang. I was in the dark--trapped. So the Morlocks
thought. At that I chuckled gleefully.
"I could already hear their murmuring laughter as they came towards me. Very
calmly I tried to strike the match. I had only to fix on the levers and depart then
like a ghost. But I had overlooked one little thing. The matches were of that
abominable kind that light only on the box.
"You may imagine how all my calm vanished. The little brutes were close upon
me. One touched me. I made a sweeping blow in the dark at them with the levers,
and began to scramble into the saddle of the machine. Then came one hand upon
me and then another. Then I had simply to fight against their persistent fingers
for my levers, and at the same time feel for the studs over which these fitted.
Once indeed, they almost got away from me. As it slipped from my hand, I had
to butt in the dark with my head--I could hear the Morlock's skull ring--to recover
it. It was a nearer thing than the fight in the forest, I think, this last scramble.
"But at last the lever was fitted and pulled over. The clinging hands slipped from
me. The darkness presently fell from my eyes. I found myself in the same grey
light and tumult I have already described."
11.
"I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time
travelling. And this time I was not seated properly in the saddle, but sideways
and in an unstable fashion. For an indefinite time I clung to the machine as it
swayed and vibrated, quite unheeding how I went, and when I brought myself to
look at the dials again I was amazed to find where I had arrived. One dial records
days, and another thousands of days, another millions of days, and another
thousands of millions. Now, instead of reversing the levers, I had pulled them
over so as to go forward with them, and when I came to look at these indicators I
found that the thousands hand was sweeping round as fast as the seconds hand of
a watch--into futurity.
"As I drove on, a peculiar change crept over the appearance of things. The
palpitating greyness grew darker; then--though I was still travelling with
prodigious velocity--the blinking succession of day and night, which was usually
indicative of a slower pace, returned, and grew more and more marked. This
puzzled me very much at first. The alternations of night and day grew slower and
slower, and so did the passage of the sun across the sky, until they seemed to
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stretch through centuries. At last a steady twilight brooded over the earth, a
twilight only broken now and then when a comet glared across the darkling sky.
The band of light that had indicated the sun had long since disappeared; for the
sun had ceased to set--it simply rose and fell in the west, and grew ever broader
and more red. All trace of the moon had vanished. The circling of the stars,
growing slower and slower, had given place to creeping points of light. At last,
some time before I stopped, the sun, red and very large, halted motionless upon
the horizon, a vast dome glowing with a dull heat, and now and then suffering a
momentary extinction. At one time it had for a little while glowed more
brilliantly again, but it speedily reverted to its sullen red heat. I perceived by this
slowing down of its rising and setting that the work of the tidal drag was done.
The earth had come to rest with one face to the sun, even as in our own time the
moon faces the earth. Very cautiously, for I remembered my former headlong
fall, I began to reverse my motion. Slower and slower went the circling hands
until the thousands one seemed motionless and the daily one was no longer a
mere mist upon its scale. Still slower, until the dim outlines of a desolate beach
grew visible. I stopped very gently and sat upon the Time Machine, looking
round. The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of
the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a
deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing
scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and
motionless. The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour, and all the trace
of life that I could see at first was the intensely green vegetation that covered
every projecting point on their south-eastern face. It was the same rich green that
one sees on forest moss or on the lichen in caves: plants which like these grow in
a perpetual twilight.
"The machine was standing on a sloping beach. The sea stretched away to the
south-west, to rise into a sharp bright horizon against the wan sky. There were no
breakers and no waves, for not a breath of wind was stirring. Only a slight oily
swell rose and fell like a gentle breathing, and showed that the eternal sea was
still moving and living. And along the margin where the water sometimes broke
was a thick incrustation of salt--pink under the lurid sky. There was a sense of
oppression in my head, and I noticed that I was breathing very fast. The sensation
reminded me of my only experience of mountaineering, and from that I judged
the air to be more rarefied than it is now.
"Far away up the desolate slope I heard a harsh scream, and saw a thing like a
huge white butterfly go slanting and fluttering up into the sky and, circling,
disappear over some low hillocks beyond. The sound of its voice was so dismal
that I shivered and seated myself more firmly upon the machine. Looking round
me again, I saw that, quite near, what I had taken to be a reddish mass of rock
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was moving slowly towards me. Then I saw the thing was really a monstrous
crab-like creature. Can you imagine a crab as large as yonder table, with its many
legs moving slowly and uncertainly, its big claws swaying, its long antennae, like
carters' whips, waving and feeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming at you on either
side of its metallic front? Its back was corrugated and ornamented with ungainly
bosses, and a greenish incrustation blotched it here and there. I could see the
many palps of its complicated mouth flickering and feeling as it moved.
"As I stared at this sinister apparition crawling towards me, I felt a tickling on my
cheek as though a fly had lighted there. I tried to brush it away with my hand, but
in a moment it returned, and almost immediately came another by my ear. I
struck at this, and caught something threadlike. It was drawn swiftly out of my
hand. With a frightful qualm, I turned, and I saw that I had grasped the antenna
of another monster crab that stood just behind me. Its evil eyes were wriggling on
their stalks, its mouth was all alive with appetite, and its vast ungainly claws,
smeared with an algal slime, were descending upon me. In a moment my hand
was on the lever, and I had placed a month between myself and these monsters.
But I was still on the same beach, and I saw them distinctly now as soon as I
stopped. Dozens of them seemed to be crawling here and there, in the sombre
light, among the foliated sheets of intense green.
"I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the world.
The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea, the stony beach
crawling with these foul, slow-stirring monsters, the uniform poisonous-looking
green of the lichenous plants, the thin air that hurts one's lungs: all contributed to
an appalling effect. I moved on a hundred years, and there was the same red sun-a little larger, a little duller--the same dying sea, the same chill air, and the same
crowd of earthy crustacea creeping in and out among the green weed and the red
rocks. And in the westward sky, I saw a curved pale line like a vast new moon.
"So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand years or
more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth's fate, watching with a strange
fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the
old earth ebb away. At last, more than thirty million years hence, the huge redhot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling
heavens. Then I stopped once more, for the crawling multitude of crabs had
disappeared, and the red beach, save for its livid green liverworts and lichens,
seemed lifeless. And now it was flecked with white. A bitter cold assailed me.
Rare white flakes ever and again came eddying down. To the north-eastward, the
glare of snow lay under the starlight of the sable sky and I could see an
undulating crest of hillocks pinkish white. There were fringes of ice along the sea
62
margin, with drifting masses further out; but the main expanse of that salt ocean,
all bloody under the eternal sunset, was still unfrozen.
"I looked about me to see if any traces of animal life remained. A certain
indefinable apprehension still kept me in the saddle of the machine. But I saw
nothing moving, in earth or sky or sea. The green slime on the rocks alone
testified that life was not extinct. A shallow sand-bank had appeared in the sea
and the water had receded from the beach. I fancied I saw some black object
flopping about upon this bank, but it became motionless as I looked at it, and I
judged that my eye had been deceived, and that the black object was merely a
rock. The stars in the sky were intensely bright and seemed to me to twinkle very
little.
"Suddenly I noticed that the circular westward outline of the sun had changed;
that a concavity, a bay, had appeared in the curve. I saw this grow larger. For a
minute perhaps I stared aghast at this blackness that was creeping over the day,
and then I realized that an eclipse was beginning. Either the moon or the planet
Mercury was passing across the sun's disk. Naturally, at first I took it to be the
moon, but there is much to incline me to believe that what I really saw was the
transit of an inner planet passing very near to the earth.
"The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from
the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the
edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the
world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the
sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the
stir that makes the background of our lives--all that was over. As the darkness
thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and
the cold of the air more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other,
the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a
moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards
me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless
obscurity. The sky was absolutely black."
"A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote to my marrow,
and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and a deadly nausea
seized me. Then like a red-hot bow in the sky appeared the edge of the sun. I got
off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy and incapable of facing the return
journey. As I stood sick and confused I saw again the moving thing upon the
shoal--there was no mistake now that it was a moving thing--against the red
water of the sea. It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be,
bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering
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blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about. Then I felt I was fainting. But
a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight sustained me
while I clambered upon the saddle."
12.
"So I came back. For a long time I must have been insensible upon the machine.
The blinking succession of the days and nights was resumed, the sun got golden
again, the sky blue. I breathed with greater freedom. The fluctuating contours of
the land ebbed and flowed. The hands spun backward upon the dials. At last I
saw again the dim shadows of houses, the evidences of decadent humanity. These
too, changed and passed, and others came. Presently, when the million dial was
at zero, I slackened speed. I began to recognize our own petty and familiar
architecture, the thousands hand ran back to the starting-point, the night and day
flapped slower and slower. Then the old walls of the laboratory came round me.
Very gently, now, I slowed the mechanism down.
"I saw one little thing that seemed odd to me. I think I have told you that when I
set out, before my velocity became very high, Mrs. Watchett had walked across
the room, travelling, as it seemed to me, like a rocket. As I returned, I passed
again across that minute when she traversed the laboratory. But now her every
motion appeared to be the exact inversion of her previous ones. The door at the
lower end opened, and she glided quietly up the laboratory, back foremost, and
disappeared behind the door by which she had previously entered. Just before
that I seemed to see Hillyer for a moment; but he passed like a flash.
"Then I stopped the machine, and saw about me again the old familiar laboratory,
my tools, my appliances just as I had left them. I got off the thing very shaky, and
sat down upon my bench. For several minutes I trembled violently. Then I
became calmer. Around me was my old workshop again, exactly as it had been. I
might have slept there, and the whole thing have been a dream.
"And yet, not exactly! The thing had started from the south-east corner of the
laboratory. It had come to rest again in the north-west, against the wall where you
saw it. That gives you the exact distance from my little lawn to the pedestal of
the White Sphinx, into which the Morlocks had carried my machine.
"For a time my brain went stagnant. Presently I got up and came through the
passage here, limping, because my heel was still painful, and feeling sorely
begrimed. I saw the 'Pall Mall Gazette' on the table by the door. I found the date
was indeed to-day, and looking at the timepiece, saw the hour was almost eight
o'clock. I heard your voices and the clatter of plates. I hesitated--I felt so sick and
64
weak. Then I sniffed good wholesome meat, and opened the door on you. You
know the rest. I washed, and dined, and now I am telling you the story.
"I know," he said, after a pause, "that all this will be absolutely incredible to you.
To me the one incredible thing is that I am here to-night in this old familiar room
looking into your friendly faces and telling you these strange adventures."
He looked at the Medical Man. "No, I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a
lie--or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been
speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat
my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking
it as a story, what do you think of it?"
He took up his pipe, and began, in his old accustomed manner, to tap with it
nervously upon the bars of the grate. There was a momentary stillness. Then
chairs began to creak and shoes to scrape upon the carpet. I took my eyes off the
Time Traveller's face, and looked round at his audience. They were in the dark,
and little spots of colour swam before them. The Medical Man seemed absorbed
in the contemplation of our host. The Editor was looking hard at the end of his
cigar--the sixth. The Journalist fumbled for his watch. The others, as far as I
remember, were motionless.
The Editor stood up with a sigh. "What a pity it is you're not a writer of stories!"
he said, putting his hand on the Time Traveller's shoulder.
"You don't believe it?"
"Well--"
"I thought not."
The Time Traveller turned to us. "Where are the matches?" he said. He lit one
and spoke over his pipe, puffing. "To tell you the truth...I hardly believe it
myself...And yet..."
His eye fell with a mute inquiry upon the withered white flowers upon the little
table. Then he turned over the hand holding his pipe, and I saw he was looking at
some half-healed scars on his knuckles.
The Medical Man rose, came to the lamp, and examined the flowers. "The
gynaeceum's odd," he said. The Psychologist leant forward to see, holding out his
hand for a specimen.
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"I'm hanged if it isn't a quarter to one," said the Journalist. "How shall we get
home?"
"Plenty of cabs at the station," said the Psychologist.
"It's a curious thing," said the Medical Man; "but I certainly don't know the
natural order of these flowers. May I have them?"
The Time Traveller hesitated. Then suddenly: "Certainly not."
"Where did you really get them?" said the Medical Man.
The Time Traveller put his hand to his head. He spoke like one who was trying to
keep hold of an idea that eluded him. "They were put into my pocket by Weena,
when I travelled into Time." He stared round the room. "I'm damned if it isn't all
going. This room and you and the atmosphere of every day is too much for my
memory. Did I ever make a Time Machine, or a model of a Time Machine? Or is
it all only a dream? They say life is a dream, a precious poor dream at times--but
I can't stand another that won't fit. It's madness. And where did the dream come
from...? I must look at that machine. If there is one!"
He caught up the lamp swiftly, and carried it, flaring red, through the door into
the corridor. We followed him. There in the flickering light of the lamp was the
machine sure enough, squat, ugly, and askew; a thing of brass, ebony, ivory, and
translucent glimmering quartz. Solid to the touch--for I put out my hand and felt
the rail of it--and with brown spots and smears upon the ivory, and bits of grass
and moss upon the lower parts, and one rail bent awry.
The Time Traveller put the lamp down on the bench, and ran his hand along the
damaged rail. "It's all right now," he said. "The story I told you was true. I'm
sorry to have brought you out here in the cold." He took up the lamp, and in an
absolute silence, we returned to the smoking-room.
He came into the hall with us and helped the Editor on with his coat. The
Medical Man looked into his face and, with a certain hesitation, told him he was
suffering from overwork, at which he laughed hugely. I remember him standing
in the open doorway, bawling good-night.
I shared a cab with the Editor. He thought the tale a "gaudy lie." For my own part
I was unable to come to a conclusion. The story was so fantastic and incredible,
the telling so credible and sober. I lay awake most of the night thinking about it. I
determined to go next day and see the Time Traveller again. I was told he was in
66
the laboratory, and being on easy terms in the house, I went up to him. The
laboratory, however was empty. I stared for a minute at the Time Machine and
put out my hand and touched the lever. At that the squat substantial-looking mass
swayed like a bough shaken by the wind. Its instability startled me extremely,
and I had a queer reminiscence of the childish days when I used to be forbidden
to meddle. I came back through the corridor. The Time Traveller met me in the
smoking-room. He was coming from the house. He had a small camera under one
arm and a knapsack under the other. He laughed when he saw me, and gave me
an elbow to shake. "I'm frightfully busy," said he, "with that thing in there."
"But is it not some hoax?" I said. "Do you really travel through time?"
"Really and truly I do." And he looked frankly into my eyes. He hesitated. His
eye wandered about the room. "I only want half an hour," he said. "I know why
you came, and it's awfully good of you. There's some magazines here. If you'll
stop to lunch I'll prove you this time travelling up to the hilt, specimen and all. If
you'll forgive my leaving you now?"
I consented, hardly comprehending then the full import of his words, and he
nodded and went on down the corridor. I heard the door of the laboratory slam,
seated myself in a chair, and took up a daily paper. What was he going to do
before lunchtime? Then suddenly I was reminded by an advertisement that I had
promised to meet Richardson, the publisher, at two. I looked at my watch, and
saw that I could barely save that engagement. I got up and went down the
passage to tell the Time Traveller.
As I took hold of the handle of the door I heard an exclamation, oddly truncated
at the end, and a click and a thud. A gust of air whirled round me as I opened the
door, and from within came the sound of broken glass falling on the floor. The
Time Traveller was not there. I seemed to see a ghostly, indistinct figure sitting
in a whirling mass of black and brass for a moment--a figure so transparent that
the bench behind with its sheets of drawings was absolutely distinct; but this
phantasm vanished as I rubbed my eyes. The Time Machine had gone. Save for a
subsiding stir of dust, the further end of the laboratory was empty. A pane of the
skylight had, apparently, just been blown in.
I felt an unreasonable amazement. I knew that something strange had happened,
and for the moment could not distinguish what the strange thing might be. As I
stood staring, the door into the garden opened, and the man-servant appeared.
We looked at each other. Then ideas began to come. "Has Mr. ---- gone out that
way?" said I.
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"No, sir. No one has come out this way. I was expecting to find him here."
At that I understood. At the risk of disappointing Richardson I stayed on, waiting
for the Time Traveller; waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger story, and
the specimens and photographs he would bring with him. But I am beginning
now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveller vanished three years
ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.
Epilogue One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he
swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the
Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the
grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times. He may even
now--if I may use the phrase--be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted
Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age. Or did he
go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but with the
riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems solved? Into the
manhood of the race: for I, for my own part cannot think that these latter days of
weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man's
culminating time! I say, for my own part. He, I know--for the question had been
discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made--thought but
cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of
civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy
its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not
so. But to me the future is still black and blank--is a vast ignorance, lit at a few
casual places by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two
strange white flowers--shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle--to witness
that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness
still lived on in the heart of man.
THE EMPIRE OF THE ANTS
1.
When Captain Gerilleau received instructions to take his new gunboat, the
Benjamin Constant, to Badama on the Batemo arm of the Guaramadema and
there assist the inhabitants against a plague of ants, he suspected the authorities
of mockery. His promotion had been romantic and irregular, the affections of a
prominent Brazilian lady and the captain's liquid eyes had played a part in the
process, and the Diario and O Futuro had been lamentably disrespectful in their
comments. He felt he was to give further occasion for disrespect.
68
He was a Creole, his conceptions of etiquette and discipline were pure-blooded
Portuguese, and it was only to Holroyd, the Lancashire engineer, who had come
over with the boat, and as an exercise in the use of English--his "th" sounds were
very uncertain--that he opened his heart.
"It is in effect," he said, "to make me absurd! What can a man do against ants?
Dey come, dey go."
"They say," said Holroyd, "that these don't go. That chap you said was a Sambo-"
"Zambo--it is a sort of mixture of blood."
"Sambo. He said the people are going!"
The captain smoked fretfully for a time. "Dese things 'ave to happen," he said at
last. "What is it? Plagues of ants and suchlike as God wills. Dere was a plague in
Trinidad--the like ants that carry leaves. Orl der oranges-trees, all der mangoes!
What does it matter? Sometimes ant armies come into your houses--fighting ants;
a different sort. You go and they clean the house. Then you come back again;-the house is clean, like new! No cockroaches, no fleas, no jiggers in the floor."
"That Sambo chap," said Holroyd, "says these are a different sort of ant."
The captain shrugged his shoulders, fumed, and gave his attention to a cigarette.
Afterwards he reopened the subject. "My dear 'Olroyd, what am I to do about des
infernal ants?"
The captain reflected. "It is ridiculous," he said. But in the afternoon he put on
his full uniform and went ashore, and jars and boxes came back to the ship and
subsequently he did. And Holroyd sat on deck in evening coolness and smoked
profoundly and marvelled at Brazil. They were six days up the Amazon, some
hundreds of miles from the ocean, and east and west of him there was horizon
like the sea, and to the south nothing but a sand-bank island with some tufts of
scrub. The water was always running like a sluice, thick with dirt, animated with
crocodiles and hovering birds, and fed by some inexhaustible source of tree
trunks; and the waste of it, the headlong waste of it, filled his soul. The town of
Alemquer, with its meagre church, its thatched sheds for houses, its discoloured
ruins of ampler days, seemed a little thing lost in this wilderness of Nature, a
sixpence dropped on Sahara. He was a young man, this was his first site of the
tropics, he came straight from England, where Nature is hedged, ditched, and
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drained into the perfection of submission, and he had suddenly discovered the
insignificance of man. For six days they had been steaming up the sea by
unfrequented channels, and man had been as rare as a rare butterfly. One saw one
day a canoe, another day a distant station, the next no men at all. He began to
perceive that man is indeed a rare animal, having but a precarious hold upon this
land.
He perceived it more clearly as the days passed, and he made his devious way to
the Batemo, in the company of this remarkable commander, who ruled over one
big gun, and was forbidden to waste his ammunition. Holroyd was learning
Spanish industriously, but he was still in the present tense and substantive stage
of speech, and the only other person who had any words of English was a negro
stoker, who had them all wrong. The second in command was a Portuguese, da
Cunha, who spoke French, but it was a different sort of French from the French
Holroyd had learned in Southport, and their intercourse was confined to
politenesses and simple propositions about weather. And the weather, like
everything else in this amazing new world, the weather had no human aspect, and
was hot by night and hot by day, and the air steam, even the wind was hot steam,
smelling of vegetation in decay: and the alligators and the strange birds, the flies
of many sorts and sizes, the beetles, the ants, the snakes and monkeys seemed to
wonder what man was doing in an atmosphere that had no gladness in its
sunshine and no coolness in its night. To wear clothing was intolerable, but to
cast it aside was to scorch by day, and expose an ampler area to the mosquitoes
by night; to go on deck by day was to be blinded by glare and to stay below was
to suffocate. And in the daytime came certain flies, extremely clever and noxious
about one's wrist and ankle. Captain Gerilleau, who was Holroyd's sole
distraction from these physical distresses, developed into a formidable bore,
telling the simple story of his heart's affections day by day, a string of
anonymous women, as if he was telling beads. Sometimes he suggested sport,
and they shot at alligators, and at rare intervals they came to human aggregations
in the waste of trees, and stayed for a day or so, and drank and sat about; and one
night, danced with Creole girls, who found Holroyd's poor elements of Spanish,
without either past tense or future, amply sufficient for their purposes. But these
were mere luminous chinks in the long grey passage of the streaming river, up
which the throbbing engines beat. A certain liberal heathen deity, in the shape of
demi-john, held seductive court aft, and it is probable, forward.
But Gerilleau learned things about the ants, more things and more, at this
stopping-place and that, and became interested in his mission.
70
"Dey are a new sort of ant," he said. "We have got to be--what do you call it--?
Entomologie? Big. Five centimetres! Some bigger! It is ridiculous. We are like
monkeys--sent to pick insects...But dey are eating up the country."
He burst out indignantly. "Suppose--suddenly, there are complications with
Europe. Here am I--soon we shall be above the Rio Negro--and my gun, useless!"
He nursed his knee and mused.
"Dose people who were dere at de dancing place, dey 'ave come down. Dey 'ave
lost all they got. De ants come to deir house one afternoon. Everyone run out.
You know when de ants come one must--every one runs out and they go over the
house. If you stayed they'd eat you. See? Well, presently dey go back; dey say,
'The ants 'ave gone...' De ants 'aven't gone. Dey try to go in--de son, 'e gose in.
De ants fight."
"Swarm over him?"
"Bite 'im. Presently he comes out again--screaming and running. He runs past
them to river. See? He get into de water and drowns de ants--yes." Gerilleau
paused, brought his liquid eyes close to Holroyd's face, tapped Holroyd's knee
with his knuckle. "That night he dies, just as if he was stung by snake."
"Poisoned--by the ants?"
"Who knows?" Gerilleau shrugged his shoulders. "Perhaps they bit him
badly...When I joined dis service I joined to fight men. Dese things, dese ants,
dey come and go. It is no business for men."
After that he talked frequently of ants to Holroyd, and whenever they chanced to
drift against any speck of humanity in that waste of water and sunshine and
distant trees, Holroyd's improving knowledge of the language enabled him to
recognise the ascendant word Sauba, more and more completely dominating the
whole.
He perceived the ants were becoming interesting, and the nearer he drew to them
the more interesting they became. Gerilleau abandoned his old themes almost
suddenly, and the Portuguese lieutenant became a conversational figure; he knew
something about the leaf-cutting ant, and expanded his knowledge. Gerilleau
sometimes rendered what he had to tell to Holroyd. He told of the little workers
that swarm and fight, and the big workers that command and rule, and how these
latter always crawled to the neck and how their bites drew blood. He told how
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they cut leaves and made fungus beds, and how their nests in Caracas are
sometimes a hundred yards across. Two days the three men spent disputing
whether ants have eyes. The discussion grew dangerously heated on the second
afternoon, and Holroyd saved the situation by going ashore in a boat to catch ants
and see. He captured various specimens and returned and some had eyes and
some hadn't. Also, they argued, do ants bite or sting?
"Dese ants," said Gerilleau, after collecting information at a rancho, "have big
eyes. They don't run about blind--not as most ants do. No! Dey get in corners and
watch what you do."
"And they sting?" asked Holroyd.
"Yes. Dey sting. Dere is poison in the sting." He meditated. "I do not see what
men can do against ants. Dey come and go."
"But these don't go."
"They will," said Gerilleau.
Past Tamandu there is a long low coast of eighty miles without any population,
and then ones comes to the confluence of the main river and the Batemo arm, like
a great lake, and then the forest came nearer, came at last intimately near. The
character of the channel changes, snags abound, and the Benjamin Constant
moored by a cable that night, under the very shadow of dark trees. For the first
time for many days came a spell of coolness, and Holroyd and Gerilleau sat late,
smoking cigars and enjoying this delicious sensation. Gerilleau's mind was full of
ants and what they could do. He decided to sleep at last, and lay down on a
mattress on deck, a man hopelessly perplexed; his last words, when he already
seemed asleep, were to ask, with a flourish of despair: "What can one do with
ants...? De whole thing is absurd."
Holroyd was left to scratch his bitten wrists, and meditate alone.
He sat on the bulwark and listened to changes in Gerilleau's breathing until he
was fast asleep, and then the ripple and lap of stream took his mind, and brought
back that sense of immensity that had been growing upon him since first he had
left Para and come up the river. The monitor showed but one small light, and
there was first a little talking forward and then stillness. His eyes went from the
dim black outlines of the middle works of the gunboat towards the bank, to the
black overwhelming mysteries of forest, lit now and then by a fire-fly, and never
still from the murmur of alien and mysterious activities...
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It was the inhuman immensity of this land that astonished and oppressed him. He
knew the skies were empty of men, the stars were specks in an incredible
vastness of space; he knew the ocean was enormous and untamable, but in
England he had come to think of the land as man's. In England it is indeed man's,
the wild things live by sufferance, grow on lease, everywhere the roads, the
fences, and absolute security runs. In an atlas, too, the land is man's, and all
coloured to show his claim to it--in vivid contrast to the universal independent
blueness of the sea. He had taken it for granted that a day would come when
everywhere about the earth, plough and culture, light tramways, and good roads,
an ordered security, would prevail. But now he doubted.
This forest was interminable, it had an air of being invincible, and Man seemed at
best an infrequent precarious intruder. One travelled for miles amidst the still
silent struggle of giant trees, of strangulating creepers, of assertive flowers,
everywhere the alligator, the turtle, and endless varieties of bird and insects
seemed at home, dwelt irreplaceable--but man, man at most held a footing upon
resentful clearings, fought weeds, fought beasts and insects for the barest
foothold, fell a prey to snake and beast, insects and fever, and was presently
carried away. In many places down the river he had been manifestly driven back,
this deserted creek or that preserved the name of a casa, and here and there
ruinous white walls and shattered towers enforced the lesson. The puma, the
jaguar, were more the masters here...
Who are the real masters?
In a few miles of this forest there must be more ants than there are men in the
world! This seemed to Holroyd a perfectly new idea. In a few thousand years
men had emerged from barbarism to a stage of civilisation that made them feel
lords of the future and masters of earth! But what was to prevent ants evolving
also? Such ants as one knew lived in little communities of a few thousand
individuals, made no concerted efforts against the greater world. But they had a
language, they had an intelligence! Why should things stop at that any more then
men had stopped at the barbaric stage? Suppose presently the ants began to store
knowledge, just as men had done by means of books and records, use weapons,
form great empires, sustain a planned and organised war?
Things came back to him that Gerilleau had gathered about these ants they were
approaching. They used a poison like the poison of snakes. They obeyed greater
leaders even as the leaf-cutting ants do. They were carnivorous, and where they
came they stayed...
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The forest was very still. The water lapped incessantly against the side. About the
lantern overhead there eddied a noiseless whirl of phantom moths.
Gerilleau stirred in the darkness and sighed. "What can one do?" he murmured,
and turned over and was still again.
Holroyd was roused from meditations that were becoming sinister by the hum of
a mosquito.
2.
The next morning Holroyd learned they were within forty kilometers of Badama,
and his interest in the banks intensified. He came up whenever an opportunity
offered to examine his surroundings. He could see no signs of human occupation
whatever, save for a weedy ruin of a house and green-stained facade of the longdeserted monastery at Moju, with a forest tree growing out of a vacant window
space, and great creepers netted across its vacant portals. Several flights of
strange yellow butterflies with semi-transparent wings crossed the river that
morning, and many alighted on the monitor and were killed by men. It was
towards afternoon that they came upon the derelict cuberta.
She did not at first appear to be derelict; both her sails were set and hanging slack
in the afternoon calm, and there was the figure of a man sitting on the fore
planking beside the shipped sweeps. Another man appeared to be sleeping face
downwards on the sort of longitudinal bridge, these big canoes have in the waist.
But it was presently apparent, from the sway of her rudder and the way she
drifted into the course of the gunboat, that something was out of order with her.
Gerilleau surveyed her through a field-glass, and became interested in queer
darkness of the face of the sitting man, a red-faced man he seemed, without a
nose--crouching he was rather than sitting, and the longer the captain looked the
less he liked to look at him, and the less able he was to take his glasses away.
But he did so at last, and went a little way to call up Holroyd. Then he went back
to hail the cuberta. He hailed her again, and so she drove past him. Santa Rosa
stood out clearly as her name.
As she came by and into the wake of the monitor, she pitched a little, and
suddenly the figure of the crouching man collapsed as though all it's joints had
given way. His hat fell off, his head was not nice to look at, and his body flopped
lax and rolled out of sight behind the bulwarks.
"Caramba!" cried Gerilleau, and resorted to Holroyd forthwith.
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Holroyd was halfway up the companion. "Did you see dat?" said the captain.
"Dead!" said Holroyd. "Yes. You'd better send a boat aboard. There's something
wrong."
"Did you--by any chance--see his face?"
"What was it like?"
"It was--ugh--! I have no words." And the captain suddenly turned his back on
Holroyd and became a active and strident commander.
The gunboat came about, steamed parallel to the erratic course of the canoe, and
dropped the boat with Lieutenant da Cunha and three sailors to board her. Then
the curiosity of the captain made him draw up almost alongside as the lieutenant
got aboard, so that the whole of the Santa Rosa deck and hold, was visible to
Holroyd.
He saw now clearly that the sole crew of the vessel was these two dead men, and
though he could not see their faces, he saw by their outstretched hands, which
were all of ragged flesh, that they had been subjected to some strange exceptional
process of decay. For a moment his attention, concentrated on these two
enigmatical bundles of dirty cloths and laxly flung limbs, and then his eyes went
forward to discover the open hold piled high with trunks and cases, and aft, to
where the little cabin gaped inexplicably empty. Then he became aware that the
planks of the middle decking were dotted with moving black specks.
His attention was riveted by these specks. They were all walking in directions
radiating from the fallen man in a manner--the image came unsought to his mind-like the crowd dispersing from a bull-fight.
He became aware of Gerilleau beside him. "Capo," he said, "have you your
glasses? Can you focus as closely as those planks there?"
Gerilleau made an effort, grunted, and handed him the glasses.
There followed a moment of scrutiny. "It's ants," said the Englishman, and
handed the focused field-glasses back to Gerilleau.
His impression of them was of a crowd of large black ants, very like ordinary
ants except for size, and for the fact some of the larger of them bore a sort of
clothing of grey. But at the time his inspection was too brief for particulars. The
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head of Lieutenant da Cunha appeared over the side of the cuberta, and a brief
colloquy ensued.
"You must go aboard," said Gerilleau.
The lieutenant objected that the boat was full of ants.
"You have your boots," said Gerilleau.
The lieutenant changed the subject. "How did these men die?" he asked.
Captain Gerilleau embarked upon speculation that Holroyd could not follow, and
the two men disputed with a certain vehemence. Holroyd took up the field-glass
and resumed his scrutiny, first of ants and then of the dead man amidships.
He has described these ants to me very particularly.
He says they were as large as any ants he has ever seen, black and moving with a
steady deliberation very different from the mechanical fussiness of the common
ant. About one in twenty was much larger than it's fellows, and with an
exceptionally large head. These reminded him at once of the master workers who
are said to rule over the leaf-cutter ants; like them they seemed to be directing
and co-ordinating the general movements. They tilted their bodies back in a
manner altogether singular, as if they made some use of the fore feet. And he had
a curious fancy, that he was too far off to verify, that most of these ants of both
kinds were wearing accoutrements, had things strapped about their bodies by
bright white bands like white metal threads...
He put down the glasses abruptly, realising that the question of discipline
between the captain and his subordinate had become acute.
"It is your duty," said the captain, "to go aboard. It is my instructions."
The lieutenant seemed on the verge of refusing. The head of one of the mulatto
sailors appeared beside him.
"I believe these men were killed by ants," said Holroyd abruptly in English.
The captain burst into rage. He made no answer to Holroyd. "I have commanded
you to go aboard," he screamed to his subordinate in Portuguese. "If you do not
go aboard forthwith it is mutiny--rank mutiny. Mutiny and cowardice! Where is
the courage that should animate us? I will have you in irons, I will have you shot
like a dog." He began a torrent of abuse and curses, he danced to and fro. He
76
shook his fists, he behaved as if beside himself with rage, and the lieutenant,
white and still, stood looking at him. The crew appeared forward, with amazed
faces.
Suddenly, in a pause of this outbreak, the lieutenant came to some heroic
decision, saluted, drew himself together and clambered upon the deck of the
cuberta.
"Ah!" said Gerilleau, and his mouth shut like a trap. Holroyd saw the ants
retreating before da Cunha's boots. The Portuguese walked slowly to the fallen
man, stooped down, hesitated, clutched his coat and turned him over. A black
swarm of ants rushed out of the clothes, and da Cunha stepped back very quickly
and trod two or three times on the deck.
Holroyd put up the glasses. He saw the scattered ants about the invader's feet, and
doing what he had never seen ants doing before. They had nothing of the blind
movements of the common ant; they were looking at him--as a rallying crowd of
men might look at some gigantic monster that had dispersed it.
"How did he die?" the captain shouted.
Holroyd understood the Portuguese to say the body was too much eaten to tell.
"What is there forward?" asked Gerilleau.
The lieutenant walked a few paces, and began his answer in Portuguese. He
stopped abruptly and beat off something from his leg. He made some peculiar
steps as if he was trying to stamp on something invisible, and went quickly
towards the side. Then he controlled himself, turned about, walked deliberately
forward to the hold, clambered up to the fore decking, from which the sweeps are
worked, stooped for a time over the second man, groaned audibly, and made his
way back and aft to the cabin; moving very rigidly. He turned and began a
conversation with his captain, cold and respectful in tone on either side,
contrasting vividly with the wrath and insult of a few moments before. Holroyd
gathered only fragments of it's purport.
He reverted to the field-glass, and was surprised to find the ants had vanished
from all exposed surfaces of the deck. He turned towards the shadow beneath the
decking, and it seemed to him they were full of watching eyes.
The cuberta, it was agreed, was derelict, but too full of ants to put men aboard to
sit and sleep: it must be towed. The lieutenant went forward to take in and adjust
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the cable, and the men in the boat stood up to be ready to help him. Holroyd's
glasses searched the canoe.
He became more and more impressed by the fact that a great if minute and
furtive activity was going on. He perceived that a number of gigantic ants--they
seemed nearly a couple of inches in length--carrying oddly-shaped burthens for
which he could imagine no use--were moving in rushes from one point of
obscurity to another. They did not move in columns across the exposed places,
but in open, spaced-out lines, oddly suggestive of the rushes of modern infantry
advancing under fire. A number were taking cover under the dead man's clothes,
and a perfect swarm was gathering along the side over which da Cunha must
presently go.
He did not see them actually rush for the lieutenant as he returned, but he has no
doubt they did make a concerted rush. Suddenly the lieutenant was shouting and
cursing and beating at his legs. "I'm stung!" he shouted, with a face of hate and
accusation towards Gerilleau.
Then he vanished over the side, dropped into his boat, and plunged at once into
the water. Holroyd heard the splash.
The three men in the boat pulled him out and brought him aboard, and that night
he died.
3.
Holroyd and the captain came out of the cabin in which the swollen and
contorted body of the lieutenant lay, and stood together at the stern of the
monitor, staring at the sinister vessel they trailed behind them. It was a close,
dark night that had only phantom flickers of sheet lightning to illuminate it. The
cuberta, a vague black triangle, rocked about in the steamer's wake, her sails
bobbing and flapping, and the black smoke from the funnels, spark-lit ever and
again, streamed over her swaying masts.
Gerilleau's mind was inclined to run on the unkind things the lieutenant had said
in the heat of his last fever.
"He says I murdered 'im," he protested. "It is simply absurd. Someone 'ad to go
aboard. Are we to run away from these confounded ants whenever they show
up?"
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Holroyd said nothing. He was thinking of a disciplined rush of little black shapes
across bare sunlit planking.
"It was his place to go," harped Gerilleau. "He died in the execution of his duty.
What has he to complain of? Murdered...! But the poor fellow was--what is it--?
Demented. He was not in his right mind. The poison swelled him...U'm."
They came to a long silence.
"We will sink that canoe--burn it."
"And then?"
The inquiry irritated Gerilleau. His shoulders went up, his hands flew out at right
angles from his body. "What is one to do?" he said, his voice going up to an
angry squeak.
"Anyhow," he broke out vindictively, "every ant in dat cuberta--! I will burn dem
alive!"
Holroyd was not moved to conversation. A distant ululation of howling monkeys
filled the sultry night with foreboding sounds, and as the gunboat drew near the
black mysterious banks this was reinforced by a depressing clamour of frogs.
"What is one to do?" the captain repeated after a vast interval, and suddenly
becoming active and savage and blasphemous, decided to burn the Santa Rosa
without further delay. Everyone aboard was pleased by that idea, everyone
helped with zest; they pulled in the cable, cut it, and dropped the boat and fired
her with tow and kerosene, and soon the cuberta was crackling and flaring
merrily amidst the immensities of the tropical night. Holroyd watched the
mounting yellow flare against the blackness, and the livid flashes of sheet
lightning that came and went above the forest summits, throwing them into
momentary silhouette, and his stoker stood behind him watching also.
The stoker was stirred to the depths of his linguistics. "Sauba go pop, pop," he
said. "Wahaw!" and laughed richly.
But Holroyd was thinking that these little creatures on the decked canoe had also
eyes and brains.
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The whole thing impressed him as incredibly foolish and wrong, but--what was
one to do? This question came back enormously reinforced on the morrow, when
at last the gunboat reached Badama.
This place, with its leaf-thatch-covered houses and sheds, its creeper-invaded
sugar-mill, its little jetty of timber and canes, was very still in the morning heat,
and showed never a sign of living men. Whatever ants there were at that distance
were too small to see.
"All the people have gone," said Gerilleau, "but we will do one thing anyhow.
We will 'oot and vissel."
So Holroyd hooted and whistled.
Then the captain fell into a doubting fit of the worst kind. "Dere is one thing we
can do," he said presently.
"What's that?" said Holroyd.
"'Oot and vissel again."
So they did.
The captain walked his deck and gesticulated to himself. He seemed to have
many things on his mind. Fragments of speeches came from his lips. He appeared
to be addressing some imaginary public tribunal either in Spanish or Portuguese.
Holroyd's improving ear detected something about ammunition. He came out of
these preoccupations suddenly into English. "My dear 'Olroyd!" he cried, and
broke off with "But what can one do?"
They took the boat and field-glasses, and went close in to examine the place.
They made out a number of big ants, whose still postures had a certain effect of
watching them, dotted about the edge of the rude embarkation jetty. Gerilleau
tried ineffectual pistol shots at these. Holroyd thinks he distinguished curious
earthworks running between the nearer houses, that may have been the work of
insect conquerors of those human habitations. The explorers pulled past the jetty,
and became aware of a human skeleton wearing a loin cloth, and very bright and
clean and shining, lying beyond. They came to a pause regarding this...
"I 'ave all dose lives to consider," said Gerilleau suddenly.
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Holroyd turned and stared at the captain, realising slowly that he referred to the
unappetising mixture of races that constituted his crew.
"To send a landing party--it is impossible--impossible. They will be poisoned,
they will swell, they will swell up and abuse me and die. It is totally
impossible...If we land, I must land alone, alone in thick boots and with my life
in my hand. Perhaps I should live. Or again--I might not land. I do not know. I do
not know."
Holroyd thought he did, but he said nothing.
"De whole thing," said Gerilleau suddenly, "'as been got up to make me
ridiculous. De whole thing!"
They paddled about and regarded the clean white skeleton from various points of
view, and then they returned to the gunboat. Then Gerilleau's indecisions became
terrible. Steam was got up, and in the afternoon the monitor went on up the river
with an air of going to ask somebody something, and by sunset came back again,
and anchored. A thunderstorm gathered and broke furiously, and then the night
became beautifully cool and quiet and everyone slept on deck. Except Gerilleau,
who tossed about and muttered. In the dawn he awakened Holroyd.
"Lord!" said Holroyd, "what now?"
"I have decided," said the captain.
"What--to land?" said Holroyd, sitting up brightly.
"No!" said the captain, and was for a time very reserved. "I have decided," he
repeated, and Holroyd manifested symptoms of impatience.
"Well--yes," said the captain. "I shall fire de big gun!"
And he did! Heaven knows what the ants thought of it, but he did. He fired it
twice with great sternness and ceremony. All the crew had wadding in their ears,
and there was effect of going into action about the whole affair, and first hit and
wrecked the old sugar-mill, and then they smashed the abandoned store behind
the jetty. And then Gerilleau experienced the inevitable reaction.
"It is no good," he said to Holroyd; "no good at all. No sort of bally good. We
must go back--for instructions. Dere will be de devil of a row about dis
ammunition--oh! De devil of a row! You don't know, 'Olroyd..."
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He stood regarding the world in infinite perplexity for a space.
"But what else was there to do?" he cried.
In the afternoon the monitor started down stream again, and in the evening a
landing party took the body of the lieutenant and buried it on the bank upon
which the new ants have so far not appeared...
4.
I heard this story in a fragmentary state from Holroyd not three weeks ago. These
new ants have got into his brain, and he has come back to England with the idea,
as he says, of "exciting people" about them "before it is too late." He says they
threaten British Guiana, which cannot be much over a trifle of a thousand miles
from their present sphere of activity, and that the Colonial Office ought to get to
work upon them at once. He declaims with great passion: "These are intelligent
ants. Just think what that means!"
There can be no doubt they are a serious pest, and that the Brazilian Government
is well advised in offering a prize of five hundred pounds for some effectual
method of extirpation. It is certain too, that since they first appeared in the hills
beyond Badama, about three years ago, they have achieved extraordinary
conquests. The whole of the south bank of the Batemo River, for nearly sixty
miles, they have in their effectual occupation; they have driven men out
completely, occupied plantations and settlements, and boarded and captured at
least one ship. It is even said they have in some inexplicable way bridged the
very considerable Capuarana arm and pushed many miles towards the Amazon
itself. There can be little doubt that they are far more reasonable and with a far
better social organisation then any previously known ant species; instead of being
dispersed societies they are organised into what is in effect a single nation; but
their peculiar and immediate formidableness lies not so much in this as in the
intelligent use they make of poison against their enemies. It would seem this
poison of theirs is closely akin to snake poison, and it is highly probable they
actually manufacture it, and that the larger individuals among them carry the
needle-like crystals of it in their attacks upon men.
Of course it is extremely difficult to get any detailed information about these new
competitors for sovereignty of the globe. No eye-witnesses of their activity,
except for such glimpses as Holroyd's, have survived the encounter. The most
extraordinary legends of their prowess and capacity are in circulation in the
region of the Upper Amazon, and grow daily as the steady advance of the invader
stimulates men's imaginations through their fears. These strange little creatures
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are credited not only with the use of implements and knowledge of fire and
metals and with organised feats of engineering that stagger our Northern minds-used as we are to such feats as that of the Saubas of Rio de Janeiro, who, in 1841,
drove a tunnel under Parahyba, where it is as wide as the Thames at London
Bridge--but with an organised and detailed method of record and communication
analogous to our books. So far their action has been a steady progressive
settlement, involving the flight or slaughter of every human being in the new
areas they invade. They are increasing rapidly in numbers, and Holroyd at least is
firmly convinced that they will finally dispossess man over the whole of tropical
South America.
And why should they stop at tropical South America?
Well, there they are, anyhow. By 1911 or thereabouts, if they go on as they are
going, they ought to strike the Capuarana Extension Railway, and force
themselves upon the attention of the European capitalist.
By 1920 they will be halfway down the Amazon. I fix 1950 or '60 at least for the
discovery of Europe.
A VISION OF JUDGMENT
1.
Bru-a-a-a.
I listened, not understanding. Wa-ra-ra-ra.
"Good Lord!" said I, still only half awake. "What an infernal shindy!" Ra-ra-rara-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra Ta-ra-rra-ra.
"It's enough," said I, "to wake--" and stopped short. Were was I? Ta-rra-rara-louder and louder.
"It's either some new invention--" Toora-toora-toora! Deafening!
"No," said I, speaking loud in order to hear myself. "That's the Last Trump."
Tooo-rraa!
2.
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The last note jerked me out of my grave like a hooked minnow.
I saw my monument (rather a mean little affair, and I wished I knew who'd done
it), and the old elm tree and the sea view vanished like a puff of steam, and then
all about me--a multitude no man could number, nations, tongues, kingdoms,
peoples--children of all ages, in an amphitheatral space as vast as the sky. And
over against us, seated on a throne of dazzling white cloud, the Lord God and all
the host of his angels. I recognised Azreal by his darkness and Michael by his
sword, and the great angel who had blown the trumpet stood with the trumpet
still half raised.
3.
"Prompt," said the little man beside me. "Very prompt. Do you see the angel with
the book?"
He was ducking and craning his head about to see over and under and between
the souls that crowded round us. "Everybody's here," he said. "Everybody. And
now we shall know--"
"There's Darwin," he said, going off at a tangent. "He'll catch it! And there--you
see--? That tall, important-looking man trying to catch the eye of the Lord God,
that's the Duke. But there's a lot of people one doesn't know.
"Oh! There's Priggles, the publisher. I have always wondered about printers'
overs. Priggles was a clever man...But we shall know now--even about him.
"I shall hear all that. I shall get most of the fun before...My letter's S."
He drew the air in between his teeth.
"Historical characters, too. See? That's Henry the Eighth. There'll be a good bit of
evidence. Oh, damn! He's Tudor."
He lowered his voice. "Notice this chap, just in front of us, all covered with hair.
Paleolithic, you know. And there again--"
But I did not heed him, because I was looking at the Lord God.
4.
"Is this all?" asked the Lord God.
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The angel at the book--it was one of countless volumes, like the British Museum
Reading-room Catalogue, glanced at us and seemed to count us in the instant.
"That's all," he said, and added: "It was, O God, a very little planet."
The eyes of God surveyed us.
"Let us begin," said the Lord God.
5.
The angel opened the book and read a name. It was a name full of A's, and the
echoes of it came back out of the uttermost parts of space. I did not catch it
clearly, because the little man beside me said, in a sharp jerk, "What's that?" It
sounded like "Ahab" to me; but it could not have been the Ahab of Scripture.
Instantly a small black figure was lifted up to a puffy cloud at the very feet of
God. It was a stiff little figure, dressed in rich outlandish robes and crowned, and
it folded its arms and scowled.
"Well?" said God, looking down at him.
We were privileged to hear the reply, and indeed the acoustic properties of the
place were marvellous.
"I plead guilty," said the little figure.
"Tell them what you have done," said the Lord God.
"I was a king," said the little figure, "a great king, and I was lustful and proud and
cruel. I made wars, I devastated countries, I built palaces, and the mortar was the
blood of men. Hear, O God, the witnesses against me, calling to you for
vengeance. Hundreds and thousands of witnesses." He waved his hands towards
us. "And worse! I took a prophet--one of your prophets--"
"One of my prophets," said the Lord God.
"And because he would not bow to me, I tortured him for four days and nights,
and in the end he died. I did more, O God, I blasphemed. I robbed you of your
honours--"
"Robbed me of my honours," said the Lord God.
85
"And caused myself to be worshipped in your stead. No evil was there, but I
practised it; no cruelty wherewith I did not stain my soul. And at last you smote
me, O God!"
God raised his eyebrows slightly.
"And I was slain in battle. And so I stand before you, meet for your nethermost
Hell! Out of your greatness daring no lies, daring no pleas, but telling the truth of
my iniquities before all mankind."
He ceased. His face I saw distinctly, and it seemed to me white and terrible and
proud and strangely noble. I thought of Milton's Satan.
"Most of that is from the Obelisk," said the recording Angel, finger on page.
"It is," said the Tyrannous Man, with a faint touch of surprise.
Then suddenly God bent forward and took this man in his hand, and held him up
on his palm as if to see him better. He was just a little dark stroke in the middle
of God's palm.
"Did he do all this?" said the Lord God.
The recording angel flattened his book with his hand.
"In a way," said the recording angel, carelessly.
Now when I looked again at the little man his face had changed in a very curious
manner. He was looking at the recording angel with strange apprehension in his
eyes, and one hand fluttered to his mouth. Just the movement of a muscle or so,
and all that dignity of defiance was gone.
"Read," said the Lord God.
And the angel read, explaining very carefully and fully all the wickedness of the
Wicked Man. It was quite a intellectual treat--A little "daring" in places, I
thought, but of course Heaven has its privileges...
6.
Everybody was laughing. Even the prophet of the Lord whom the Wicked Man
had tortured had a smile on his face. The Wicked Man was really such a
preposterous little fellow.
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"And then," reading the recording angel, with a smile that set us all agog, "one
day, when he was a little irascible from over-eating, he--"
"Oh, not that," cried the Wicked Man, "nobody knew of that."
"It didn't happen," screamed the Wicked Man. "I was bad--I was really bad.
Frequently bad, but there was nothing so silly--so absolutely silly--"
The angel went on reading.
"O God!" cried the Wicked Man. "Don't let them know that! I'll repent! I'll
apologise..."
The Wicked Man on God's hand began to dance and weep. Suddenly shame
overcame him. He made a wild rush to jump off the ball of God's little finger, but
God stopped him by a dexterous turn of the wrist. Then he made a rush for a gap
between hand and thumb, but thumb closed. And all the while the angel went on
reading--reading. The Wicked Man rushed to and fro across God's palm, and then
suddenly turned about and fled up the sleeve of God.
I expected God would turn him out, but the mercy of God is infinite.
The recording angel paused.
"Eh?" said the recording angel.
"Next," said God, and before the recording angel could call upon the name, a
hairy creature in filthy rags stood upon God's palm.
7.
"Has God got Hell up his sleeve then?" said the little man beside me.
"Is there a Hell?" I asked.
"If you notice," he said--he peered between the feet of the great angels--"there's
no particular indication of the Celestial City."
"Ssh!" said a little woman near us, scowling. "Hear this blessed Saint!"
8.
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"He was Lord of the Earth, but I was the prophet of the God of Heaven," cried
the Saint, "and all the people marvelled at the sign. For I, O God, knew of the
glories of thy Paradise. No pain, no hardship, gashing with knives, splinters
thrust under my nails, strips of flesh flayed off, all for the glory and honour of
God."
God smiled.
"And at last I went, I in my rags and sores, smelling of my holy discomforts--"
Gabriel laughed abruptly.
"And lay outside his gates, as a sign, as a wonder--"
"As a perfect nuisance," said the recording angel, and began to read, heedless of
the fact that the Saint was still speaking of gloriously unpleasant things he had
done that Paradise might be his.
And behold, in that book the record of the Saint also was a revelation, a marvel.
It seemed not ten seconds before the Saint, also, was rushing to and fro over the
great palm of God. Not ten seconds! And at last he also shrieked beneath that
pitiless and cynical exposition, and fled also, even as the Wicked Man had fled,
into the shadow of the sleeve. And it was permitted us to see into the shadow of
the sleeve. And the two sat side by side, stark of all delusions, in the shadow of
the robe of God's charity, like brothers.
And thither also I fled in my turn.
9.
"And now," said God, as he shook us out of his sleeve upon the planet he had
given us to live upon, the planet that whirled about green Sirius for a sun, "now
that you understand me and each other a little better... try again."
Then he and his great angels turned themselves about and suddenly had vanished.
The Throne had vanished.
All about me was a beautiful land, more beautiful than any I had ever seen
before--waste, austere, and wonderful; and all about me were the enlightened
souls of men in new clean bodies...
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THE LAND IRONCLADS
1.
The young lieutenant lay beside the war correspondent and admired the idyllic
calm of the enemy's lines through his field-glass.
"So far as I can see," he said at last, "one man."
"What's he doing?" asked the war correspondent.
"Field-glass at us," said the young lieutenant.
"And this is War!"
"No," said the young lieutenant; "it's Bloch."
"The game's a draw."
"No! They've got to win or else they lose. A draw's a win for our side."
They had discussed the political situation fifty times or so, and the war
correspondent was weary of it. He stretched out his limbs. "Aaai s'pose it is!" he
yawned.
Flut!
"What was that?"
"Shot at us."
The war correspondent shifted to a slightly lower position. "No one shot at him,"
he complained.
"I wonder if they think we shall get so bored we shall go home?"
The war correspondent made no reply.
"There's the harvest, of course..."
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They had been there a month. Since the first brisk movements after the
declaration of war things had gone slower and slower, until it seemed as though
the whole machine of events must have run down. To begin with, they had, had
almost a scampering time; the invader had come across the frontier on the very
dawn of the war in half-a-dozen parallel columns behind a cloud of cyclists and
cavalry, with a general air of coming straight on the capital, and the defender
horsemen had held him up, and peppered him and forced him to open out to
outflank, and had then bolted to the next position in the most approved style, for
a couple of days, until in the afternoon, bump! They had the invader against their
prepared lines of defence. He did not suffer so much as had been hoped and
expected: he was coming on, it seemed, with his eyes open, his scouts winded the
guns, and down he sat at once without the shadow of an attack and began
grubbing trenches for himself, as though he meant to sit down there to the very
end of time. He was slow, but much more wary than the world had been led to
expect, and he kept convoys tucked in and shielded his slow-marching infantry
sufficiently well to prevent any heavy adverse scoring.
"But he ought to attack," the young lieutenant had insisted.
"He'll attack us at dawn, somewhere along the lines. You'll get the bayonets
coming into the trenches just about when you see," the war correspondent had
held until a week ago.
The young lieutenant winked when he said that.
When one early morning the men the defenders sent to lie out five hundred yards
before the trenches, with a view to the unexpected emptying of magazines into
any night attack, gave way to causeless panic and blazed away at nothing for ten
minutes, the war correspondent understood the meaning of that wink.
"What would you do if you were the enemy?" said the war correspondent,
suddenly.
"If I had men like I've got now?"
"Yes."
"Take those trenches."
"How?"
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"Oh--dodges! Crawl out halfway at night before moonrise and get into touch with
the chaps we send out. Blaze at 'em if they tried to shift, and so bag some of 'em
in the daylight. Learn that patch of ground by heart, lie all day in squatty holes,
and come on nearer next night. There's a bit over there, lumpy ground, where
they could get across to rushing distance--easy. In a night or so. It would be a
mere game for our fellows; it's what they're made for...Guns? Shrapnel and stuff
wouldn't stop good men who meant business."
"Why don't they do that?
"Their men aren't brutes enough; that's the trouble. They're a crowd of devitalised
townsmen, and that's the truth of the matter. They're clerks, they're factory hands,
they're students, they're civilised men. They can write, they can talk, they can
make and do all sorts of things, but they're poor amateurs at war. They've got no
physical staying power, and that's the whole thing. They've never slept in the
open one night in their lives; they've never drunk anything but the purest watercompany water; they've never gone short of three meals a day since they left their
feeding-bottles. Half their cavalry never cocked leg over horse till it enlisted six
months ago. They ride their horses as though they were bicycles--you watch 'em!
They're fools at the game, and they know it. Our boys of fourteen can give their
grown men points...Very well--"
The war correspondent mused on his face with his nose between his knuckles.
"If a decent civilisation," he said, "cannot produce better men for war than--"
He stopped with belated politeness. "I mean--"
"Than our open-air life," said the young lieutenant.
"Exactly," said the war correspondent. "The civilisation has to stop."
"It looks like it," the young lieutenant admitted.
"Civilisation has science, you know," said the war correspondent. "It invented
and it makes the rifles and guns and things you use."
"Which our nice healthy hunters and stockmen and so on, rowdy-dowdy
cowpunchers and nigger-whackers, can use ten times better than--What's that?"
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"What?" said the war correspondent, and then seeing his companion busy with
his field-glass he produced his own: "Where?" said the war correspondent,
sweeping the enemy's lines.
"It's nothing," said the young lieutenant, still looking.
"What's nothing?"
The young lieutenant put down his glass and pointed. "I thought I saw something
there, behind the stems of those trees. Something black. What it was I don't
know."
The war correspondent tried to get even by intense scrutiny.
"It wasn't anything," said the young lieutenant, rolling over to regard the darkling
evening sky, and generalised: "There never will be anything any more for ever.
Unless--"
The war correspondent looked inquiry.
"They may get their stomachs wrong, or something--living without proper
drains."
A sound of bugles came from the tents behind. The war correspondent slid
backward down the sand and stood up. "Boom!" came from somewhere far away
to the left. "Halloa!" he said, hesitated, and crawled back to peer again. "Firing at
this time is jolly bad manners."
The young lieutenant was uncommunicative for a space.
Then he pointed to the distant clump of trees again. "One of our big guns. They
were firing at that," he said.
"The thing that wasn't anything?"
"Something over there, anyhow."
Both men were silent, peering through their glasses for a space. "Just when it's
twilight," the lieutenant complained. He stood up.
"I might stay here a bit," said the war correspondent.
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The lieutenant shook his head. "There's nothing to see," he apologised, and then
went down to where his little squad of sun-brown, loose-limbed men had been
yarning in the trench. The war correspondent stood up also, glanced for a
moment at the businesslike bustle below him, gave perhaps twenty seconds to
those enigmatical trees again, then turned his face toward the camp.
He found himself wondering whether his editor would consider the story of how
somebody thought he saw something black behind a clump of trees, and how a
gun was fired at this illusion by somebody else, too trivial for public
consumption.
"It's the only gleam of a shadow of interest," said the war correspondent, "for ten
whole days."
"No," he said presently; "I'll write that other article, 'Is War Played Out?'"
He surveyed the darkling lines in perspective, the tangle of trenches one behind
another, one commanding another, which the defender had made ready. The
shadows and mists swallowed up their receding contours, and here and there a
lantern gleamed, and here and there knots of men were busy about small fires.
"No troops on earth could do it," he said...
He was depressed. He believed that there were other things in life better worth
having than proficiency in war; he believed that in the heart of civilisation, for all
its stresses, its crushing concentrations of forces, its injustice and suffering, there
lay something that might be the hope of the world; and the idea that any people,
by living in the open air, hunting perpetually, losing touch with books and art and
all the things that intensify life, might hope to resist and break that great
development to the end of time, jarred on his civilised soul.
Apt to his thought came a file of the defender soldiers, and passed him in the
gleam of a swinging lamp that marked the way.
He glanced at their red-lit faces, and one shone out for a moment, a common type
of face in the defender's ranks: ill-shaped nose, sensuous lips, bright clear eyes
full of alert cunning, slouch hat cocked on one side and adorned with the
peacock's plume of the rustic Don Juan turned soldier, a hard brown skin, a
sinewy frame, an open, tireless stride, and a master's grip on his rifle.
The war correspondent returned their salutations and went on his way.
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"Louts," he whispered. "Cunning, elementary louts. And they are going to beat
the townsmen at the game of war!"
From the red glow among the nearer tents came first one and then half-a-dozen
hearty voices, bawling in a drawling unison the words of a particularly slab and
sentimental patriotic song.
"Oh, go it!" muttered the war correspondent, bitterly.
2.
It was opposite the trenches called after Hackbone's Hut that the battle began.
There the ground stretched broad and level between the lines, with scarcely
shelter for a lizard, and it seemed to the startled, just-awakened men who came
crowding into the trenches that this was one more proof of that inexperience of
the enemy of which they had heard so much. The war correspondent would not
believe his ears at first, and swore that he and the war artist, who, still
imperfectly roused, was trying to put on his boots by the light of a match held in
his hand, were the victims of a common illusion. Then, after putting his head in a
bucket of cold water, his intelligence came back as he towelled. He listened.
"Gollys!" he said; "that's something more than scare firing this time. It's like ten
thousand carts on a bridge of tin."
There came a sort of enrichment to that steady uproar. "Machine-guns!"
Then, "Guns!"
The artist, with one boot on, thought to look at his watch, and went to it hopping.
"Half an hour from dawn," he said. "You were right about their attacking, after
all..."
The war correspondent came out of the tent, verifying the presence of chocolate
in his pocket as he did so. He had to halt for a moment or so until his eyes were
toned down to the night a little. "Pitch!" he said. He stood for a space to season
his eyes before he felt justified in striking out for a black gap among the adjacent
tents. The artist coming out behind him fell over a tent-rope. It was half-past two
o'clock in the morning of the darkest night in time, and against a sky of dull black
silk the enemy was talking search-lights, a wild jabber of search-lights. "He's
trying to blind our riflemen," said the war correspondent with a flash, and waited
for the artist and then set off with a sort of discreet haste again. "Whoa!" he said,
presently. "Ditches!"
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They stopped.
"It's the confounded search-lights," said the war correspondent.
They saw lanterns going to and fro, near by, and men falling in to march down to
the trenches. They were for following them, and then the artist began to get his
night eyes. "If we scramble this," he said, "and it's only a drain, there's a clear run
up to the ridge." And that way they took. Lights came and went in the tents
behind, as the men turned out, and ever and again they came to broken ground
and staggered and stumbled. But in a little while they drew near the crest.
Something that sounded like the impact of a tremendous railway accident
happened in the air above them, and the shrapnel bullets seethed about them like
a sudden handful of hail. "Right-ho!" said the war correspondent, and soon they
judged they had come to the crest and stood in the midst of a world of great
darkness and frantic glares, whose principal fact was sound.
Right and left of them and all about them was the uproar, an army-full of
magazine fire, at first chaotic and monstrous, and then, eked out by little flashes
and gleams and suggestions, taking the beginnings of a shape. It looked to the
war correspondent as though the enemy must have attacked in line and with his
whole force--in which case he was either being or was already annihilated.
"Dawn and the dead," he said, with his instinct for headlines. He said this to
himself, but afterwards by means of shouting he conveyed an idea to the artist,
"They must have meant it for a surprise," he said.
It was remarkable how the firing kept on. After a time he began to perceive a sort
of rhythm in this inferno of noise. It would decline--decline perceptibly, droop
towards something that was comparatively a pause--a pause of inquiry. "Aren't
you all dead yet?" this pause seemed to say. The flickering fringe of rifle-flashes
would become attenuated and broken, and the whack-bang of enemy's big guns
two miles away there would come up out of the deeps. Then suddenly, east or
west of them, something would startle the rifles to a frantic outbreak again.
The war correspondent taxed his brain for some theory of conflict that would
account for this, and was suddenly aware that the artist and he were vividly
illuminated. He could see the ridge on which they stood, and before them in
black outline a file of riflemen hurrying down towards the nearer trenches. It
became visible that a light rain was falling, and farther away towards the enemy
was a clear space with men--"our men--?" Running across it in disorder. He saw
one of those men throw up his hands and drop. And something else black and
shining loomed up on the edge of the beam-coruscating flashes; and behind it and
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far away a calm, white eye regarded the world. "Whit, whit, whit," sang
something in the air, and then the artist was running for cover, with the war
correspondent behind him. Bang came shrapnel, bursting close at hand as it
seemed, and our two men were lying flat in a dip in the ground, and the light and
everything had gone again, leaving a vast note of interrogation upon the light.
The war correspondent came within brawling range. "What the deuce was it?
Shooting our men down!"
"Black," said the artist, "and like a fort. Not two hundred yards from the first
trench."
He sought for comparison in his mind. "Something between a big blockhouse and
a giant's dish-cover," he said.
"And they were running!" said the war correspondent.
"You'd run if a thing like that, with a search-light to help it, turned up like a
prowling nightmare in the middle of the night."
They crawled to what they judged the edge of the dip and lay regarding the
unfathomable dark. For a space they could distinguish nothing, and then a sudden
convergence of the search-lights of both sides brought the strange thing out
again.
In that flickering pallor it had the effect of a large and clumsy black insect, an
insect the size of an iron-clad cruiser, crawling obliquely to the first line of
trenches and firing shots out port-holes in its side. And on its carcass the bullets
must have been battering with more than the passionate violence of hail on a roof
of tin.
Then in the twinkling of an eye the curtain of the dark had fallen again and the
monster had vanished, but the crescendo of musketry marked its approach to the
trenches.
They were beginning to talk about the thing to each other, when a flying bullet
kicked dirt into the artist's face, and they decided abruptly to crawl down into the
cover of the trenches. They had got down with an unobtrusive persistence into
the second line, before the dawn had grown clear enough for anything to be seen.
They found themselves in a crowd of expectant riflemen, all noisily arguing
about what would happen next. The enemy's contrivance had done execution
96
upon the outlying men, it seemed, but they did not believe it would do any more.
"Come the day and we'll capture the lot of them," said a burly soldier.
"Them?" said the war correspondent.
"They say there's a regular string of 'em, crawling along the front of our
lines...Who cares?"
The darkness filtered away so imperceptibly that at no moment could one declare
decisively that one could see. The search-lights ceased to sweep hither and
thither. The enemy's monsters were dubious patches of darkness upon the dark,
and then no longer dubious, and so they crept out into distinctness. The war
correspondent, munching chocolate absent-mindedly, beheld at last a spacious
picture of battle under the cheerless sky, whose central focus was an array of
fourteen or fifteen huge clumsy shapes lying in perspective on the very edge of
the first line trenches, at intervals of perhaps three hundred yards, and evidently
firing down upon the crowded riflemen. They were so close in that the defender's
guns had ceased, and only the first line of trenches was in action.
The second line commanded the first, and as the light grew, the war
correspondent could make out the riflemen who were fighting these monsters,
crouched in knots and crowds behind the transverse banks that crossed the
trenches against the eventuality of an enfilade. The trenches close to the big
machines were empty save for the crumpled suggestions of dead and wounded
men; the defenders had been driven right and left as soon as the prow of land
ironclad had loomed up over the front of the trench. The war correspondent
produced his field-glass, and was immediately a centre of inquiry from the
soldiers about him.
They wanted to look, they asked questions, and after he had announced that the
men across the traverses seemed unable to advance or retreat, and were
crouching under cover rather than fighting, he found it advisable to loan his
glasses to a burly and incredulous corporal. He heard a strident voice, and found
a lean and sallow soldier at his back talking to the artist.
"There's chaps down there caught" the men was saying. "If they retreat they got
to expose themselves, and the fire's too straight..."
"They aren't firing much, but every shot's a hit."
"Who?"
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"The chaps in that thing. The men who're coming up--"
"Coming up where?"
"We're evacuating them trenches where we can. Our chaps are coming back up
the zigzags...No end of 'em hit...But when we get clear our turn'll come. Rather!
Those things won't be able to cross a trench or get into it; and before they can get
back our guns'll smash 'em up. Smash 'em right up. See?" A brightness came into
his eyes. "Then we'll have a go at the beggars inside," he said.
The war correspondent thought for a moment, trying to realise the idea. Then he
set himself to recover his field-glasses from the burly corporal.
The daylight was getting clearer now. The clouds were lifting, and a gleam of
lemon-yellow amidst the level masses to the east portended sunrise. He looked
again at the land ironclad. As he saw it in the bleak, grey dawn, lying obliquely
upon the slope and on the very lip of the foremost trench, the suggestion of a
stranded vessel was very strong indeed. It might have been from eighty to a
hundred feet long--it was about two hundred and fifty yards away--its vertical
side was ten feet high or so, smooth for that height, and then with a complex
patterning under the eaves of its flattish turtle cover. This patterning was a close
interlacing of port-holes, rifle barrels, and telescope tubes--sham and real-indistinguishable one from the other. The thing had come into such a position as
to enfilade the trench, which was empty now, so far as he could see, except for
two or three crouching knots of men and the tumbled dead. Behind it, across the
plain, it had scored the grass with a train of linked impressions, like the dotted
tracings sea-things leave in sand. Left and right of that track dead men and
wounded men were scattered--men it had picked off as they fled back from their
advanced positions in the search-light glare from the invader's lines. And now it
lay with its head projecting a little over the trench it had won, as if it were a
single sentient thing planning the next phase of its attack...
He lowered his glasses and took a more comprehensive view of the situation.
These creatures of night had evidently won the first line of trenches and the fight
had come to a pause. In the increasing light he could make out by a stray shot or
a chance exposure that the defender's marksmen were lying thick in the second
and third line of trenches up towards the low crest of the position, and in such of
the zigzags as gave them a chance of a converging fire. The men about him were
talking of guns. "We're in the line of big guns at the crest, but they'll soon shift
one to pepper them" the lean man said, reassuringly.
"Whup," said the corporal.
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"Bang! Bang! Bang! Whir-r-r-r-r!" it was a sort of nervous jump, and all the
rifles were going off by themselves. The war correspondent found himself and
artist, two idle men crouching behind a line of preoccupied backs, of industrious
men discharging magazines. The monster had moved. It continued to move
regardless of the hail that splashed its skin with bright new specks of lead. It was
singing a mechanical little ditty to itself, "Tuf-tuf, tuf-tuf, tuf-tuf," and squirting
out little jets of steam behind. It had humped itself up, as a limpet does before it
crawls; it had its skirt and displayed along the length of it--feet! They were thick,
stumpy feet, between knobs and buttons in shape--flat, broad things, reminding
one of the feet of elephants or the legs of caterpillars; and then, as the skirt rose
higher, the war correspondent, scrutinising the thing through his glasses again,
saw that these feet hung, as it were, on the rims of wheels. His thoughts whirled
back to Victoria Street, Westminster, and he saw himself in the piping times of
peace, seeking matter for an interview.
"Mr.--Mr. Diplock," he said; "and he called them Pedrails...Fancy meeting them
here!"
The marksman beside him raised his head and shoulders in a speculative mood to
fire more certainly--it seemed so natural to assume the attention of the monster
must be distracted by this trench before it--and was suddenly knocked backwards
by a bullet through his neck. His feet flew up, and he vanished out of the margin
of the watcher's field of vision. The war correspondent grovelled tighter, but after
a glance behind him at a painful little confusion, he resumed his field-glass, for
the thing was putting down its feet one after the other, and hoisting itself farther
and farther over the trench. Only a bullet in the head could have stopped him
looking just then.
The lean man with the strident voice ceased firing to turn and reiterate his point.
"They can't possibly cross," he bawled. "They--"
"Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang--!" Drowned everything.
The lean man continued speaking for a word or so, then gave it up, shook his
head to enforce the impossibility of anything crossing a trench like the one
below, and resumed business once more.
And all the while that great bulk was crossing. When the war correspondent
turned his glass on it again it had bridged the trench, and its queer feet were
rasping away at the farther bank, in the attempt to get a hold there. It got its hold.
It continued to crawl until the greater bulk of it was over the trench--until it was
all over. Then it paused for a moment, adjusted its skirt a little nearer the ground,
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gave an unnerving "toot, toot," and came on abruptly at a pace of, perhaps, six
miles an hour straight up the gentle slope towards our observer.
The war correspondent raised himself on his elbow and looked a natural inquiry
at the artist.
For a moment the men about him stuck to their position and fired furiously. Then
the lean man in a mood of precipitancy slid backwards, and the war
correspondent said "Come along," to the artist, and led the movement along the
trench.
As they dropped down, the vision of a hillside of trench being rushed by a dozen
vast cockroaches disappeared for a space, and instead was one of a narrow
passage, crowded with men, for the most part receding, through one or two
turned or halted. He never turned back to see the nose of the monster creep over
the brow of the trench; he never even troubled to keep in touch with the artist. He
heard the "whit" of bullets about him soon enough, and saw a man before him
stumble and drop, and then he was one of a furious crowd fighting to get into a
transverse zigzag ditch that enabled the defenders to get under cover up and
down the hill. It was like a theatre panic. He gathered from signs and fragmentary
words that on ahead another of these monsters had also won to the second trench.
He lost his interest in the general course of the battle for a space altogether; he
became simply a modest egotist, in a mood of hasty circumspection, seeking the
farthest rear, amidst a dispersed multitude of disconcerted riflemen similarly
employed. He scrambled down through trenches, he took his courage in both
hands and sprinted across the open, he had moments of panic when it seemed
madness not to be quadrupedal, and moments of shame when he stood up and
faced about to see how the fight was going. And he was one of many thousand
very similar men that morning. On the ridge he halted in a knot of scrub, and was
for a few minutes almost minded to stop and see things out.
The day was now fully come. The grey sky had changed to blue, and of all the
cloudy masses of dawn there remained only a few patches of dissolving
fleeciness. The world below was bright and singularly clear. The ridge was not,
perhaps, more than a hundred feet or so above the general plain, but in this flat
region it sufficed to give the effect of extensive view. Away on the north side of
the ridge, little and far, were the camps, the ordered wagons, all the gear of a big
army; with officers galloping about and men doing aimless things. Here and there
men were falling in, however, and the cavalry was forming up on the plain
beyond the tents. The bulk of men who had been in the trenches were still on the
move to the rear, scattered like sheep without a shepherd over the farther slopes.
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Here and there were little rallies and attempts to wait and do--something vague;
but the general drift was away from any concentration. There on the southern
side was the elaborate lacework of trenches and defences, across which these iron
turtles, fourteen of them spread out over a line of perhaps three miles, were now
advancing as fast as a man could trot, and methodically shooting down and
breaking up any persistent knots of resistance. Here and there stood little clumps
of men, outflanked and unable to get away, showing the white flag, and the
invader's cyclist infantry was advancing now across the open, in open order, but
unmolested, to complete the work of the machines. Surveyed at large, the
defenders already looked a beaten army. A mechanism that was effectually
ironclad against bullets, that could at a pinch cross a thirty-foot trench, and that
seemed able to shoot out rifle-bullets with unerring precision, was clearly an
inevitable victor against anything but rivers, precipices, and guns.
He looked at his watch. "Half-past four! Lord! What thing can happen in two
hours. Here's the whole blesses army being walked over, and at half-past two--"
"And even now our blessed louts haven't done a thing with their guns!"
He scanned the ridge right and left of him with his glasses. He turned again to the
nearest land ironclad, advancing now obliquely to him and not three hundred
yards away, and then scanned the ground over which he must retreat if he was
not to be captured.
"They'll do nothing," he said, and glanced at the enemy.
And then from far away to the left came the thud of a gun, followed very rapidly
by a rolling gun-fire.
He hesitated and decided to stay.
3.
The defender had relied chiefly upon his rifles in the event of an assault. His guns
he kept concealed at various points upon and behind the ridge ready to bring
them into action against any artillery preparations for an attack on the part of his
antagonist. The situation had rushed upon him with the dawn, and by the time the
gunners had their guns ready for motion, the land ironclads were already in
among the foremost trenches. There is a natural reluctance to fire into one's own
broken men, and many of the guns, being intended simply to fight an advance of
the enemy's artillery, were not in positions to hit anything in the second line of
trenches. After that the advance of the land ironclads was swift. The defender101
general found himself suddenly called upon to invent a new sort of warfare, in
which guns were to fight alone amidst broken and retreating infantry. He had
scarcely thirty minutes in which to think it out. He did not respond to call, and
what happened that morning was that the advance of the land ironclads forced the
fight, and each gun and battery made what play its circumstance dictated. For the
most part it was poor play.
Some of the guns got in two or three shots, some one or two, and the percentage
of misses was unusually high. The howitzers, of course, did nothing. The land
ironclads in each case followed much the same tactics. As soon as a gun came
into play the monster turned itself almost end-on, so as to minimise the chances
of a square hit, and made not for the gun, but for the nearest point on its flank
from which the gunners could be shot down. Few of the hits scored were very
effectual; only one of the things was disabled, and that was the one that fought
the three batteries attached to the brigade on the left wing. Three that were hit
when close upon the guns were clean shot through without being put out of
action. Our war correspondent did not see that one momentary arrest of the tide
of victory on the left; he saw only the very ineffectual fight of half-battery 96B
close at hand upon his right. This he watched some time beyond the margin of
safety.
Just after he heard the three batteries opening up upon his left he became aware
of the thud of horses' hoofs from the sheltered side of the slope, and presently
saw first one and then two other guns galloping into position along the north side
of the ridge, well out of sight of the great bulk that was now creeping obliquely
towards the crest and cutting up the lingering infantry beside it and below, as it
came.
The half-battery swung round into line--each gun describing its curve--halted,
unlimbered, and prepared for action...
"Bang!"
The land ironclad had become visible over the brow of the hill, and just visible as
a long black back to the gunners. It halted, as though it hesitated.
The two remaining guns fired, and then their big antagonist had swung round and
was in full view, end-on, against the sky, coming at a rush.
The gunners became frantic in their haste to fire again. They were so near the war
correspondent could see the expression of their excited faces through his field-
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glass. As he looked he saw a man drop, and realised for the first time that the
ironclad was shooting.
For a moment the big black monster crawled with an accelerated pace towards
the furiously active gunners. Then, as if moved by a generous impulse, it turned
its full broadside to their attack, and scarcely forty yards away from them. The
war correspondent turned his field-glass back to the gunners and perceived it was
now shooting down the men about the guns with the most deadly rapidity.
Just for a moment it seemed splendid, and then it seemed horrible. The gunners
were dropping in heaps about their guns. To lay a hand on a gun was death.
"Bang!" went the gun on the left, a hopeless miss, and that was the only second
shot the half-battery fired. In another moment half-a-dozen surviving
artillerymen were holding up their hands amidst a scattered muddle of dead and
wounded men, and the fight was done.
The war correspondent hesitated between stopping in his scrub and waiting for an
opportunity to surrender decently, or taking to an adjacent gully he had
discovered. If he surrendered it was certain he would get no copy off; while, he
escaped, there were all sorts of chances. He decided to follow the gully, and take
the first offer in the confusion beyond the camp of picking up a horse.
4.
Subsequent authorities have found fault with the first land ironclads in many
particulars, but assuredly they served their purpose on the day of their
appearance. They were essentially long, narrow, and very strong steel
frameworks carrying the engines, and borne upon eight pairs of big pedrail
wheels, each about ten feet in diameter, each a driving wheel and set upon long
axles free to swivel round a common axis. This arrangement gave them the
maximum of adaptability to the contours of the ground. They crawled level along
the ground with one foot high upon a hillock and another deep in a depression,
and they could hold themselves erect and steady sideways upon even a steep
hillside. The engineers directed the engines under the command of the captain,
who had lookout points at small ports all round the upper edge of the adjustable
skirt of twelve-inch iron-plating which protected the whole affair, and who could
also raise or depress a conning-tower set about the port-holes through the centre
of the iron top cover. The riflemen each occupied a small cabin of peculiar
construction, and these cabins were slung along the sides of and before and
behind the great main framework, in a manner suggestive of the slinging of the
seats of an Irish jaunting-car. Their rifles, however, were very different pieces of
apparatus from the simple mechanisms in the hands of their adversaries.
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These were in the first place automatic, ejected their cartridges and loaded again
from a magazine each time they fired, until the ammunition store was at an end,
and they had the most remarkable sights imaginable, sights which threw a bright
little camera-obscura picture into the light-tight box in which the riflemen sat
below. This camera-obscura picture was marked with two crossed lines, and
whatever was covered by the intersection of these two lines, that the rifle hit. The
sighting was ingeniously contrived. The rifleman stood at the table with a like an
elaboration of a draughtsman's dividers in his hand, and he opened and closed
these dividers, so that they were always at the apparent height--if it was an
ordinary-sized man--of the man he wanted to kill. A little twisted strand of wire
like an electric-light wire ran from this implement up to the gun, and as the
dividers opened and shut the sights went up or down. Changes in the clearness of
the atmosphere, due to changes of moisture, were met by an ingenious use of that
meteorologically sensitive substance, catgut, and when the land ironclad moved
forward the sights got a compensatory deflection in the direction of its motion.
The rifleman stood up in his pitch-dark chamber and watched the little picture
before him. One hand held the dividers for judging distance, and the other
grasped a big knob like a door-handle. As he pushed this knob about the rifle
above swung to correspond, and the picture passed to and fro like an agitated
panorama. When he saw a man he wanted to shoot he brought him up to the
cross-lines, and then pressed a finger upon a little push like an electric bell-push,
conveniently placed in the centre of the knob. Then the man was shot. If by any
chance the rifleman missed his target he moved the knob a trifle, or readjusted
his dividers, pressed the push, and got him the second time.
This rifle and its sights protruded from a port-hole, exactly like a great number of
other port-holes that ran in a triple row under the eaves of the cover of the land
ironclad. Each port-hole displayed a rifle and sight in dummy, so that the real
ones could only be hit by a chance shot, and if one was, then the young man
below said "Pshaw!" turned on an electric light, lowered the injured instrument
into his camera, replaced the injured part, or put up a new rifle if the injury was
considerable.
You must conceive these cabins as hung clear above the swing of the axles, and
inside the big wheels upon which the great elephant-like feet were hung, and
behind these cabins along the centre of the monster ran a central gallery into
which they opened, and along which worked the big compact engines. It was like
a long passage into which this throbbing machinery had been packed, and the
captain stood about the middle, close to the ladder that led to his conning-tower,
and directed the silent, alert engineers--for the most part by signs. The throb and
noise of the engines mingled with the reports of the rifles and the intermittent
clangour of the bullet hail upon the armour. Ever and again he would touch the
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wheel that raised his conning-tower, step up his ladder until his engineers could
see nothing of him above the waist, and then come down again with orders. Two
small electric lights were all the illumination of this space--they were placed to
make him most clearly visible to his subordinates; the air was thick with the
smell of oil and petrol, and had the war correspondent been suddenly transferred
from the spacious dawn outside to the bowels of this apparatus he would have
thought himself fallen into another world.
The captain, of course, saw both sides of the battle. When he raised his head into
his conning-tower there were the dewy sunrise, the amazed and disordered
trenches, the flying and falling soldiers, the depressed-looking groups of
prisoners, the beaten guns; when he bent down again to signal "half speed,"
"quarter speed," "half circle, round toward the right," or what not, he was in the
oil-smelling twilight of the ill-lit engine-room. Close beside him on either side
was the mouth-piece of a speaking-tube, and ever and again he would direct one
side or other of his strange craft to "concentrate fire forward on gunners," or to
"clear out trench about a hundred yards on our right front."
He was a young man, healthy enough but by no means sun-tanned, and of a type
of feature and expression that prevails in His Majesty's Navy: alert, intelligent,
quiet. He and his engineers and riflemen all went about their work, calm and
reasonable men. They had none of that flapping strenuousness of the half-wit in a
hurry, that excessive strain upon the blood-vessels, that hysteria of effort which is
so frequently regarded as the proper state of mind for heroic deeds.
For the enemy these young engineers were defeating they felt a certain qualified
pity and a quite unqualified contempt. They regarded these big, healthy men they
were shooting down precisely as these same big, healthy men might regard some
inferior kind of nigger. They despised them for making war; despised their
brawling patriotisms and their emotionality profoundly; despised them, above all,
for the petty cunning and the almost brutish want of imagination their method of
fighting displayed. "If they must make war," these young men thought, "Why in
thunder don't they do it like sensible men?" They resented the assumption that
their own side was too stupid to do anything more than play their enemy's game,
that they were going to play this costly folly according to the rules of
unimaginative men. They resented being forced to the trouble of making mankilling machinery; resented the alternative of having to massacre these people or
endure their truculent yappings; resented the whole unfathomable imbecility of
war.
Meanwhile, with something of the mechanical precision of a good clerk posting a
ledger, the rifleman moved their knobs and pressed their buttons...
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The captain of Land Ironclad Number Three had halted on the crest close to his
captured half-battery. His lined up prisoners stood hard by and waited for the
cyclists behind to come for them. He surveyed the victorious morning through
his conning-tower.
He read the general's signals. "Five and Four are to keep among the guns to the
left and prevent any attempt to recover them. Seven and Eleven and Twelve,
stick to the guns you have got; Seven, got into position to command the guns
taken by Three. Then we're to do something else, are we? Six and One, quicken
up to about ten miles an hour and walk round behind that camp to the levels near
the river--we shall bag the whole crowd of them," interjected the young man.
"Ah, here we are! Two and Three, Eight and Nine, Thirteen and Fourteen, space
out to a thousand yards, wait for the word, and then go slowly to cover the
advance of the cyclist infantry against any change of mounted troops. That's all
right. But where's Ten? Halloa! Ten to repair and get movable as soon as
possible. They've broken up Ten!"
The discipline of the new war machines was business-like rather than pedantic,
and the head of the captain came down out of the conning-tower to tell his men:
"I say, you chaps there. They've broken up Ten. Not badly, I think; but anyhow,
he's stuck."
But that still left thirteen of the monsters in action to finish up the broken army.
The war correspondent stealing down his gully looked back and saw them all
lying along the crest and talking fluttering congratulatory flags to one another.
Their iron sides were shining golden in the light of the rising sun.
5.
The private adventures of the war correspondent terminated in surrender about
one o'clock in the afternoon, and by that time he had stolen a horse, pitched off it,
and narrowly escaped being rolled upon; found the brute had broken its leg, and
shot it with his revolver. He had spent some hours in the company of a squad of
dispirited riflemen, had quarrelled with them about topography at last, and gone
off by himself in a direction that should have brought him to the banks of the
river and didn't. Moreover, he had eaten all his chocolate and found nothing in
the whole world to drink. Also, it had become extremely hot. From behind a
broken, but attractive, stone wall he had seen far away in the distance the
defender-horsemen trying to charge cyclists in open order, with land ironclads
outflanking them on either side. He had discovered that cyclists could retreat
over open turf before horsemen with a sufficient margin of speed to allow of
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frequent dismounts and much terribly effective sharp-shooting, and he had a
sufficient persuasion that those horsemen, having charged their hearts out, had
halted just beyond his range of vision and surrendered. He had been urged to
sudden activity by a forward movement of one of those machines that had
threatened to enfilade his wall. He had discovered a fearful blister on his heel.
He was now in a scrubby gravelly place, sitting down and meditating on his
pocket-handkerchief, which had in some extraordinary way become in the last
twenty-four hours extremely ambiguous in hue. "It's the whitest thing I've got,"
he said.
He had known all along that the enemy was east, west and south of him, but
when he heard land ironclads Number One and Six talking in their measured,
deadly way not half a mile to the north he decided to make his own little
unconditional peace without any further risks. He was for hoisting his white flag
to a brush and taking up a position of modest obscurity near it until some one
came along. He became aware of voices, clatter, and the distinctive noises of a
body of horses, quite near, and he put his handkerchief in his pocket again and
went to see what was going forward.
The sound of firing ceased, and then as he drew near he heard the deep sounds of
many simple, coarse, but hearty and noble-hearted soldiers of the old school
swearing with vigour.
He emerged from his scrub upon a big level plain, and far away a fringe of trees
marked the banks of the river.
In the centre of the picture was a still intact road bridge, and big railway bridge a
little to the right. Two land ironclads rested, with a general air of being long,
harmless sheds, in a pose of anticipatory peacefulness right and left of the
picture, completely commanding two miles and more of the river levels.
Emerged and halted a few yards from the scrub was the remainder of the
defender's cavalry, dusty, a little disordered and obviously annoyed, but still a
very fine show of men. In the middle distance three or four men and horses were
receiving medical attendance, and nearer a knot of officers regarded the distant
novelties in mechanism with profound distaste. Every one was very distinctly
aware of the twelve other ironclads, and of the multitude of townsmen soldiers,
on bicycles or afoot, encumbered now by prisoners and captured war-gear, but
otherwise thoroughly effective, who were sweeping like a great net in their rear.
"Checkmate," said the war correspondent, walking out into the open. "But I
surrender in the best of company. Twenty-four hours ago I thought war was
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impossible--and these beggars have captured the whole blessed army! Well!
Well!" He thought of his talk with the young lieutenant. "If there's no end to the
surprises of science, the civilised people have it, of course. As long as their
science keeps going they will necessarily be ahead of open-country men. Still..."
He wondered for a space what might have happened to the young lieutenant.
The war correspondent was one of those inconsistent people who always want
the beaten side to win. When he saw all these burly, sun-tanned horsemen,
disarmed and dismounted and lined up; when he saw their horses unskilfully led
away by the singularly not equestrian cyclists to whom they had surrendered;
when he saw these truncated Paladins watching this scandalous sight, he forgot
altogether that he had called these men "cunning louts" and wished them beaten
not four-and-twenty hours ago. A month ago he had seen that regiment in its
pride going forth to war, and had told of its terrible prowess, how it could charge
in open order with each man firing from his saddle, and sweep before it anything
else that ever came out to battle in any sort of order, foot or horse. And it had,
had to fight a few score of young men in atrociously unfair machines!
"Manhood versus Machinery" occurred to him as a suitable headline. Journalism
curdles all one's mind to phrases.
He strolled as near the lined-up prisoners as the sentinels seemed disposed to
permit, and surveyed them and compared their sturdy proportions with those of
their lightly built captors.
"Smart degenerates," he muttered. "Anaemic cockneydom."
The surrendered officers came quite close to him presently, and he could hear the
colonel's high-pitched tenor. The poor gentleman had spent three years of
arduous toil upon the best material in the world perfecting that shooting from the
saddle charge, and he was inquiring with phrases of blasphemy, natural in the
circumstances, what one could be expected to do against this suitably consigned
ironmongery.
"Guns," said some one.
"Big guns they can walk around. You can't shift big guns to keep pace with them,
and little guns in the open they rush. I saw 'em rushed. You might do a surprised
now and then--assassinate the brutes, perhaps--"
"You might make things like 'em."
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"What? More ironmongery? Us...?"
"I'll call my article," meditated the war correspondent, "'Mankind versus
Ironmongery,' and quote the old boy at the beginning."
And he was much too good a journalist to spoil his contrast by remarking that the
half-dozen comparatively slender young men in blue pyjamas who were standing
about their victorious land ironclad, drinking coffee and eating biscuits, had also
in their eyes and carriage something not altogether degraded below the level of a
man.
THE BEAUTIFUL SUIT
There was once a little man whose mother made him a beautiful suit of clothes. It
was green and gold, and woven so that I can not describe how delicate and fine it
was, and there was a tie of orange fluffiness that tied up under his chin. And the
buttons in their newness shone like stars. He was proud and pleased by his suit
beyond measure, and stood before the long looking-glass when first he put it on,
so astonished and delighted with it that he could hardly turn himself away.
He wanted to wear it everywhere, and show it to all sorts of people. He thought
over all the places he had ever visited, and all the scenes he had ever heard
described, and tried to imagine what the feel of it would be if he were to go now
to those scenes and places wearing his shining suit, and he wanted to go out
forthwith into the long grass and hot sunshine of the meadow wearing it. Just to
wear it! But his mother told him "No," She told him he must take great care of
his suit, for never would he have another nearly so fine; he must save it and save
it, and only wear it on rare great occasions. It was his wedding-suit, she said. And
she took the buttons and twisted them up with tissue paper for fear their bright
newness should be tarnished, and she tacked little guards over the cuffs and
elbows, and wherever the suit was most likely to come to harm. He hated and
resisted these things, but what could he do? And at last her warnings and
persuasions had effect, and he consented to take off his beautiful suit and fold it
into its proper creases, and put it away. It was almost as though he gave it up
again. But he was always thinking of wearing it, and of the supreme occasions
when some day it might be worn without the guards, without the tissue paper on
the buttons, utterly and delightfully, never caring, beautiful beyond measure.
One night, when he was dreaming of it after his habit, he dreamt he took the
tissue paper from one of the buttons, and found its brightness a little faded, and
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that distressed him mightily in his dream. He polished the poor faded button and
polished it, and if anything, it grew duller. He woke up and lay awake, thinking
of the brightness slightly dulled, and wondering how he would feel if perhaps
when the great occasions (whatever it might be) should arrive, one button should
chance to be ever so little short of its first glittering freshness, and for days and
days that thought remained with him distressingly. And when next his mother let
him wear his suit, he was tempted and nearly gave way to the temptation just to
fumble off a bit of tissue paper and see if indeed the buttons were keeping as
bright as ever.
He went trimly along on his way to church, full of this wild desire. For you must
know his mother did, with repeated and careful warnings, let him wear his suit at
times, on Sundays, for example, to and fro from church, when there was no
threatening of rain, no dust blowing, nor anything to injure it, with its buttons
covered and its protections tacked upon it, and a sunshade in his hand to shadow
it, if there seemed too strong a sunlight for its colours. And always, after such
occasions, he brushed it over and folded it exquisitely as she had taught him, and
put it away again.
Now all these restrictions his mother set to the wearing of his suit he obeyed,
always he obeyed them, until one strange night he woke up and saw the
moonlight shining outside his window. It seemed to him the moonlight was not
common moonlight, nor the night a common night, and for a while he lay quite
drowsily, with this odd persuasion in his mind. Thought joined on to thought like
things that whisper warmly in the shadows. Then he sat up in his little bed
suddenly very alert, with his heart beating very fast, and a quiver in his body
from top to toe. He had made up his mind. He knew that now he was going to
wear his suit as it should be worn. He had no doubt in the matter. He was afraid,
terribly afraid, but glad, glad.
He got out of his bed and stood for a moment by the window looking at the
moonshine-flooded garden, and trembling at the thing he meant to do. The air
was full of a minute clamour of crickets and murmurings, of the infinitesimal
shouting of little living things. He went very gently across the creaking boards,
for fear that he might wake the sleeping house, to the big dark clothes-press
wherein his beautiful suit lay folded, and he took it out garment by garment, and
softly and very eagerly tore off its tissue-paper covering and its tacked
protections until there it was, perfect and delightful as he had seen it when first
his mother had given it to him--a long time it seemed ago. Not a button had
tarnished, not a thread had faded on this dear suit of his; he was glad enough for
weeping, as in a noiseless hurry he put it on. And then back he went, soft and
quick, to the window that looked out upon the garden, and stood there for a
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minute, shining in the moonlight, with his buttons twinkling like stars, before he
got out on the sill, and making as little of a rustling as he could, clambered down
to the garden path below. He stood before his mother's house, and it was white
and nearly as plain as by day, with every window-blind but his own shut like an
eye that sleeps. The trees cast still shadows like intricate black lace upon the
wall.
The garden in the moonlight was very different from the garden by day;
moonshine was tangled in hedges and stretched in phantom cobwebs from spray
to spray. Every flower was gleaming white or crimson black, and the air was aquiver with the thridding of small crickets and nightingales singing unseen in the
depths of the trees.
There was no darkness in the world, but only warm, mysterious shadows, and all
the leaves and spikes were edged and lined with iridescent jewels of dew. The
night was warmer than any other night had ever been; the heavens by some
miracle at once vaster and nearer, and in spite of the great ivory-tinted moon that
ruled the world, the sky was full of stars.
The little man did not shout nor sing for all his infinite gladness. He stood for a
time like one awe-stricken, and then with a queer small cry and holding out his
arms, he ran out as if he would embrace at once the whole round immensity of
the world. He did not follow the neat set paths that cut the garden squarely, but
thrust across the beds and through the wet, tall, scented herbs, though the nightstock and the nicotine and the clusters of phantom white mallow flowers and
through the thickets of southernwood and lavender, and knee-deep across a wide
space of mignonette. He came to the great hedge, and he thrust his way through
it; and though the thorns of the brambles scored him deeply and tore threads from
his wonderful suit, and though burrs and goose-grass and havers caught and
clung to him, he did not care. He did not care, for he knew it was all part of the
wearing for which he had longed. "I am glad I put on my suit," he said; "I am
glad I wore my suit."
Beyond the hedge he came to the duck-pond, or at least to what was the duckpond by day. But by night it was a great bowl of silver moonshine all noisy with
singing frogs, of wonderful silver moonshine twisted and clotted with strange
patternings, and the little man ran down into its waters between the thin black
rushes, knee-deep and waist-deep and to his shoulders, smiting the water to black
and shining wavelets with either hand, swaying and shivering wavelets, amidst
which the stars were netted in the tangled reflections of the brooding trees upon
the bank. He waded until he swam, and so he crossed the pond and came out
upon the other side, trailing, as it seemed to him, not duckweed, but very silver in
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long, clinging, dripping masses. And up he went through the transfigured tangles
of the willow-herb and the uncut seeding grasses of the farther bank. He came
glad and breathless into the high road. "I am glad," he said, "beyond measure,
that I had clothes that fitted this occasion."
The high-road ran straight as an arrow flies, straight into the deep-blue pit of the
sky beneath the moon, a white and shining road between the singing nightingales,
and along it he went, running now and leaping, and now walking and rejoicing,
in the clothes his mother had made for him with tireless, loving hands. The road
was deep in dust, but that for him was only soft whiteness; and as he went a great
dim moth came fluttering round his wet and shimmering and hastening figure. At
first he did not heed the moth, and then he waved his hands at it, and made a sort
of dance with it, as it circled round his head. "Soft moth!" he cried, "Dear moth!
And wonderful night, wonderful night of the world! Do you think my clothes are
beautiful, dear moth? As beautiful as your scales and all this silver vesture of the
earth and sky?"
And the moth circled closer and closer until at last its velvet wings just brushed
his lips...
And next morning they found him dead, with his neck broken, in the bottom of
the stone pit, with his beautiful clothes a little bloody, and foul and stained with
the duckweed from the pond. But his face was a face of such happiness that, had
you seen it, you would have understood indeed how that he had died happy,
never knowing that cool and streaming silver for the duckweed in the pond.
THE DOOR IN THE WALL
1.
One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this
story of the Door in the Wall. And at the time I thought that so far as he was
concerned it was a true story.
He told it me with such a direct simplicity of conviction that I could not do
otherwise than believe in him. But in the morning, in my own flat, I woke to a
different atmosphere, and as I lay in bed and recalled the things he had told me,
stripped of the glamour of his earnest slow voice, denuded of the focused shaded
table light, the shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him and the pleasant
bright things, the dessert and glasses and napery of the dinner we had shared,
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making them for the time a bright little world quite cut off from everyday
realities, I saw it all as frankly incredible. "He was mystifying!" I said, and then:
"How well he did it...! It isn't quite the thing I should have expected him, of all
people, to do well."
Afterwards, as I sat up in bed and sipped my morning tea, I found myself trying
to account for the flavour of reality that perplexed me in his impossible
reminiscences, by supposing they did in some way suggest, present, convey--I
hardly know which word to use--experiences it was otherwise impossible to tell.
Well I don't resort to that explanation now. I have got over my intervening
doubts. I believe now, as I believed at the moment of telling, that Wallace did to
the very best of his ability strip the truth of his secret for me. But whether he
himself saw, or only thought he saw, whether he himself was the possessor of an
inestimable privilege, or the victim of a fantastic dream, I cannot pretend to
guess. Even the facts of his death, which ended my doubts forever, throw no light
on that. That much the reader must judge for himself.
I forget now what chance comment or criticism of mine moved so reticent a man
to confide in me. He was I think, defending himself against an imputation of
slackness and unreliability I had made in relation to a great public movement in
which he had disappointed me. But he plunged suddenly. "I have" he said, "a
preoccupation-"I know," he went on, after a pause that he devoted to the study of his cigar ash,
"I have been negligent. The fact is--it isn't a case of ghosts or apparitions--but-it's an odd thing to tell of, Redmond--I am haunted. I am haunted by something-that rather takes the light out of things, that fills me with longings..."
He paused, checked by that English shyness that so often overcomes us when we
would speak of moving or grave or beautiful things. "You were at Saint
Althelstan's all through," he said, and for a moment that seemed to me quite
irrelevant. "Well--" and he paused. Then very haltingly at first, but afterwards
more easily, he began to tell of the thing that was hidden in his life, the haunting
memory of a beauty and a happiness that filled his heart with insatiable longings
that made all the interests and spectacle of worldly life seem dull and tedious and
vain to him.
Now that I have the clue to it, the thing seems written visibly in his face. I have a
photograph in which that look of detachment has been caught and intensified. It
reminds me of what a woman once said of him--a woman who had loved him
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greatly. "Suddenly," she said, "the interest goes out of him. He forgets you. He
doesn't care a rap for you--under his very nose..."
Yet the interest was not always out of him, and when he was holding his attention
to a thing Wallace could contrive to be an extremely successful man. His career,
indeed, is set with successes. He left me behind him long ago; he soared up over
my head, and cut a figure in the world that I couldn't cut--anyhow. He was still a
year short of forty, and they say now that he would have been in office and very
probably in the new Cabinet if he had lived. At school he always beat me without
effort--as it were by nature. We were at school together at Saint Althelstan's
College in West Kensington for almost all our school-time. He came into the
school as my co-equal, but he left far above me, in a blaze of scholarships and
brilliant performance. Yet I think I made a fair average running. And it was at
school I heard first of the "Door in the Wall--" that I was to hear of a second time
only a month before his death.
To him at least the Door in the Wall was a real door leading through a real wall
to immortal realities. Of that I am now quite assured.
And it came into his life early, when he was a little fellow between five and six. I
remember how, as he sat making his confession to me with a slow gravity, he
reasoned and reckoned the date of it. "There was," he said, "a crimson Virginia
creeper in it--all one bright uniform crimson in a clear amber sunshine against a
white wall. That came into the impression somehow, though I don't clearly
remember how, and there were horse-chestnut leaves upon the clean pavement
outside the green door. They were blotched yellow and green, you know, not
brown nor dirty, so that they must have been new fallen. I take it that means
October. I look out for horse-chestnut leaves every year, and I ought to know."
"If I'm right in that, I was about five years and four months old."
He was, he said, rather a precocious little boy--he learned to talk at an
abnormally early age, and he was so sane and "old-fashioned," as people say, that
he was permitted an amount of initiative that most children scarcely attain by
seven or eight. His mother died when he was born, and he was under the less
vigilant and authoritative care of a nursery governess. His father was a stern,
preoccupied lawyer, who gave him little attention, and expected great things of
him. For all his brightness he found life a little grey and dull I think. And one day
he wandered.
He could not recall the particular neglect that enabled him to get away, nor the
course he took among the West Kensington roads. All that had faded among the
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incurable blurs of memory. But the white wall and the green door stood out quite
distinctly.
As his memory of that remote childish experience ran, he did at the very first
sight of that door experience a peculiar emotion, an attraction, a desire to get to
the door and open it and walk in.
And at the same time he had the clearest conviction that either it was unwise or it
was wrong of him--he could not tell which--to yield to this attraction. He insisted
upon it as a curious thing that he knew from the very beginning--unless memory
has played him the queerest trick--that the door was unfastened, and that he could
go in as he chose.
I seem to see the figure of that little boy, drawn and repelled. And it was very
clear in his mind too, though why it should be so was never explained, that his
father would be very angry if he went through that door.
Wallace described all these moments of hesitation to me with the utmost
particularity. He went right past the door, and then with his hands in his pockets,
and making an infantile attempt to whistle, strolled right along beyond the end of
the wall. There he recalls a number of mean, dirty shops, and particularly that of
a plumber and decorator, with a dusty disorder of earthenware pipes, sheet lead
ball taps, pattern books of wall paper, and tins of enamel. He stood pretending to
examine these things, and coveting, passionately desiring the green door.
Then he said, he had a gust of emotion. He made a run for it, lest hesitation
should grip him again, he went plump with outstretched hand through the green
door and let it slam behind him. And so, in a trice, he came into the garden that
has haunted all his life.
It was very difficult for Wallace to give me his full sense of that garden into
which he came.
There was something in the very air of it that exhilarated, that gave one a sense
of lightness and good happening and well-being; there was something in the sight
of it that made all its colour clean and perfect and subtly luminous. In the instant
of coming into it one was exquisitely glad--as only in rare moments and when
one is young and joyful one can be glad in this world. And everything was
beautiful there...
Wallace mused before he went on telling me. "You see," he said, with the
doubtful inflection of a man who pauses at incredible things, "there were two
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great panthers there...Yes, spotted panthers. And I was not afraid. There was a
long wide path with marble-edged flower borders on either side, and these two
huge velvety beasts were playing there with a ball. One looked up and came
towards me, a little curious as it seemed. It came right up to me, rubbed its soft
round ear very gently against the small hand I held out and purred. It was I tell
you, an enchanted garden. I know. And the size? Oh! it stretched far and wide,
this way and that. I believe there were hills far away. Heaven knows where West
Kensington had suddenly got to. And somehow it was just like coming home."
"You know, in the very moment the door swung to behind me, I forgot the road
with its fallen chestnut leaves, its cabs and tradesmen's carts, I forgot the sort of
gravitational pull back to the discipline and obedience of home, I forgot all
hesitations and fear, forgot discretion, forgot all the intimate realities of this life. I
became in a moment a very glad and wonder-happy little boy--in another world.
It was a world with a different quality, a warmer, more penetrating and mellower
light, with a faint clear gladness in its air, and wisps of sun-touched cloud in the
blueness of its sky. And before me ran this long wide path, invitingly, with
weedless beds on either side, rich with untended flowers, and these two great
panthers. I put my little hands fearlessly on their soft fur, and caressed their
round ears and the sensitive corners under their ears, and played with them, and it
was as though they welcomed me home. There was a keen sense of home-coming
in my mind, and when presently a tall, fair girl appeared in the pathway and came
to meet me, smiling, and said 'Well?' to me, and lifted me, and kissed me, and put
me down, and led me by the hand, there was no amazement, but only an
impression of delightful rightness, of being reminded of happy things that had in
some strange way been overlooked. There were broad steps, I remember, that
came into view between spikes of delphinium, and up these we went to a great
avenue between very old and shady dark trees. All down this avenue, you know,
between the red chapped stems, were marble seats of honour and statuary, and
very tame and friendly white doves..."
"And along this avenue my girl-friend led me, looking down--I recall the pleasant
lines, the finely-modelled chin of her sweet kind face--asking me questions in a
soft, agreeable voice, and telling me things, pleasant things I know, though what
they were I was never able to recall...And presently a little Capuchin monkey,
very clean, with a fur of ruddy brown and kindly hazel eyes, came down a tree to
us and ran beside me, looking up at me and grinning, and presently leapt to my
shoulder. So we went on our way in great happiness..."
He paused.
"Go on," I said.
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"I remember little things. We passed an old man musing among laurels, I
remember, and a place gay with paroquets, and came through a broad shaded
colonnade to a spacious cool palace, full of pleasant fountains, full of beautiful
things, full of the quality and promise of heart's desire. And there were many
things and many people, some that still seem to stand out clearly and some that
are a little vague, but all these people were beautiful and kind. In some way--I
don't know how--it was conveyed to me that they all were kind to me, glad to
have me there, and filling me with gladness by their gestures, by the touch of
their hands, by the welcome and love in their eyes. Yes--"
He mused for awhile. "Playmates I found there. That was very much to me,
because I was a lonely little boy. They played delightful games in a grasscovered court where there was a sun-dial set about with flowers. And as one
played one loved...
"But--it's odd--there's a gap in my memory. I don't remember the games we
played. I never remembered. Afterwards as a child, I spent long hours trying,
even with tears, to recall the form of that happiness. I wanted to play it all over
again--in my nursery--by myself. No! All I remember is the happiness and two
dear playfellows who were most with me...Then presently came a sombre dark
woman, with a grave, pale face and dreamy eyes, a sombre woman wearing a soft
long robe of pale purple, who carried a book and beckoned and took me aside
with her into a gallery above a hall--though my playmates were loth to have me
go, and ceased their game and stood watching as I was carried away. 'Come back
to us!' they cried. 'Come back to us soon!' I looked up at her face, but she heeded
them not at all. Her face was very gentle and grave. She took me to a seat in the
gallery, and I stood beside her, ready to look at her book as she opened it upon
her knee. The pages fell open. She pointed, and I looked, marvelling, for in the
living pages of that book I saw myself; it was a story about myself, and in it were
all the things that had happened to me since ever I was born...
"It was wonderful to me, because the pages of that book were not pictures, you
understand, but realities."
Wallace paused gravely--looked at me doubtfully.
"Go on," I said. "I understand."
"They were realities--yes, they must have been; people moved and things came
and went in them; my dear mother, whom I had near forgotten; then my father,
stern and upright, the servants, the nursery, all the familiar things of home. Then
the front door and the busy streets, with traffic to and fro: I looked and
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marvelled, and looked half doubtfully again into the woman's face and turned the
pages over, skipping this and that, to see more of this book, and more, and so at
last I came to myself hovering and hesitating outside the green door in the long
white wall, and felt again the conflict and the fear.
"'And next?' I cried, and would have turned on, but the cool hand of the grave
woman delayed me.
"'Next?' I insisted, and struggled gently with her hand, pulling up her fingers with
all my childish strength, and as she yielded and the page came over she bent
down upon me like a shadow and kissed my brow.
"But the page did not show the enchanted garden, nor the panthers, nor the girl
who had led me by the hand, nor the playfellows who had been so loth to let me
go. It showed a long grey street in West Kensington, on that chill hour of
afternoon before the lamps are lit, and I was there, a wretched little figure,
weeping aloud, for all that I could do to restrain myself, and I was weeping
because I could not return to my dear playfellows who had called after me,
'Come back to us! Come back to us soon!' I was there. This was no page in a
book, but harsh reality; that enchanted place and the restraining hand of the grave
mother at whose knee I stood had gone--whither have they gone?"
He halted again, and remained for a time, staring into the fire.
"Oh! The wretchedness of that return!" he murmured.
"Well?" I said after a minute or so.
"Poor little wretch I was--! Brought back to this grey world again! As I realised
the fulness of what had happened to me, I gave way to quite ungovernable grief.
And the shame and humiliation of that public weeping and my disgraceful homecoming remain with me still. I see again the benevolent-looking old gentleman in
gold spectacles who stopped and spoke to me--prodding me first with his
umbrella. 'Poor little chap,' said he; 'and are you lost then--?' And me a London
boy of five and more! And he must needs bring in a kindly young policeman and
make a crowd of me, and so march me home. Sobbing, conspicuous and
frightened, I came from the enchanted garden to the steps of my father's house.
"That is as well as I can remember my vision of that garden--the garden that
haunts me still. Of course, I can convey nothing of that indescribable quality of
translucent unreality, that difference from the common things of experience that
hung about it all; but that--that is what happened. If it was a dream, I am sure it
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was a daytime and altogether extraordinary dream...H'm--! Naturally there
followed a terrible questioning, by my aunt, my father, the nurse, the governess-everyone...
"I tried to tell them, and my father gave me my first thrashing for telling lies.
When afterwards I tried to tell my aunt, she punished me again for my wicked
persistence. Then as I said, everyone was forbidden to listen to me, to hear a
word about it. Even my fairy tale books were taken away from me for a time-because I was too 'imaginative.' Eh? Yes, they did that! My father belonged to
the old school...And my story was driven back upon myself. I whispered it to my
pillow--my pillow that was often damp and salt to my whispering lips with
childish tears. And I added always to my official and less fervent prayers this one
heartfelt request: 'Please God I may dream of the garden. Oh! Take me back to
my garden! Take me back to my garden!'
"I dreamt often of the garden. I may have added to it, I may have changed it; I do
not know...All this you understand is an attempt to reconstruct from fragmentary
memories a very early experience. Between that and the other consecutive
memories of my boyhood there is a gulf. A time came when it seemed impossible
I should ever speak of that wonder glimpse again."
I asked an obvious question.
"No," he said. "I don't remember that I ever attempted to find my way back to the
garden in those early years. This seems odd to me now, but I think that very
probably a closer watch was kept on my movements after this misadventure to
prevent my going astray. No, it wasn't until you knew me that I tried for the
garden again. And I believe there was a period--incredible as it seems now--when
I forgot the garden altogether--when I was about eight or nine it may have been.
Do you remember me as a kid at Saint Althelstan's?"
"Rather!"
"I didn't show any signs did I in those days of having a secret dream?"
2.
He looked up with a sudden smile.
"Did you ever play North-West Passage with me...? No, of course you didn't
come my way!
119
"It was the sort of game," he went on, "that every imaginative child plays all day.
The idea was the discovery of a North-West Passage to school. The way to
school was plain enough; the game consisted in finding some way that wasn't
plain, starting off ten minutes early in some almost hopeless direction, and
working one's way round through unaccustomed streets to my goal. And one day
I got entangled among some rather low-class streets on the other side of
Campden Hill, and I began to think that for once the game would be against me
and that I should get to school late. I tried rather desperately a street that seemed
a cul de sac, and found a passage at the end. I hurried through that with renewed
hope. 'I shall do it yet,' I said, and passed a row of frowsy little shops that were
inexplicably familiar to me, and behold! There was my long white wall and the
green door that led to the enchanted garden!
"The thing whacked upon me suddenly. Then after all, that garden, that
wonderful garden, wasn't a dream...!"
He paused.
"I suppose my second experience with the green door marks the world of
difference there is between the busy life of a schoolboy and the infinite leisure of
a child. Anyhow this second time I didn't for a moment think of going in straight
away. You see--For one thing my mind was full of the idea of getting to school in
time--set on not breaking my record for punctuality. I must surely have felt some
little desire at least to try the door--yes, I must have felt that...But I seem to
remember the attraction of the door mainly as another obstacle to my
overmastering determination to get to school. I was immediately interested by
this discovery I had made, of course--I went on with my mind full of it--but I
went on. It didn't check me. I ran past tugging out my watch, found I had ten
minutes still to spare, and then I was going downhill into familiar surroundings. I
got to school, breathless, it is true, and wet with perspiration, but in time. I can
remember hanging up my coat and hat...Went right by it and left it behind me.
Odd, eh?"
He looked at me thoughtfully. "Of course, I didn't know then that it wouldn't
always be there. School boys have limited imaginations. I suppose I thought it
was an awfully jolly thing to have it there, to know my way back to it, but there
was the school tugging at me. I expect I was a good deal distraught and
inattentive that morning, recalling what I could of the beautiful strange people I
should presently see again. Oddly enough I had no doubt in my mind that they
would be glad to see me...Yes, I must have thought of the garden that morning
just as a jolly sort of place to which one might resort in the interludes of a
strenuous scholastic career.
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"I didn't go that day at all. The next day was a half holiday, and that may have
weighed with me. Perhaps too, my state of inattention brought down impositions
upon me and docked the margin of time necessary for the detour. I don't know.
What I do know is that in the meantime the enchanted garden was so much upon
my mind that I could not keep it to myself.
"I told--What was his name--? A ferrety-looking youngster we used to call
Squiff."
"Young Hopkins," said I.
"Hopkins it was. I did not like telling him, I had a feeling that in some way it was
against the rules to tell him, but I did. He was walking part of the way home with
me; he was talkative, and if we had not talked about the enchanted garden we
should have talked of something else, and it was intolerable to me to think about
any other subject. So I blabbed.
"Well, he told my secret. The next day in the play interval I found myself
surrounded by half a dozen bigger boys, half teasing and wholly curious to hear
more of the enchanted garden. There was that big Fawcett--you remember him--?
And Carnaby and Morley Reynolds. You weren't there by any chance? No, I
think I should have remembered if you were...
"A boy is a creature of odd feelings. I was, I really believe, in spite of my secret
self-disgust, a little flattered to have the attention of these big fellows. I
remember particularly a moment of pleasure caused by the praise of Crawshaw-you remember Crawshaw major, the son of Crawshaw the composer--? Who said
it was the best lie he had ever heard. But at the same time there was a really
painful undertow of shame at telling what I felt was indeed a sacred secret. That
beast Fawcett made a joke about the girl in green--"
Wallace's voice sank with the keen memory of that shame. "I pretended not to
hear," he said. "Well, then Carnaby suddenly called me a young liar and disputed
with me when I said the thing was true. I said I knew where to find the green
door, could lead them all there in ten minutes. Carnaby became outrageously
virtuous, and said I'd have to--and bear out my words or suffer. Did you ever
have Carnaby twist your arm? Then perhaps you'll understand how it went with
me. I swore my story was true. There was nobody in the school then to save a
chap from Carnaby though Crawshaw put in a word or so. Carnaby had got his
game. I grew excited and red-eared, and a little frightened, I behaved altogether
like a silly little chap, and the outcome of it all was that instead of starting alone
for my enchanted garden, I led the way presently--cheeks flushed, ears hot, eyes
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smarting, and my soul one burning misery and shame--for a party of six
mocking, curious and threatening schoolfellows."
"We never found the white wall and the green door..."
"You mean--?"
"I mean I couldn't find it. I would have found it if I could.
"And afterwards when I could go alone I couldn't find it. I never found it. I seem
now to have been always looking for it through my school-boy days, but I've
never come upon it--again."
"Did the fellows--make it disagreeable?"
"Beastly...Carnaby held a council over me for wanton lying. I remember how I
sneaked home and upstairs to hide the marks of my blubbering. But when I cried
myself to sleep at last it wasn't for Carnaby, but for the garden, for the beautiful
afternoon I had hoped for, for the sweet friendly women and the waiting
playfellows and the game I had hoped to learn again, that beautiful forgotten
game...
"I believed firmly that if I had not told--...I had bad times after that--crying at
night and wool-gathering by day. For two terms I slackened and had bad reports.
Do you remember? Of course you would! It was you--your beating me in
mathematics that brought me back to the grind again."
3.
For a time my friend stared silently into the red heart of the fire. Then he said: "I
never saw it again until I was seventeen."
"It leapt upon me for the third time--as I was driving to Paddington on my way to
Oxford and a scholarship. I had just one momentary glimpse. I was leaning over
the apron of my hansom smoking a cigarette, and no doubt thinking myself no
end of a man of the world, and suddenly there was the door, the wall, the dear
sense of unforgettable and still attainable things.
"We clattered by--I too taken by surprise to stop my cab until we were well past
and round a corner. Then I had a queer moment, a double and divergent
movement of my will: I tapped the little door in the roof of the cab, and brought
my arm down to pull out my watch. 'Yes, sir!' said the cabman, smartly. 'Er-122
well--it's nothing,' I cried. 'My mistake! We haven't much time! Go on!' And he
went on...
"I got my scholarship. And the night after I was told of that I sat over my fire in
my little upper room, my study in my father's house, with his praise--his rare
praise--and his sound counsels ringing in my ears, and I smoked my favourite
pipe--the formidable bulldog of adolescence--and thought of that door in the long
white wall. 'If I had stopped,' I thought, 'I should have missed my scholarship, I
should have missed Oxford--muddled all the fine career before me! I begin to see
things better!' I fell musing deeply, but I did not doubt then this career of mine
was a thing that merited sacrifice.
"Those dear friends and that clear atmosphere seemed very sweet to me, very
fine, but remote. My grip was fixing now upon the world. I saw another door
opening--the door of my career."
He stared again into the fire. Its red lights picked out a stubborn strength in his
face for just one flickering moment, and then it vanished again.
"Well", he said and sighed, "I have served that career. I have done--much work,
much hard work. But I have dreamt of the enchanted garden a thousand dreams,
and seen its door, or at least glimpsed its door, four times since then. Yes--four
times. For a while this world was so bright and interesting, seemed so full of
meaning and opportunity that the half-effaced charm of the garden was by
comparison gentle and remote. Who wants to pat panthers on the way to dinner
with pretty women and distinguished men? I came down to London from Oxford,
a man of bold promise that I have done something to redeem. Something--and yet
there have been disappointments...
"Twice I have been in love--I will not dwell on that--but once, as I went to
someone who, I know, doubted whether I dared to come, I took a short cut at a
venture through an unfrequented road near Earl's Court, and so happened on a
white wall and a familiar green door. 'Odd!' said I to myself, 'But I thought this
place was on Campden Hill. It's the place I never could find somehow--like
counting Stonehenge--the place of that queer day dream of mine.' And I went by
it intent upon my purpose. It had no appeal to me that afternoon.
"I had just a moment's impulse to try the door, three steps aside were needed at
the most--though I was sure enough in my heart that it would open to me--and
then I thought that doing so might delay me on the way to that appointment in
which I thought my honour was involved. Afterwards I was sorry for my
punctuality--I might at least have peeped in I thought, and waved a hand to those
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panthers, but I knew enough by this time not to seek again belatedly that which is
not found by seeking. Yes, that time made me very sorry...
"Years of hard work after that and never a sight of the door. It's only recently it
has come back to me. With it there has come a sense as though some thin tarnish
had spread itself over my world. I began to think of it as a sorrowful and bitter
thing that I should never see that door again. Perhaps I was suffering a little from
overwork--perhaps it was what I've heard spoken of as the feeling of forty. I don't
know. But certainly the keen brightness that makes effort easy has gone out of
things recently, and that just at a time--ith all these new political developments-when I ought to be working. Odd isn't it? But I do begin to find life toilsome, its
rewards, as I come near them, cheap. I began a little while ago to want the garden
quite badly. Yes--and I've seen it three times."
"The garden?"
"No--The door! And I haven't gone in!"
He leaned over the table to me, with an enormous sorrow in his voice as he
spoke. "Thrice I have had my chance--thrice! If ever that door offers itself to me
again, I swore, I will go in out of this dust and heat, out of this dry glitter of
vanity, out of these toilsome futilities. I will go and never return. This time I will
stay...I swore it and when the time came--I didn't go.
"Three times in one year have I passed that door and failed to enter. Three times
in the last year."
"The first time was on the night of the snatch division on the Tenants'
Redemption Bill, on which the Government was saved by a majority of three.
You remember? No one on our side--perhaps very few on the opposite side-expected the end that night. Then the debate collapsed like eggshells. I and
Hotchkiss were dining with his cousin at Brentford, we were both unpaired, and
we were called up by telephone, and set off at once in his cousin's motor. We got
in barely in time, and on the way we passed my wall and door--livid in the
moonlight, blotched with hot yellow as the glare of our lamps lit it, but
unmistakable. 'My God!' cried I. 'What?' said Hotchkiss. 'Nothing!' I answered,
and the moment passed."
"'I've made a great sacrifice,' I told the whip as I got in. 'They all have,' he said,
and hurried by.
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"I do not see how I could have done otherwise then. And the next occasion was
as I rushed to my father's bedside to bid that stern old man farewell. Then too, the
claims of life were imperative. But the third time was different; it happened a
week ago. It fills me with hot remorse to recall it. I was with Gurker and Ralphs-it's no secret now you know that I've had my talk with Gurker. We had been
dining at Frobisher's, and the talk had become intimate between us. The question
of my place in the reconstructed ministry lay always just over the boundary of the
discussion. Yes--yes. That's all settled. It needn't be talked about yet, but there's
no reason to keep a secret from you... Yes--Thanks! Thanks! But let me tell you
my story.
"Then, on that night things were very much in the air. My position was a very
delicate one. I was keenly anxious to get some definite word from Gurker, but
was hampered by Ralphs' presence. I was using the best power of my brain to
keep that light and careless talk, not too obviously, directed to the point that
concerns me. I had to. Ralphs' behaviour since has more than justified my
caution...Ralphs I knew, would leave us beyond the Kensington High Street, and
then I could surprise Gurker by a sudden frankness. One has sometimes to resort
to these little devices...And then it was that in the margin of my field of vision I
became aware once more of the white wall, the green door before us down the
road."
"We passed it talking. I passed it. I can still see the shadow of Gurker's marked
profile, his opera hat tilted forward over his prominent nose, the many folds of
his neck wrap going before my shadow and Ralphs' as we sauntered past.
"I passed within twenty inches of the door. 'If I say good-night to them, and go
in,' I asked myself, 'what will happen?' And I was all a-tingle for that word with
Gurker.
"I could not answer that question in the tangle of my other problems. 'They will
think me mad,' I thought. 'And suppose I vanish now--! Amazing disappearance
of a prominent politician!' That weighed with me. A thousand inconceivably
petty worldlinesses weighed with me in that crisis."
Then he turned on me with a sorrowful smile, and speaking slowly; "Here I am!"
he said.
"Here I am!" he repeated, "and my chance has gone from me. Three times in one
year the door has been offered me--the door that goes into peace, into delight,
into a beauty beyond dreaming, a kindness no man on earth can know. And I
have rejected it, Redmond, and it has gone--"
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"How do you know?"
"I know. I know. I am left now to work it out, to stick to the tasks that held me so
strongly when my moments came. You say, I have success--this vulgar, tawdry,
irksome, envied thing. I have it." He had a walnut in his big hand. "If that was my
success," he said, and crushed it, and held it out for me to see.
"Let me tell you something, Redmond. This loss is destroying me. For two
months, for ten weeks nearly now, I have done no work at all, except the most
necessary and urgent duties. My soul is full of inappeasable regrets. At nights-when it is less likely I shall be recognised--I go out. I wander. Yes. I wonder
what people would think of that if they knew. A Cabinet Minister, the
responsible head of that most vital of all departments, wandering alone--grieving-sometimes near audibly lamenting--for a door, for a garden!"
4.
I can see now his rather pallid face, and the unfamiliar sombre fire that had come
into his eyes. I see him very vividly to-night. I sit recalling his words, his tones,
and last evening's Westminster Gazette still lies on my sofa, containing the notice
of his death. At lunch to-day the club was busy with him and the strange riddle of
his fate.
They found his body very early yesterday morning in a deep excavation near East
Kensington Station. It is one of two shafts that have been made in connection
with an extension of the railway southward. It is protected from the intrusion of
the public by a hoarding upon the high road, in which a small doorway has been
cut for the convenience of some of the workmen who live in that direction. The
doorway was left unfastened through a misunderstanding between two gangers,
and through it he made his way...
My mind is darkened with questions and riddles.
It would seem he walked all the way from the House that night--he has frequently
walked home during the past Session--and so it is I figure his dark form coming
along the late and empty streets, wrapped up, intent. And then did the pale
electric lights near the station cheat the rough planking into a semblance of
white? Did that fatal unfastened door awaken some memory?
Was there, after all, ever any green door in the wall at all?
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I do not know. I have told his story as he told it to me. There are times when I
believe that Wallace was no more than the victim of the coincidence between a
rare but not unprecedented type of hallucination and a careless trap, but that
indeed is not my profoundest belief. You may think me superstitious if you will,
and foolish; but indeed, I am more than half convinced that he had in truth, an
abnormal gift, and a sense, something--I know not what--that in the guise of wall
and door offered him an outlet, a secret and peculiar passage of escape into
another and altogether more beautiful world. At any rate, you will say, it betrayed
him in the end. But did it betray him? There you touch the inmost mystery of
these dreamers, these men of vision and the imagination.
We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our daylight
standard he walked out of security into darkness, danger and death. But did he
see like that?
THE PEARL OF LOVE
The pearl is lovelier than the most brilliant of crystalline stones, the moralist
declares, because it is made through the suffering of a living creature. About that
I can say nothing because I feel none of the fascination of pearls. Their cloudy
lustre moves me not at all. Nor can I decide for myself upon that age-long dispute
whether the Pearl of Love is the cruellest of stories or only a gracious fable of the
immortality of beauty.
Both the story and the controversy will be familiar to students of mediaeval
Persian prose. The story is a short one, though the commentary upon it is a
respectable part of the literature of that period. They have treated it as a poetic
invention and they have treated it as an allegory meaning this, that, or the other
thing. Theologians have had their copious way with it, dealing with it particularly
as concerning the restoration of the body after death, and it has been greatly used
as a parable by those who write about aesthetics. And many have held it to be the
statement of a fact, simply and baldly true.
The story is laid in North India, which is the most fruitful soil for sublime love
stories of all the lands in the world. It was in a country of sunshine and lakes and
rich forests and hills and fertile valleys; and far away the great mountains hung in
the sky, peaks, crests, ridges of inaccessible and eternal snow. There was a young
prince, lord of all the land; and he found a maiden of indescribable beauty and
delightfulness and he made her his queen and laid his heart at her feet. Love was
theirs, full of joys and sweetness, full of hope, exquisite, brave and marvellous
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love, beyond anything you have ever dreamt of love. It was theirs for a year and
part of a year, and then suddenly, because of some venomous sting that came to
her in a thicket, she died.
She died and for a while the prince was utterly prostrated. He was silent and
motionless with grief. They feared he might kill himself, and he had neither sons
nor brothers to succeed him. For two days and nights he lay upon his face,
fasting, across the foot of the couch which bore her calm and lovely body. Then
he arose and ate, and went about very quietly like one who has taken a great
resolution. He caused her body to be put in a coffin of lead mixed with silver, and
for that he had an outer coffin made of the most precious and scented woods
wrought with gold, and about that there was to be a sarcophagus of alabaster,
inlaid with precious stones. And while these things were being done he spent his
time for the most part by the pools and in the garden-houses and pavilions and
groves and in those chambers in the palace where they two had been most
together, brooding upon her loveliness. He did not rend his garments nor defile
himself with ashes and sackcloth as the custom was, for his love was too great for
such extravagances. At last he came forth again among his councillors and before
the people, and told them what he had a mind to do.
He said he could never more touch woman, he could never more think of them,
and so he would find a seemly youth to adopt for his heir and train him to his
task, and that he would do his princely duties as became him; but that for the rest
of it, he would give himself with all his power and all his strength and all his
wealth, all that he could command, to make a monument worthy of his
incomparable, dear, lost mistress. A building it should be of perfect grace and
beauty, more marvellous than any other building had ever been or could ever be,
so that to the end of time it should be a wonder, and men would treasure it and
speak of it and desire to see it and come from all lands of the earth to visit and
recall the name and memory of his queen. And this building he said was to be
called the Pearl of Love.
And this his councillors and people permitted him to do, and so he did.
Year followed year, and all the years he devoted himself to building and adorning
the Pearl of Love. A great foundation was hewn out of the living rock in a place
whence one seemed to be looking at the snowy wilderness of the great mountains
across the valley of the world. Villages and hills there were, a winding river, and
very far away three great cities. Here they put the sarcophagus of alabaster
beneath a pavilion of cunning workmanship; and about it there were set pillars of
strange and lovely stone and wrought and fretted walls, and a great casket of
masonry bearing a dome and pinnacles and cupolas, as exquisite as a jewel. At
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first the design of Pearl of Love was less bold and subtle than it became later. At
first it was smaller and more wrought and encrusted; there were many pierced
screens and delicate clusters of rosy-hued pillars, and the sarcophagus lay like a
child that sleeps among flowers. The first dome was covered with green tiles,
framed and held together by silver, but this was taken away again because it
seemed close, because it did not soar grandly enough for the broadening
imagination of the prince.
For by this time he was no longer the graceful youth who had loved the girl
queen. He was now a man, grave and intent, wholly set upon the building of the
Pearl of Love. With every year of effort he had learnt new possibilities in arch
and wall and buttress; he had acquired greater power over the material he had to
use and he had learnt of a hundred stones and hues and effects that he could
never have thought of in the beginning. His sense of colour had grown finer and
colder; he cared no more for the enamelled gold-lined brightness that had pleased
him first, the brightness of an illuminated missal; he sought now for blue
colouring like the sky and for the subtle hues of great distances, for recondite
shadows and sudden broads floods of purple opalescence and for grandeur and
space. He wearied altogether of carvings and pictures and inlaid ornamentation
and all the little careful work of men. "Those were pretty things," he said of his
earlier decorations; and had them put aside into subordinate buildings where they
would not hamper his main design. Greater and greater grew his artistry. With
awe and amazement people saw the Pearl of Love sweeping up from its first
beginnings to a superhuman breadth and height and magnificence. They did not
know clearly what they had expected, but never had they expected so sublime a
thing as this. "Wonderful are the miracles," they whispered, "that love can do,"
and all the women in the world, whatever other loves they had, loved the prince
for the splendour of his devotion.
Through the middle of the building ran a great aisle, a vista, that the prince came
to care for more and more. From the inner entrance of the building he looked
along the length of an immense pillared gallery and across the central area from
which the rose-hued columns had long since vanished, over the top the pavilion
under which lay the sarcophagus, through a marvellously designed opening, to
the snowy wilderness of the great mountain, the lord of all mountains, two
hundred miles away. The pillars and arches and buttresses and galleries soared
and floated on either side, perfect yet unobtrusive, like great archangels waiting
in the shadows about the presence of God. When men saw that austere beauty for
the first time they were exalted, and then they shivered and their hearts bowed
down. Very often would the prince come to stand there and look at that vista,
deeply moved and not yet fully satisfied. The Pearl of Love had still something
for him to do, he felt, before his task was done. Always he would order some
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little alteration to be made or some recent alteration to be put back again. And
one day he said that the sarcophagus would be clearer and simpler without the
pavilion; and after regarding it very steadfastly for a long time, he had the
pavilion dismantled and removed.
The next day he came and said nothing, and the next day and the next. Then for
two days he stayed away altogether. Then he returned, bringing with him an
architect and two master craftsmen and a small retinue.
All looked, standing together silently in a little group, amidst the serene vastness
of their achievement. No trace of toil remained in its perfection. It was as if God
of nature's beauty had taken over their offspring to himself.
Only one thing there was to mar the absolute harmony. There was a certain
disproportion about the sarcophagus. It had never been enlarged, and indeed how
could it have been enlarged since the early days? It challenged the eye; it nicked
the streaming lines. In that sarcophagus was the casket of lead and silver, and in
the casket of lead and silver was the queen, the dear immortal cause of all this
beauty. But now that sarcophagus seemed no more than a little dark oblong that
lay incongruously in the great vista of the Pearl of Love. It was as if someone had
dropped a small valise upon the crystal sea of heaven.
Long the prince mused, but no one knew the thoughts that passed through his
mind.
At last he spoke. He pointed.
"Take that thing away," he said.
THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
Three hundred miles and more from Chimborazo, one hundred from the snows of
Cotopaxi, in the wildest wastes of Ecuador's Andes, there lies that mysterious
mountain valley, cut off from all the world of men, the Country of the Blind.
Long years ago that valley lay so far open to the world that men might come at
last through frightful gorges and over an icy pass into its equable meadows, and
thither indeed men came, a family or so of Peruvian half-breeds fleeing from the
lust and tyranny of an evil Spanish ruler. Then came the stupendous outbreak of
Mindobamba, when it was night in Quito for seventeen days, and the water was
boiling at Yaguachi and all the fish floating dying even as far as Guayaquil;
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everywhere along the Pacific slopes there were landslips and swift thawings and
sudden floods, and one whole side of the old Arauca crest slipped and came
down in thunder, and cut off the Country of the Blind for ever from the exploring
feet of men. But one of these early settlers had chanced to be on the hither side of
the gorges when the world had so terribly shaken itself, and he perforce had to
forget his wife and his child and all the friends and possessions he had left up
there, and start life over again in the lower world. He started it again but ill,
blindness overtook him, and he died of punishment in the mines; but the story he
told begot a legend that lingers along the length of the Cordilleras of the Andes to
this day.
He told of his reason for venturing back from that fastness, into which he had
first been carried lashed to a llama, beside a vast bale of gear, when he was a
child. The valley, he said, had in it all that the heart of man could desire--sweet
water, pasture, an even climate, slopes of rich brown soil with tangles of a shrub
that bore an excellent fruit, and on one side great hanging forests of pine that held
the avalanches high. Far overhead, on three sides, vast cliffs of grey-green rock
were capped by cliffs of ice; but the glacier stream came not to them, but flowed
away by the farther slopes, and only now and then huge ice masses fell on the
valley side. In this valley it neither rained nor snowed, but the abundant springs
gave a rich green pasture, that irrigation would spread over all the valley space.
The settlers did well indeed there. Their beasts did well and multiplied, and but
one thing marred their happiness. Yet it was enough to mar it greatly. A strange
disease had come upon them and had made all the children born to them there-and indeed, several older children also--blind. It was to seek some charm or
antidote against this plague of blindness that he had with fatigue and danger and
difficulty returned down the gorge. In those days, in such cases, men did not
think of germs and infections, but of sins, and it seemed to him that the reason of
this affliction must he in the negligence of these priestless immigrants to set up a
shrine so soon as they entered the valley. He wanted a shrine--a handsome,
cheap, effectual shrine--to be erected in the valley; he wanted relics and suchlike
potent things of faith, blessed objects and mysterious medals and prayers. In his
wallet he had a bar of native silver for which he would not account; he insisted
there was none in the valley with something of the insistence of an inexpert liar.
They had all clubbed their money and ornaments together, having little need for
such treasure up there, he said, to buy them holy help against their ill. I figure
this dim-eyed young mountaineer, sunburnt, gaunt, and anxious, hat brim
clutched feverishly, a man all unused to the ways of the lower world, telling this
story to some keen-eyed, attentive priest before the great convulsion; I can
picture him presently seeking to return with pious and infallible remedies against
that trouble, and the infinite dismay with which he must have faced the tumbled
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vastness where the gorge had once come out. But the rest of his story of
mischances is lost to me, save that I know of his evil death after several years.
Poor stray from that remoteness! The stream that had once made the gorge now
bursts from the mouth of a rocky cave, and the legend his poor, ill-told story set
going developed into the legend of a race of blind men somewhere "over there"
one may still hear to-day.
And amidst the little population of that now isolated and forgotten valley the
disease ran its course. The old became groping, the young saw but dimly, and the
children that were born to them never saw at all. But life was very easy in that
snow-rimmed basin, lost to all the world, with neither thorns nor briers, with no
evil insects nor any beasts save the gentle breed of llamas they had lugged and
thrust and followed up the beds of the shrunken rivers in the gorges up which
they had come. The seeing had become purblind so gradually that they scarcely
noticed their loss. They guided the sightless youngsters hither and thither until
they knew the whole valley marvellously, and when at last sight died out among
them the race lived on. They had even time to adapt themselves to the blind
control of fire, which they made carefully in stoves of stone. They were a simple
strain of people at the first, unlettered, only slightly touched with the Spanish
civilisation, but with something of a tradition of the arts of old Peru and of its lost
philosophy. Generation followed generation. They forgot many things; they
devised many things. Their tradition of the greater world they came from became
mythical in colour and uncertain. In all things save sight they were strong and
able, and presently chance sent one who had an original mind and who could talk
and persuade among them, and then afterwards another. These two passed,
leaving their effects, and the little community grew in numbers and in
understanding, and met and settled social and economic problems that arose.
Generation followed generation. Generation followed generation. There came a
time when a child was born who was fifteen generations from that ancestor who
went out of the valley with a bar of silver to seek God's aid, and who never
returned. There about it chanced that a man came into this community from the
outer world. And this is the story of that man.
He was a mountaineer from the country near Quito, a man who had been down to
the sea and had seen the world, a reader of books in an original way, an acute and
enterprising man, and he was taken on by a party of Englishmen who had come
out to Ecuador to climb mountains, to replace one of their three Swiss guides
who had fallen ill. He climbed here and he climbed there, and then came the
attempt on Parascotopetl, the Matterhorn of the Andes, in which he was lost to
the outer world. The story of that accident has been written a dozen times.
Pointer's narrative is the best. He tells how the little party worked their difficult
and almost vertical way up to the very foot of the last and greatest precipice, and
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how they built a night shelter amidst the snow upon a little shelf of rock, and
with a touch of real dramatic power, how presently they found Nunez had gone
from them. They shouted, and there was no reply; shouted and whistled, and for
the rest of that night they slept no more.
As the morning broke they saw the traces of his fall. It seems impossible he could
have uttered a sound. He had slipped eastward towards the unknown side of the
mountain; far below he had struck a steep slope of snow, and ploughed his way
down it in the midst of a snow avalanche. His track went straight to the edge of a
frightful precipice, and beyond that everything was hidden. Far, far below, and
hazy with distance, they could see trees rising out of a narrow, shut-in valley--the
lost Country of the Blind. But they did not know it was the lost Country of the
Blind, nor distinguish it in any way from any other narrow streak of upland
valley. Unnerved by this disaster, they abandoned their attempt in the afternoon,
and Pointer was called away to the war before he could make another attack. To
this day Parascotopetl lifts an unconquered crest, and Pointer's shelter crumbles
unvisited amidst the snows.
And the man who fell survived.
At the end of the slope he fell a thousand feet, and came down in the midst of a
cloud of snow upon a snow slope even steeper than the one above. Down this he
was whirled, stunned and insensible, but without a bone broken in his body; and
then at last came to gentler slopes, and at last rolled out and lay still, buried
amidst a softening heap of the white masses that had accompanied and saved
him. He came to himself with a dim fancy that he was ill in bed; then realized his
position with a mountaineer's intelligence and worked himself loose and, after a
rest or so, out until he saw the stars. He rested flat upon his chest for a space,
wondering where he was and what had happened to him. He explored his limbs,
and discovered that several of his buttons were gone and his coat turned over his
head. His knife had gone from his pocket and his hat was lost, though he had tied
it under his chin. He recalled that he had been looking for loose stones to raise
his piece of the shelter wall. His ice-axe had disappeared.
He decided he must have fallen, and looked up to see, exaggerated by the ghastly
light of the rising moon, the tremendous flight he had taken. For a while he lay,
gazing blankly at the vast, pale cliff towering above, rising moment by moment
out of a subsiding tide of darkness. Its phantasmal, mysterious beauty held him
for a space, and then he was seized with a paroxysm of sobbing laughter...
After a great interval of time he became aware that he was near the lower edge of
the snow. Below, down what was now a moonlit and practicable slope, he saw
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the dark and broken appearance of rock-strewn turf. He struggled to his feet,
aching in every joint and limb, got down painfully from the heaped loose snow
about him, went downward until he was on the turf, and there dropped rather than
lay beside a boulder, drank deep from the flask in his inner pocket, and instantly
fell asleep...
He was awakened by the singing of birds in the trees far below.
He sat up and perceived he was on a little alp at the foot of a vast precipice that
sloped only a little in the gully down which he and his snow had come. Over
against him another wall of rock reared itself against the sky. The gorge between
these precipices ran east and west and was full of the morning sunlight, which lit
to the westward the mass of fallen mountain that closed the descending gorge.
Below him it seemed there was a precipice equally steep, but behind the snow in
the gully he found a sort of chimney-cleft dripping with snow-water, down which
a desperate man might venture. He found it easier than it seemed, and came at
last to another desolate alp, and then after a rock climb of no particular difficulty,
to a steep slope of trees. He took his bearings and turned his face up the gorge,
for he saw it opened out above upon green meadows, among which he now
glimpsed quite distinctly a cluster of stone huts of unfamiliar fashion. At times
his progress was like clambering along the face of a wall, and after a time the
rising sun ceased to strike along the gorge, the voices of the singing birds died
away, and the air grew cold and dark about him. But the distant valley with its
houses was all the brighter for that. He came presently to talus, and among the
rocks he noted--for he was an observant man--an unfamiliar fern that seemed to
clutch out of the crevices with intense green hands. He picked a frond or so and
gnawed its stalk, and found it helpful.
About midday he came at last out of the throat of the gorge into the plain and the
sunlight. He was stiff and weary; he sat down in the shadow of a rock, filled up
his flask with water from a spring and drank it down, and remained for a time,
resting before he went on to the houses.
They were very strange to his eyes, and indeed the whole aspect of that valley
became, as he regarded it, queerer and more unfamiliar. The greater part of its
surface was lush green meadow, starred with many beautiful flowers, irrigated
with extraordinary care, and bearing evidence of systematic cropping piece by
piece. High up and ringing the valley about was a wall, and what appeared to be a
circumferential water-channel, from which the little trickles of water that fed the
meadow plants came, and on the higher slopes above this flocks of llamas
cropped the scanty herbage. Sheds, apparently shelters or feeding-places for the
llamas, stood against the boundary wall here and there. The irrigation streams ran
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together into a main channel down the centre of the valley, and this was enclosed
on either side by a wall breast high. This gave a singularly urban quality to this
secluded place, a quality that was greatly enhanced by the fact that a number of
paths paved with black and white stones, and each with a curious little kerb at the
side, ran hither and thither in an orderly manner. The houses of the central village
were quite unlike the casual and higgledy-piggledy agglomeration of the
mountain villages he knew; they stood in a continuous row on either side of a
central street of astonishing cleanness, here and there their parti-coloured facade
was pierced by a door, and not a solitary window broke their even frontage. They
were parti-coloured with extraordinary irregularity, smeared with a sort of plaster
that was sometimes grey, sometimes drab, sometimes slate-coloured or dark
brown; and it was the sight of this wild plastering first brought the word "blind"
into the thoughts of the explorer. "The good man who did that," he thought,
"must have been as blind as a bat."
He descended a steep place, and so came to the wall and channel that ran about
the valley, near where the latter spouted out its surplus contents into the deeps of
the gorge in a thin and wavering thread of cascade. He could now see a number
of men and women resting on piled heaps of grass, as if taking a siesta, in the
remoter part of the meadow, and nearer the village a number of recumbent
children, and then nearer at hand three men carrying pails on yokes along a little
path that ran from the encircling wall towards the houses. These latter were clad
in garments of llama cloth and boots and belts of leather, and they wore caps of
cloth with back and ear flaps. They followed one another in single file, walking
slowly and yawning as they walked, like men who have been up all night. There
was something so reassuringly prosperous and respectable in their bearing that
after a moment's hesitation Nunez stood forward as conspicuously as possible
upon his rock, and gave vent to a mighty shout that echoed round the valley.
The three men stopped, and moved their heads as though they were looking about
them. They turned their faces this way and that, and Nunez gesticulated with
freedom. But they did not appear to see him for all his gestures, and after a time,
directing themselves towards the mountains far away to the right, they shouted as
if in answer. Nunez bawled again, and then once more, and as he gestured
ineffectually the word "blind" came up to the top of his thoughts. "The fools must
be blind," he said.
When at last, after much shouting and wrath, Nunez crossed the stream by a little
bridge, came through a gate in the wall, and approached them, he was sure that
they were blind. He was sure that this was the Country of the Blind of which the
legends told. Conviction had sprung upon him, and a sense of great and rather
enviable adventure. The three stood side by side, not looking at him, but with
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their ears directed towards him, judging him by his unfamiliar steps. They stood
close together like men a little afraid, and he could see their eyelids closed and
sunken, as though the very balls beneath had shrunk away. There was an
expression near awe on their faces.
"A man," one said, in hardly recognisable Spanish--"A man it is--a man or a
spirit--coming down from the rocks."
But Nunez advanced with the confident steps of a youth who enters upon life. All
the old stories of the lost valley and the Country of the Blind had come back to
his mind, and through his thoughts ran this old proverb, as if it were a refrain-"In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King."
"In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King."
And very civilly he gave them greeting. He talked to them and used his eyes.
"Where does he come from, brother Pedro?" asked one.
"Down out of the rocks."
"Over the mountains I come," said Nunez, "out of the country beyond there-where men can see. From near Bogota, where there are a hundred thousands of
people, and where the city passes out of sight."
"Sight?" muttered Pedro. "Sight?"
"He comes," said the second blind man, "out of the rocks."
The cloth of their coats, Nunez saw was curious fashioned, each with a different
sort of stitching.
They startled him by a simultaneous movement towards him, each with a hand
outstretched. He stepped back from the advance of these spread fingers.
"Come hither," said the third blind man, following his motion and clutching him
neatly.
And they held Nunez and felt him over, saying no word further until they had
done so.
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"Carefully," he cried, with a finger in his eye, and found they thought that organ,
with its fluttering lids, a queer thing in him. They went over it again.
"A strange creature, Correa," said the one called Pedro. "Feel the coarseness of
his hair. Like a llama's hair."
"Rough he is as the rocks that begot him," said Correa, investigating Nunez's
unshaven chin with a soft and slightly moist hand. "Perhaps he will grow finer."
Nunez struggled a little under their examination, but they gripped him firm.
"Carefully," he said again.
"He speaks," said the third man. "Certainly he is a man."
"Ugh!" said Pedro, at the roughness of his coat.
"And you have come into the world?" asked Pedro.
"Out of the world. Over mountains and glaciers; right over above there, halfway
to the sun. Out of the great, big world that goes down, twelve days' journey to the
sea."
They scarcely seemed to heed him. "Our fathers have told us men may be made
by the forces of Nature," said Correa. "It is the warmth of things, and moisture,
and rottenness--rottenness."
"Let us lead him to the elders," said Pedro.
"Shout first," said Correa, "lest the children be afraid. This is a marvellous
occasion."
So they shouted, and Pedro went first and took Nunez by the hand to lead him to
the houses.
He drew his hand away. "I can see," he said.
"See?" said Correa.
"Yes; see," said Nunez, turning towards him, and stumbled against Pedro's pail.
"His senses are still imperfect," said the third blind man. "He stumbles, and talks
unmeaning words. Lead him by the hand."
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"As you will," said Nunez, and was led along laughing.
It seemed they knew nothing of sight.
Well, all in good time he would teach them.
He heard people shouting, and saw a number of figures gathering together in the
middle roadway of the village.
He found it tax his nerve and patience more than he had anticipated, that first
encounter with the population of the Country of the Blind. The place seemed
larger as he drew near to it, and the smeared plasterings queerer, and a crowd of
children and men and women (the women and girls he was pleased to note had,
some of them, quite sweet faces, for all that their eyes were shut and sunken)
came about him, holding on to him, touching him with soft, sensitive hands,
smelling at him, and listening at every word he spoke. Some of the maidens and
children, however, kept aloof as if afraid, and indeed his voice seemed coarse and
rude beside their softer notes. They mobbed him. His three guides kept close to
him with an effect of proprietorship, and said again and again, "A wild man out
of the rocks."
"Bogota," he said. "Bogota. Over the mountain crests."
"A wild man--using wild words," said Pedro. "Did you hear that--Bogota? His
mind has hardly formed yet. He has only the beginnings of speech."
A little boy nipped his hand. "Bogota!" he said mockingly.
"Aye! A city to your village. I come from the great world--where men have eyes
and see."
"His name's Bogota," they said.
"He stumbled," said Correa, "stumbled twice as we came hither."
"Bring him in to the elders."
And they thrust him suddenly through a doorway into a room as black as pitch,
save at the end there faintly glowed a fire. The crowd closed in behind him and
shut out all but the faintest glimmer of day, and before he could arrest himself he
had fallen headlong over the feet of a seated man. His arm, outflung, struck the
face of someone else as he went down; he felt the soft impact of features and
heard a cry of anger, and for a moment he struggled against a number of hands
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that clutched him. It was a one-sided fight. An inkling of the situation came to
him and he lay quiet.
"I fell down," he said; "I couldn't see in this pitchy darkness."
There was a pause as if the unseen persons about him tried to understand his
words. Then the voice of Correa said: "He is but newly formed. He stumbles as
he walks and mingles words that mean nothing with his speech."
Others also said things about him that he heard or understood imperfectly.
"May I sit up?" he asked, in a pause. "I will not struggle against you again."
They consulted and let him rise.
The voice of an older man began to question him, and Nunez found himself
trying to explain the great world out of which he had fallen, and the sky and
mountains and suchlike marvels, to these elders who sat in darkness in the
Country of the Blind. And they would believe and understand nothing whatever
that he told them, a thing quite outside his expectation. They would not even
understand many of his words. For fourteen generations these people had been
blind and cut off from all the seeing world; the names for all the things of sight
had faded and changed; the story of the outer world was faded and changed to a
child's story; and they had ceased to concern themselves with anything beyond
the rocky slopes above their circling wall. Blind men of genius had arisen among
them and questioned the shreds of belief and tradition they had brought with
them from their seeing days, and had dismissed all these things as idle fancies
and replaced them with new and saner explanations. Much of their imagination
had shrivelled with their eyes, and they had made for themselves new
imaginations with their ever more sensitive ears and finger-tips. Slowly Nunez
realised this: that his expectation of wonder and reverence at his origin and his
gifts was not to be borne out; and after his poor attempt to explain sight to them
had been set aside as the confused version of a new-made being describing the
marvels of his incoherent sensations, he subsided, a little dashed, into listening to
their instruction. And the eldest of the blind men explained to him life and
philosophy and religion, how that the world (meaning their valley) had been first
an empty hollow in the rocks, and then had come first inanimate things without
the gift of touch, and llamas and a few other creatures that had little sense, and
then men, and at last angels, whom one could hear singing and making fluttering
sounds, but whom no one could touch at all, which puzzled Nunez greatly until
he thought of the birds.
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He went on to tell Nunez how this time had been divided into the warm and the
cold, which are the blind equivalents of day and night, and how it was good to
sleep in the warm and work during the cold, so that now, but for his advent, the
whole town of the blind would have been asleep. He said Nunez must have been
specially created to learn and serve the wisdom they had acquired, and that for all
his mental incoherency and stumbling behaviour he must have courage and do
his best to learn, and at that all the people in the doorway murmured
encouragingly. He said the night--for the blind call their day night--was now far
gone, and it behooved everyone to go back to sleep. He asked Nunez if he knew
how to sleep, and Nunez said he did, but that before sleep he wanted food.
They brought him food--llama's milk in a bowl and rough salted bread--and led
him into a lonely place to eat out of their hearing, and afterwards to slumber until
the chill of the mountain evening roused them to begin their day again. But
Nunez slumbered not at all.
Instead, he sat up in the place where they had left him, resting his limbs and
turning the unanticipated circumstances of his arrival over and over in his mind.
Every now and then he laughed, sometimes with amusement and sometimes with
indignation.
"Unformed mind!" he said. "Got no senses yet! They little know they've been
insulting their heaven-sent king and master. I see I must bring them to reason. Let
me think--Let me think."
He was still thinking when the sun set.
Nunez had an eye for all beautiful things, and it seemed to him that the glow
upon the snowfields and glaciers that rose about the valley on every side was the
most beautiful thing he had ever seen. His eyes went from that inaccessible glory
to the village and irrigated fields, fast sinking into the twilight, and suddenly a
wave of emotion took him, and he thanked God from the bottom of his heart that
the power of sight had been given him.
He heard a voice calling to him from out of the village.
"Ya ho there, Bogota! Come hither!"
At that he stood up, smiling. He would show these people once and for all what
sight would do for a man. They would seek him, but not find him.
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"You move not, Bogota," said the voice.
He laughed noiselessly and made two stealthy steps aside from the path.
"Trample not on the grass, Bogota; that is not allowed."
Nunez had scarcely heard the sound he made himself. He stopped, amazed.
The owner of the voice came running up the piebald path towards him.
He stepped back into the pathway. "Here I am," he said.
"Why did you not come when I called you?" said the blind man. "Must you be
led like a child? Cannot you hear the path as you walk?"
Nunez laughed. "I can see it," he said.
"There is no such word as see," said the blind man, after a pause. "Cease this
folly and follow the sound of my feet."
Nunez followed, a little annoyed.
"My time will come," he said.
"You'll learn," the blind man answered. "There is much to learn in the world."
"Has no one told you, 'In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King'?"
"What is blind?" asked the blind man, carelessly, over his shoulder.
Four days passed and the fifth found the King of the Blind still incognito, as a
clumsy and useless stranger among his subjects.
It was, he found, much more difficult to proclaim himself than he had supposed,
and in the meantime, while he meditated his coup d'etat, he did what he was told
and learnt the manners and customs of the Country of the Blind. He found
working and going about at night a particularly irksome thing, and he decided
that, that should be the first thing he would change.
They led a simple, laborious life, these people, with all the elements of virtue and
happiness as these things can be understood by men. They toiled, but not
oppressively; they had food and clothing sufficient for their needs; they had days
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and seasons of rest; they made much of music and singing, and there was love
among them and little children.
It was marvellous with what confidence and precision they went about their
ordered world. Everything, you see, had been made to fit their needs; each of the
radiating paths of the valley area had a constant angle to the others, and was
distinguished by a special notch upon its kerbing; all obstacles and irregularities
of path or meadow had long since been cleared away; all their methods and
procedure arose naturally from their special needs. Their senses had become
marvellously acute; they could hear and judge the slightest gesture of a man a
dozen paces away--could hear the very beating of his heart. Intonation had long
replaced expression with them, and touches gesture, and their work with hoe and
spade and fork was as free and confident as garden work can be. Their sense of
smell was extraordinarily fine; they could distinguish individual differences as
readily as a dog can, and they went about the tending of llamas, who lived among
the rocks above and came to the wall for food and shelter, with ease and
confidence. It was only when at last Nunez sought to assert himself that he found
how easy and confident their movements could be.
He rebelled only after he had tried persuasion.
He tried at first on several occasions to tell them of sight. "Look you here, you
people," he said. "There are things you do not understand in me."
Once or twice one or two of them attended to him; they sat with faces downcast
and ears turned intelligently towards him, and he did his best to tell them what it
was to see. Among his hearers was a girl, with eyelids less red and sunken than
the others, so that one could almost fancy she was hiding eyes, whom especially
he hoped to persuade. He spoke of the beauties of sight, of watching the
mountains, of the sky and the sunrise, and they heard him with amused
incredulity that presently became condemnatory. They told him there were
indeed no mountains at all, but that the end of the rocks where the llamas grazed
was indeed the end of the world; thence sprang a cavernous roof of the universe,
from which the dew and the avalanches fell; and when he maintained stoutly the
world had neither end nor roof such as they supposed, they said his thoughts
were wicked. So far as he could describe sky and clouds and stars to them it
seemed to them a hideous void, a terrible blankness in the place of the smooth
roof to things in which they believed--it was an article of faith with them that the
cavern roof was exquisitely smooth to the touch. He saw that in some manner he
shocked them, and gave up that aspect of the matter altogether, and tried to show
them the practical value of sight. One morning he saw Pedro in the path called
Seventeen and coming towards the central houses, but still too far off for hearing
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or scent, and he told them as much. "In a little while," he prophesied, "Pedro will
be here." An old man remarked that Pedro had no business on path Seventeen,
and then, as if in confirmation, that individual as he drew near turned and went
transversely into path Ten, and so back with nimble paces towards the outer wall.
They mocked Nunez when Pedro did not arrive, and afterwards, when he asked
Pedro questions to clear his character, Pedro denied and outfaced him, and was
afterwards hostile to him.
Then he induced them to let him go a long way up the sloping meadows towards
the wall with one complaisant individual, and to him he promised to describe all
that happened among the houses. He noted certain goings and comings, but the
things that really seemed to signify to these people happened inside of or behind
the windowless houses--the only things they took note of to test him by--and of
those he could see or tell nothing; and it was after the failure of this attempt, and
the ridicule they could not repress, that he resorted to force. He thought of seizing
a spade and suddenly smiting one or two of them to earth, and so in fair combat
showing the advantage of eyes. He went so far with that resolution as to seize his
spade, and then he discovered a new thing about himself, and that was that it was
impossible for him to hit a blind man in cold blood.
He hesitated, and found them all aware that he had snatched up the spade. They
stood all alert, with their heads on one side, and bent ears towards him for what
he would do next.
"Put that spade down," said one, and he felt a sort of helpless horror. He came
near obedience.
Then he had thrust one backwards against a house wall, and fled past him and out
of the village.
He went athwart one of their meadows, leaving a track of trampled grass behind
his feet, and presently sat down by the side of one of their ways. He felt
something of the buoyancy that comes to all men in the beginning of a fight, but
more perplexity. He began to realise that you cannot even fight happily with
creatures who stand upon a different mental basis to yourself. Far away he saw a
number of men carrying spades and sticks come out of the street of houses and
advance in a spreading line along the several paths towards him. They advanced
slowly, speaking frequently to one another, and ever and again the whole cordon
would halt and sniff the air and listen.
The first time they did this Nunez laughed. But afterwards he did not laugh.
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One struck his trail in the meadow grass and came stooping and feeling his way
along it.
For five minutes he watched the slow extension of the cordon, and then his vague
disposition to do something forthwith became frantic. He stood up, went a pace
or so towards the circumferential wall, turned, and went back a little way. There
they all stood in a crescent, still and listening.
He also stood still, gripping his spade very tightly in both hands. Should he
charge them?
The pulse in his ears ran into the rhythm of "In the Country of the Blind the OneEyed Man is King."
Should he charge them?
He looked back at the high and unclimbable wall behind--unclimbable because of
its smooth plastering, but withal pierced with many little doors and at the
approaching line of seekers. Behind these others were now coming out of the
street of houses.
Should he charge them?
"Bogota!" called one. "Bogota! Where are you?"
He gripped his spade still tighter and advanced down the meadows towards the
place of habitations, and directly he moved they converged upon him. "I'll hit
them if they touch me," he swore; "by Heaven, I will. I'll hit." He called aloud,
"Look here, I'm going to do what I like in this valley! Do you hear? I'm going to
do what I like and go where I like."
They were moving in upon him quickly, groping, yet moving rapidly. It was like
playing blind man's buff with everyone blindfolded except one. "Get hold of
him!" cried one. He found himself in the arc of a loose curve of pursuers. He felt
suddenly he must be active and resolute.
"You don't understand," he cried, in a voice that was meant to be great and
resolute, and which broke. "You are blind and I can see. Leave me alone!"
"Bogota! Put down that spade and come off the grass!"
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The last order, grotesque in its urban familiarity, produced a gust of anger. "I'll
hurt you," he said, sobbing with emotion. "By Heaven, I'll hurt you! Leave me
alone!"
He began to run, not knowing clearly where to run. He ran from the nearest blind
man, because it was a horror to hit him. He stopped, and then made a dash to
escape from their closing ranks. He made for where a gap was wide, and the men
on either side, with a quick perception of the approach of his paces, rushed in on
one another. He sprang forward, and then saw he must be caught, and Swish! The
spade had struck. He felt the soft thud of hand and arm, and the man was down
with a yell of pain, and he was through.
Through! And then he was close to the street of houses again, and blind men,
whirling spades and stakes, were running with a reasoned swiftness hither and
thither.
He heard steps behind him just in time, and found a tall man rushing forward and
swiping at the sound of him. He lost his nerve, hurled his spade a yard wide of
this antagonist, and whirled about and fled, fairly yelling as he dodged another.
He was panic-stricken. He ran furiously to and fro, dodging when there was no
need to dodge, and in his anxiety to see on every side of him at once, stumbling.
For a moment he was down and they heard his fall. Far away in the
circumferential wall a little doorway looked like Heaven, and he set off in a wild
rush for it. He did not even look round at his pursuers until it was gained, and he
had stumbled across the bridge, clambered a little way among the rocks, to the
surprise and dismay of a young llama, who went leaping out of sight, and lay
down sobbing for breath.
And so his coup d'etat came to an end.
He stayed outside the wall of the valley of the blind for two nights and days
without food or shelter, and meditated upon the unexpected. During these
meditations he repeated very frequently and always with a profounder note of
derision the exploded proverb: "In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is
King." He thought chiefly of ways of fighting and conquering these people, and it
grew clear that for him no practicable way was possible. He had no weapons, and
now it would be hard to get one.
The canker of civilisation had got to him even in Bogota, and he could not find it
in himself to go down and assassinate a blind man. Of course, if he did that, he
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might then dictate terms on the threat of assassinating them all. But--Sooner or
later he must sleep...!
He tried also to find food among the pine trees, to be comfortable under pine
boughs while the frost fell at night, and--with less confidence--to catch a llama
by artifice in order to try to kill it--perhaps by hammering it with a stone--and so
finally, perhaps, to eat some of it. But the llamas had a doubt of him and regarded
him with distrustful brown eyes and spat when he drew near. Fear came on him
the second day and fits of shivering. Finally he crawled down to the wall of the
Country of the Blind and tried to make his terms. He crawled along by the
stream, shouting, until two blind men came out to the gate and talked to him.
"I was mad," he said. "But I was only newly made."
They said that was better.
He told them he was wiser now, and repented of all he had done.
Then he wept without intention, for he was very weak and ill now, and they took
that as a favourable sign.
They asked him if he still thought he could see."
"No," he said. "That was folly. The word means nothing--less than nothing!"
They asked him what was overhead.
"About ten times ten the height of a man there is a roof above the world--of rock-and very, very smooth..." He burst again into hysterical tears. "Before you ask
me any more, give me some food or I shall die!"
He expected dire punishments, but these blind people were capable of toleration.
They regarded his rebellion as but one more proof of his general idiocy and
inferiority, and after they had whipped him they appointed him to do the simplest
and heaviest work they had for anyone to do, and he, seeing no other way of
living, did submissively what he was told.
He was ill for some days and they nursed him kindly. That refined his
submission. But they insisted on his lying in the dark, and that was a great
misery. And blind philosophers came and talked to him of the wicked levity of
his mind, and reproved him so impressively for his doubts about the lid of rock
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that covered their cosmic casserole that he almost doubted whether indeed he was
not the victim of hallucination in not seeing it overhead.
So Nunez became a citizen of the Country of the Blind, and these people ceased
to be a generalised people and became individualities to him, and familiar to him,
while the world beyond the mountains became more and more remote and unreal.
There was Yacob, his master, a kindly man when not annoyed; there was Pedro,
Yacob's nephew; and there was Medina-sarote, who was the youngest daughter
of Yacob. She was little esteemed in the world of the blind, because she had a
clear-cut face and lacked that satisfying, glossy smoothness that is the blind
man's ideal of feminine beauty, but Nunez thought her beautiful at first, and
presently the most beautiful thing in the whole creation. Her closed eyelids were
not sunken and red after the common way of the valley, but lay as though they
might open again at any moment; and she had long eyelashes, which were
considered a grave disfigurement. And her voice was weak and did not satisfy the
acute hearing of the valley swains. So that she had no lover.
There came a time when Nunez thought that, could he win her, he would be
resigned to live in the valley for all the rest of his days.
He watched her; he sought opportunities of doing her little services and presently
he found that she observed him. Once at a rest-day gathering they sat side by side
in the dim starlight, and the music was sweet. His hand came upon hers and he
dared to clasp it. Then very tenderly she returned his pressure. And one day, as
they were at their meal in the darkness, he felt her hand very softly seeking him,
and as it chanced the fire leapt then, and he saw the tenderness of her face.
He sought to speak to her.
He went to her one day when she was sitting in the summer moonlight spinning.
The light made her a thing of silver and mystery. He sat down at her feet and told
her he loved her, and told her how beautiful she seemed to him. He had a lover's
voice, he spoke with a tender reverence that came near to awe, and she had never
before been touched by adoration. She made him no definite answer, but it was
clear his words pleased her.
After that he talked to her whenever he could take an opportunity. The valley
became the world for him, and the world beyond the mountains where men lived
by day seemed no more than a fairy tale he would some day pour into her ears.
Very tentatively and timidly he spoke to her of sight.
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Sight seemed to her the most poetical of fancies, and she listened to his
description of the stars and the mountains and her own sweet white-lit beauty as
though it was a guilty indulgence. She did not believe, she could only half
understand, but she was mysteriously delighted, and it seemed to him that she
completely understood.
His love lost its awe and took courage. Presently he was for demanding her of
Yacob and the elders in marriage, but she became fearful and delayed. And it was
one of her elder sisters who first told Yacob that Medina-sarote and Nunez were
in love.
There was from the first very great opposition to the marriage of Nunez and
Medina-sarote; not so much because they valued her as because they held him as
a being apart, an idiot, incompetent thing below the permissible level of a man.
Her sisters opposed it bitterly as bringing discredit on them all; and old Yacob,
though he had formed a sort of liking for his clumsy, obedient serf, shook his
head and said the thing could not be. The young men were all angry at the idea of
corrupting the race, and one went so far as to revile and strike Nunez. He struck
back. Then for the first time he found an advantage in seeing, even by twilight,
and after that fight was over no one was disposed to raise a hand against him. But
they still found his marriage impossible.
Old Yacob had a tenderness for his last little daughter, and was grieved to have
her weep upon his shoulder.
"You see, my dear, he's an idiot. He has delusions; he can't do anything right."
"I know," wept Medina-sarote. "But he's better than he was. He's getting better.
And he's strong, dear father, and kind--stronger and kinder than any other man in
the world. And he loves me--and father, I love him."
Old Yacob was greatly distressed to find her inconsolable, and besides--what
made it more distressing--he liked Nunez for many things. So he went and sat in
the windowless council-chamber with the other elders and watched the trend of
the talk, and said, at the proper time, "He's better than he was. Very likely, some
day, we shall find him as sane as ourselves."
Then afterwards one of the elders, who thought deeply, had an idea. He was a
great doctor among these people, their medicine-man, and he had a very
philosophical and inventive mind, and the idea of curing Nunez of his
peculiarities appealed to him. One day when Yacob was present he returned to
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the topic of Nunez. "I have examined Nunez," he said, "and the case is clearer to
me. I think very probably he might be cured."
"This is what I have always hoped," said old Yacob.
"His brain is affected," said the blind doctor.
The elders murmured assent.
"Now, what affects it?"
"Ah!" said old Yacob.
"This," said the doctor, answering his own question. "Those queer things that are
called the eyes, and which exist to make an agreeable depression in the face, are
diseased, in the case of Nunez, in such a way as to affect his brain. They are
greatly distended, he has eyelashes, and his eyelids move, and consequently his
brain is in a state of constant irritation and distraction."
"Yes?" said old Yacob. "Yes?"
"And I think I may say with reasonable certainty that, in order to cure him
complete, all that we need to do is a simple and easy surgical operation--namely,
to remove these irritant bodies."
"And then he will be sane?"
"Then he will be perfectly sane, and a quite admirable citizen."
"Thank Heaven for science!" said old Yacob, and went forth at once to tell Nunez
of his happy hopes.
But Nunez's manner of receiving the good news struck him as being cold and
disappointing.
"One might think," he said, "from the tone you take that you did not care for my
daughter."
It was Medina-sarote who persuaded Nunez to face the blind surgeons.
"You do not want me," he said, "to lose my gift of sight?"
She shook her head.
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"My world is sight."
Her head drooped lower.
"There are the beautiful things, the beautiful little things--the flowers, the lichens
amidst the rocks, the light and softness on a piece of fur, the far sky with its
drifting dawn of clouds, the sunsets and the stars. And there is you. For you alone
it is good to have sight, to see your sweet, serene face, your kindly lips, your
dear, beautiful hands folded together...It is these eyes of mine you won, these
eyes that hold me to you, that these idiots seek. Instead, I must touch you, hear
you, and never see you again. I must come under that roof of rock and stone and
darkness, that horrible roof under which your imaginations stoop...No; you would
not have me do that?"
A disagreeable doubt had arisen in him. He stopped and left the thing a question.
"I wish," she said, "sometimes--" She paused.
"Yes?" he said, a little apprehensively.
"I wish sometimes--you would not talk like that."
"Like what?"
"I know it's pretty--it's your imagination. I love it, but now--"
He felt cold. "Now?" he said, faintly.
She sat quite still.
"You mean--you think--I should be better, better perhaps--"
He was realising things very swiftly. He felt anger perhaps, anger at the dull
course of fate, but also sympathy for her lack of understanding--a sympathy near
akin to pity.
"Dear," he said, and he could see by her whiteness how tensely her spirit pressed
against the things she could not say. He put his arms about her, he kissed her ear,
and they sat for a time in silence.
"If I were to consent to this?" he said at last, in a voice that was very gentle.
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She flung her arms about him, weeping wildly. "Oh, if you would," she sobbed,
"if only you would!"
For a week before the operation that was to raise him from his servitude and
inferiority to the level of a blind citizen Nunez knew nothing of sleep, and all
through the warm, sunlit hours, while the others slumbered happily, he sat
brooding or wandered aimlessly, trying to bring his mind to bear on his dilemma.
He had given his answer, he had given his consent, and still he was not sure. And
at last work-time was over, the sun rose in splendour over the golden crests, and
his last day of vision began for him. He had a few minutes with Medina-sarote
before she went apart to sleep.
"To-morrow," he said, "I shall see no more."
"Dear heart!" she answered, and pressed his hands with all her strength.
"They will hurt you but little," she said; "and you are going through this pain-you are going through it, dear lover, for me...Dear, if a woman's heart and life
can do it, I will repay you. My dearest one, my dearest with the tender voice, I
will repay."
He was drenched in pity for himself and her.
He held her in his arms, and pressed his lips to hers and looked on her sweet face
for the last time. "Good-bye!" he whispered to that dear sight, "Good-bye!"
And then in silence he turned away from her.
She could hear his slow retreating footsteps, and something in the rhythm of
them threw her into a passion of weeping.
He walked away.
He had fully meant to go to a lonely place where the meadows were beautiful
with white narcissus, and there remain until the hour of his sacrifice should
come, but as he walked he lifted up his eyes and saw the morning, the morning
like an angel in golden armour, marching down the steeps...
It seemed to him that before this splendour he and this blind world in the valley,
and his love and all, were no more than a pit of sin.
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He did not turn aside as he had meant to do, but went on and passed through the
wall of the circumference and out upon the rocks, and his eyes were always upon
the sunlit ice and snow.
He saw their infinite beauty, and his imagination soared over them to the things
beyond he was now to resign for ever!
He thought of that great free world that he was parted from, the world that was
his own, and he had a vision of those further slopes, distance beyond distance,
with Bogota, a place of multitudinous stirring beauty, a glory by day, a luminous
mystery by night, a place of palaces and fountains and statues and white houses,
lying beautifully in the middle distance. He thought how for a day or so one
might come down through passes drawing ever nearer and nearer to its busy
streets and ways. He thought of the river journey, day by day, from great Bogota
to the still vaster world beyond, through towns and villages, forest and desert
places, the rushing river day by day, until its banks receded, and the big steamers
came splashing by and one had reached the sea--the limitless sea, with its
thousand islands, its thousands of islands, and its ships seen dimly far away in
their incessant journeyings round and about that greater world. And there, unpent
by mountains, one saw the sky--the sky, not such a disc as one saw it here, but an
arch of immeasurable blue, a deep of deeps in which the circling stars were
floating...
His eyes scrutinised the great curtain of the mountains with a keener inquiry.
For example; if one went so, up that gully and to that chimney there, then one
might come out high among those stunted pines that ran round in a sort of shelf
and rose still higher and higher as it passed above the gorge. And then? That talus
might be managed. Thence perhaps a climb might be found to take him up to the
precipice that came below the snow; and if that chimney failed, then another
farther to the east might serve his purpose better. And then? Then one would be
out upon the amber-lit snow there, and halfway up to the crest of those beautiful
desolations. And suppose one had good fortune!
He glanced back at the village, then turned right round and regarded it with
folded arms.
He thought of Medina-sarote, and she had become small and remote.
He turned again towards the mountain wall down which the day had come to
him.
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Then very circumspectly he began his climb.
When sunset came he was no longer climbing, but he was far and high. His
clothes were torn, his limbs were blood-stained, he was bruised in many places,
but he lay as if he were at his ease, and there was a smile on his face.
From where he rested the valley seemed as if it were in a pit and nearly a mile
below. Already it was dim with haze and shadow, though the mountain summits
around him were things of light and fire. The mountain summits around him were
things of light and fire, and the little things in the rocks near at hand were
drenched with light and beauty, a vein of green mineral piercing the grey, a flash
of small crystal here and there, a minute, minutely beautiful orange lichen close
beside his face. There were deep, mysterious shadows in the gorge, blue
deepening into purple, and purple into a luminous darkness, and overhead was
the illimitable vastness of the sky. But he heeded these things no longer, but lay
quite still there, smiling as if he were content now merely to have escaped from
the Valley of the Blind, in which he had thought to be King. And the glow of the
sunset passed, and the night came, and still he lay there, under the cold, clear
stars.
THE STOLEN BACILLUS AND OTHER
STORIES
THE STOLEN BACILLUS
"This again," said the Bacteriologist, slipping a glass slide under the microscope,
"is a preparation of the celebrated Bacillus of cholera--the cholera germ."
The pale-faced man peered down the microscope. He was evidently not
accustomed to that kind of thing, and held a limp white hand over his disengaged
eye. "I see very little," he said.
"Touch this screw," said the Bacteriologist; "perhaps the microscope is out of
focus for you. Eyes vary so much. Just the fraction of a turn this way or that."
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"Ah! Now I see," said the visitor. "Not so very much to see after all. Little streaks
and shreds of pink. And yet those little particles, those mere atomies, might
multiply and devastate a city! Wonderful!"
He stood up, and releasing the glass slip from the microscope, held it in his hand
towards the window. "Scarcely visible," he said, scrutinising the preparation. He
hesitated. "Are these--alive? Are they dangerous now?"
"Those have been stained and killed," said the Bacteriologist. "I wish, for my
own part, we could kill and stain every one of them in the universe."
"I suppose," the pale man said with a slight smile, "that you scarcely care to have
such things about you in the living--in the active state?"
"On the contrary, we are obliged to," said the Bacteriologist. "Here, for instance-" He walked across the room and took up one of several sealed tubes. "Here is the
living thing. This is a cultivation of the actual living disease bacteria." He
hesitated. "Bottled cholera, so to speak."
A slight gleam of satisfaction appeared momentarily in the face of the pale man.
"It's a deadly thing to have in your possession," he said, devouring the little tube
with his eyes. The Bacteriologist watched the morbid pleasure in his visitor's
expression. This man, who had visited him that afternoon with a note of
introduction from an old friend, interested him from the very contrast of their
dispositions. The lank black hair and deep grey eyes, the haggard expression and
nervous manner, the fitful yet keen interest of his visitor were a novel change
from the phlegmatic deliberations of the ordinary scientific worker with whom
the Bacteriologist chiefly associated. It was perhaps natural, with a hearer
evidently so impressionable to the lethal nature of his topic, to take the most
effective aspect of the matter.
He held the tube in his hand thoughtfully. "Yes, here is the pestilence
imprisoned. Only break such a little tube as this into a supply of drinking-water,
say to these minute particles of life that one must needs stain and examine with
the highest powers of the microscope even to see, and that one can neither smell
nor taste--say to them, 'Go forth, increase and multiply, and replenish the
cisterns,' and death--mysterious, untraceable death, death swift and terrible, death
full of pain and indignity--would be released upon this city, and go hither and
thither seeking his victims. Here he would take the husband from the wife, here
the child from its mother, here the statesman from his duty, and here the toiler
from his trouble. He would follow the water-mains, creeping along streets,
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picking out and punishing a house here and a house there where they did not boil
their drinking-water, creeping into the wells of the mineral-water makers, getting
washed into salad, and lying dormant in ices. He would wait ready to be drunk in
the horse-troughs, and by unwary children in the public fountains. He would soak
into the soil, to reappear in springs and wells at a thousand unexpected places.
Once start him at the water supply, and before we could ring him in, and catch
him again, he would have decimated the metropolis."
He stopped abruptly. He had been told rhetoric was his weakness.
"But he is quite safe here, you know--quite safe."
The pale-faced man nodded. His eyes shone. He cleared his throat. "These
Anarchist--rascals," said he, "are fools, blind fools--to use bombs when this kind
of thing is attainable. I think--"
A gentle rap, a mere light touch of the finger-nails was heard at the door. The
Bacteriologist opened it. "Just a minute, dear," whispered his wife.
When he re-entered the laboratory his visitor was looking at his watch. "I had no
idea I had wasted an hour of your time," he said. "Twelve minutes to four. I
ought to have left here by half-past three. But your things were really too
interesting. No, positively I cannot stop a moment longer. I have an engagement
at four."
He passed out of the room reiterating his thanks, and the Bacteriologist
accompanied him to the door, and then returned thoughtfully along the passage to
his laboratory. He was musing on the ethnology of his visitor. Certainly the man
was not a Teutonic type nor a common Latin one. "A morbid product, anyhow, I
am afraid," said the Bacteriologist to himself. "How he gloated on those
cultivations of disease-germs!" A disturbing thought struck him. He turned to the
bench by the vapour-bath, and then very quickly to his writing-table. Then he felt
hastily in his pockets, and then rushed to the door. "I may have put it down on the
hall table," he said.
"Minnie!" he shouted hoarsely in the hall.
"Yes, dear," came a remote voice.
"Had I anything in my hand when I spoke to you, dear, just now?"
Pause.
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"Nothing, dear, because I remember--"
"Blue ruin!" cried the Bacteriologist, and incontinently ran to the front door and
down the steps of his house to the street.
Minnie, hearing the door slam violently, ran in alarm to the window. Down the
street a slender man was getting into a cab. The Bacteriologist, hatless, and in his
carpet slippers, was running and gesticulating wildly towards this group. One
slipper came off, but he did not wait for it. "He has gone mad!" said Minnie; "It's
that horrid science of his"; and opening the window, would have called after him.
The slender man, suddenly glancing round, seemed struck with the same idea of
mental disorder. He pointed hastily to the Bacteriologist, said something to the
cabman, the apron of the cab slammed, the whip swished, the horse's feet
clattered, and in a moment cab, and Bacteriologist hotly in pursuit, had receded
up the vista of the roadway and disappeared round the corner.
Minnie remained straining out of the window for a minute. Then she drew her
head back into the room again. She was dumbfounded. "Of course he is
eccentric," she meditated. "But running about London--in the height of the
season, too--in his socks!" A happy thought struck her. She hastily put her bonnet
on, seized his shoes, went into the hall, took down his hat and light overcoat from
the pegs, emerged upon the doorstep, and hailed a cab that opportunely crawled
by. "Drive me up the road and round Havelock Crescent, and see if we can find a
gentleman running about in a velveteen coat and no hat."
"Velveteen coat, ma'am, and no 'at. Very good, ma'am." And the cabman
whipped up at once in the most matter-of-fact way, as if he drove to this address
every day in his life.
Some few minutes later the little group of cabmen and loafers that collects round
the cabmen's shelter at Haverstock Hill were startled by the passing of a cab with
a ginger-coloured screw of a horse, driven furiously.
They were silent as it went by, and then as it receded--"That's 'Arry 'Icks. Wot's
he got?" said the stout gentleman known as old Tootles.
"He's a-using his whip, he is, to rights," said the ostler boy.
"Hullo!" said poor old Tommy Byles; "here's another bloomin' loonatic. Blowed
if there ain't."
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"It's old George," said old Tootles, "and he's drivin' a loonatic, as you say. Ain't
he a-clawin' out of the keb? Wonder if he's after 'Arry 'Icks?"
The group round the cabmen's shelter became animated. Chorus: "Go it,
George!" "It's a race." "You'll ketch 'em!" "Whip up!"
"She's a goer, she is!" said the ostler boy.
"Strike me giddy!" cried old Tootles. "Here! I'm a-goin' to begin in a minute.
Here's another comin'. If all the kebs in Hampstead ain't gone mad this morning!"
"It's a fieldmale this time," said the ostler boy.
"She's a followin' him," said old Tootles. "Usually the other way about."
"What's she got in her 'and?"
"Looks like a 'igh 'at."
"What a bloomin' lark it is! Three to one on old George," said the ostler boy.
"Nexst!"
Minnie went by in a perfect roar of applause. She did not like it but she felt that
she was doing her duty, and whirled on down Haverstock Hill and Camden Town
High Street with her eyes ever intent on the animated back view of old George,
who was driving her vagrant husband so incomprehensibly away from her.
The man in the foremost cab sat crouched in the corner, his arms tightly folded,
and the little tube that contained such vast possibilities of destruction gripped in
his hand. His mood was a singular mixture of fear and exultation. Chiefly he was
afraid of being caught before he could accomplish his purpose, but behind this
was a vaguer but larger fear of the awfulness of his crime. But his exultation far
exceeded his fear. No Anarchist before him had ever approached this conception
of his. Ravachol, Vaillant, all those distinguished persons whose fame he had
envied dwindled into insignificance beside him. He had only to make sure of the
water supply, and break the little tube into a reservoir. How brilliantly he had
planned it, forged the letter of introduction and got into the laboratory, and how
brilliantly he had seized his opportunity! The world should hear of him at last.
All those people who had sneered at him, neglected him, preferred other people
to him, found his company undesirable, should consider him at last. Death, death,
death! They had always treated him as a man of no importance. All the world had
been in a conspiracy to keep him under. He would teach them yet, what it is to
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isolate a man. What was this familiar street? Great Saint Andrew's Street, of
course! How fared the chase? He craned out of the cab. The Bacteriologist was
scarcely fifty yards behind. That was bad. He would be caught and stopped yet.
He felt in his pocket for money, and found half-a-sovereign. This he thrust up
through the trap in the top of the cab into the man's face. "More," he shouted, "if
only we get away."
The money was snatched out of his hand. "Right you are," said the cabman, and
the trap slammed, and the lash lay along the glistening side of the horse. The cab
swayed, and the Anarchist, half-standing under the trap, put the hand containing
the little glass tube upon the apron to preserve his balance. He felt the brittle
thing crack, and the broken half of it rang upon the floor of the cab. He fell back
into the seat with a curse, and stared dismally at the two or three drops of
moisture on the apron.
He shuddered.
"Well! I suppose I shall be the first. Phew! Anyhow, I shall be a Martyr. That's
something. But it is a filthy death, nevertheless. I wonder if it hurts as much as
they say."
Presently a thought occurred to him--he groped between his feet. A little drop
was still in the broken end of the tube, and he drank that to make sure. It was
better to make sure. At any rate, he would not fail.
Then it dawned upon him that there was no further need to escape the
Bacteriologist. In Wellington Street he told the cabman to stop, and got out. He
slipped on the step, and his head felt queer. It was rapid stuff this cholera poison.
He waved his cabman out of existence, so to speak, and stood on the pavement
with his arms folded upon his breast awaiting the arrival of the Bacteriologist.
There was something tragic in his pose. The sense of imminent death gave him a
certain dignity. He greeted his pursuer with a defiant laugh.
"Vive l'Anarchie! You are too late, my friend. I have drunk it. The cholera is
abroad!"
The Bacteriologist from his cab beamed curiously at him through his spectacles.
"You have drunk it! An Anarchist! I see now." He was about to say something
more, and then checked himself. A smile hung in the corner of his mouth. He
opened the apron of his cab as if to descend, at which the Anarchist waved him a
dramatic farewell and strode off towards Waterloo Bridge, carefully jostling his
infected body against as many people as possible. The Bacteriologist was so
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preoccupied with the vision of him that he scarcely manifested the slightest
surprise at the appearance of Minnie upon the pavement with his hat and shoes
and overcoat. "Very good of you to bring my things," he said, and remained lost
in contemplation of the receding figure of the Anarchist.
"You had better get in," he said, still staring. Minnie felt absolutely convinced
now that he was mad, and directed the cabman home on her own responsibility.
"Put on my shoes? Certainly dear," said he, as the cab began to turn, and hid the
strutting black figure, now small in the distance, from his eyes. Then suddenly
something grotesque struck him, and he laughed. Then he remarked, "It is really
very serious, though.
"You see, that man came to my house to see me, and he is an Anarchist. No-don't faint, or I cannot possibly tell you the rest. And I wanted to astonish him,
not knowing he was an Anarchist, and took up a cultivation of that new species
of Bacterium I was telling you of, that infest, and I think cause, the blue patches
upon various monkeys; and like a fool, I said it was Asiatic cholera. And he ran
away with it to poison the water of London, and he certainly might have made
things look blue for this civilised city. And now he has swallowed it. Of course, I
cannot say what will happen, but you know it turned that kitten blue, and the
three puppies--in patches, and the sparrow--bright blue. But the bother is, I shall
have all the trouble and expense of preparing some more.
"Put on my coat on this hot day! Why? Because we might meet Mrs. Jabber. My
dear, Mrs. Jabber is not a draught. But why should I wear a coat on a hot day
because of Mrs. ----? Oh! Very well."
THE FLOWERING OF THE STRANGE ORCHID
The buying of orchids always has in it a certain speculative flavour. You have
before you the brown shrivelled lump of tissue, and for the rest you must trust
your judgment, or the auctioneer, or your good-luck, as your taste may incline.
The plant may be moribund or dead, or it may be just a respectable purchase, fair
value for your money, or perhaps--for the thing has happened again and again-there slowly unfolds before the delighted eyes of the happy purchaser, day after
day, some new variety, some novel richness, a strange twist of the labellum, or
some subtler coloration or unexpected mimicry. Pride, beauty, and profit blossom
together on one delicate green spike, and it may be, even immortality. For the
new miracle of Nature may stand in need of a new specific name, and what so
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convenient, as that of its discoverer? "Johnsmithia!" There have been worse
names.
It was perhaps the hope of some such happy discovery that made WinterWedderburn such a frequent attendant at these sales--that hope, and also, maybe,
the fact that he had nothing else of the slightest interest to do in the world. He
was a shy, lonely, rather ineffectual man, provided with just enough income to
keep off the spur of necessity, and not enough nervous energy to make him seek
any exacting employments. He might have collected stamps or coins, or
translated Horace, or bound books, or invented new species of diatoms. But, as it
happened, he grew orchids, and had one ambitious little hothouse.
"I have a fancy," he said over his coffee, "that something is going to happen to
me to-day." He spoke--as he moved and thought--slowly.
"Oh, don't say that!" said his housekeeper--who was also his remote cousin. For
"something happening" was a euphemism that meant only one thing to her.
"You misunderstand me. I mean nothing unpleasant, though what I do mean I
scarcely know.
"To-day," he continued, after a pause, "Peters' are going to sell a batch of plants
from the Andamans and the Indies. I shall go up and see what they have. It may
be I shall buy something good, unawares. That may be it."
He passed his cup for his second cupful of coffee.
"Are these the things collected by that poor young fellow you told me of the
other day?" asked his cousin as she filled his cup.
"Yes," he said, and became meditative over a piece of toast.
"Nothing ever does happen to me," he remarked presently, beginning to think
aloud. "I wonder why? Things enough happen to other people. There is Harvey.
Only the other week--on Monday he picked up sixpence, on Wednesday his
chicks all had the staggers, on Friday his cousin came home from Australia, and
on Saturday he broke his ankle. What a whirl of excitement--! Compared to me."
"I think I would rather be without so much excitement," said his housekeeper. "It
can't be good for you."
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"I suppose it's troublesome. Still...you see, nothing ever happens to me. When I
was a little boy I never had accidents. I never fell in love as I grew up. Never
married...I wonder how it feels to have something happen to you, something
really remarkable.
"That orchid-collector was only thirty-six--twenty years younger than myself-when he died. And he had been married twice, and divorced once; he had, had
malarial fever four times, and once he broke his thigh. He killed a Malay once,
and once he was wounded by a poisoned dart. And in the end he was killed by
jungle-leeches. It must have all been very trouble-some, but then it must have
been very interesting, you know--except, perhaps, the leeches."
"I am sure it was not good for him," said the lady, with conviction.
"Perhaps not." And then Wedderburn looked at his watch. "Twenty-three minutes
past eight. I am going up by the quarter to twelve train, so that there is plenty of
time. I think I shall wear my alpaca jacket--it is quite warm enough--and my grey
felt hat and brown shoes. I suppose--"
He glanced out of the window at the serene sky and sunlit garden, and then
nervously at his cousin's face.
"I think you had better take an umbrella if you are going to London," she said, in
a voice that admitted of no denial. "There's all between here and the station
coming back."
When he returned he was in a state of mild excitement. He had made a purchase.
It was rare that he could make up his mind quickly enough to buy, but this time
he had done so.
"These are Vandas," he said, "and a Dendrobe and some Palaeonopsis." He
surveyed his purchases lovingly as he consumed his soup. They were laid out on
the spotless tablecloth before him, and he was telling his cousin all about them as
he slowly meandered through his dinner. It was his custom to live all his visits to
London over again in the evening for her and his own entertainment.
"I knew something would happen to-day. And I have bought all these. Some of
them--some of them--I feel sure, do you know, that some of them will be
remarkable. I don't know how it is, but I feel just as sure as if someone had told
me that some of these will turn out remarkable.
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"That one--" he pointed to a shrivelled rhizome--"was not identified. It may be a
Palaeonopsis or it may not. It may be a new species, or even a new genus. And it
was the last that poor Batten ever collected."
"I don't like the look of it," said his housekeeper. "It's such an ugly shape."
"To me it scarcely seems to have a shape."
"I don't like those things that stick out," said his housekeeper.
"It shall be put away in a pot to-morrow."
"It looks," said the housekeeper, "like a spider shamming dead."
Wedderburn smiled and surveyed the root with his head on one side. "It is
certainly not a pretty lump of stuff. But you can never judge of these things from
their dry appearance. It may turn out to be a very beautiful orchid indeed. How
busy I shall be to-morrow! I must see to-night, just exactly what to do with these
things, and to-morrow I shall set to work.
"They found poor Batten lying dead, or dying, in a mangrove swamp--I forget
which," he began again presently, "with one of these very orchids crushed up
under his body. He had been unwell for some days with some kind of native
fever, and I suppose he fainted. These mangrove swamps are very unwholesome.
Every drop of blood, they say, was taken out of him by the jungle-leeches. It may
be that very plant that cost him his life to obtain."
"I think none the better of it for that."
"Men must work, though women may weep," said Wedderburn, with profound
gravity.
"Fancy dying away from every comfort in a nasty swamp! Fancy being ill of
fever with nothing to take but chlorodyne and quinine--if men were left to
themselves they would live on chlorodyne and quinine--and no one round you
but horrible natives! They say the Andaman islanders are most disgusting
wretches--and anyhow, they can scarcely make good nurses, not having the
necessary training. And just for people in England to have orchids!"
"I don't suppose it was comfortable, but some men seem to enjoy that kind of
thing," said Wedderburn. "Anyhow, the natives of his party were sufficiently
civilised to take care of all his collection until his colleague, who was an
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ornithologist, came back again from the interior; though they could not tell the
species of the orchid and had let it wither. And it makes these things more
interesting."
"It makes them disgusting. I should be afraid of some of the malaria clinging to
them. And just think, there has been a dead body lying across that ugly thing! I
never thought of that before. There! I declare I cannot eat another mouthful of
dinner!"
"I will take them off the table if you like, and put them in the window-seat. I can
see them just as well there."
The next few days he was indeed singularly busy in his steamy little hothouse,
fussing about with charcoal, lumps of teak, moss, and all the other mysteries of
the orchid cultivator. He considered he was having a wonderfully eventful time.
In the evening he would talk about these new orchids to his friends, and over, and
over again he reverted to his expectation of something strange.
Several of the Vandas and the Dendrobium died under his care, but presently the
strange orchid began to show signs of life. He was delighted and took his
housekeeper right away from jam-making to see it at once, directly he made the
discovery.
"That is a bud," he said, "and presently there will be a lot of leaves there and
those little things coming out here are aerial rootlets."
"They look to me like little white fingers poking out of the brown," said his
housekeeper. "I don't like them.
"Why not?"
"I don't know. They look like fingers trying to get at you. I can't help my likes
and dislikes."
"I don't know for certain, but I don't think there are any orchids I know that have
aerial rootlets quite like that. It may be my fancy, of course. You see they are a
little flattened at the ends."
"I don't like 'em," said his housekeeper, suddenly shivering and turning away. "I
know it's very silly of me--and I'm very sorry, particularly as you like the thing
so much. But I can't help thinking of that corpse."
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"But it may not be that particular plant. That was merely a guess of mine."
His housekeeper shrugged her shoulders. "Anyhow I don't like it," she said.
Wedderburn felt a little hurt at her dislike to the plant. But that did not prevent
his talking to her about orchids generally, and this orchid in particular, whenever
he felt inclined.
"There are such queer things about orchids," he said one day; "such possibilities
of surprises. You know, Darwin studied their fertilisation, and showed that the
whole structure of an ordinary orchid-flower was contrived in order that moths
might carry the pollen from plant to plant. Well, it seems that there are lots of
orchids known, the flower of which cannot possibly be used for fertilisation in
that way. Some of the Cypripediums, for instance; there are no insects known
that can possibly fertilise them, and some of them have never been found with
seed."
"But how do they form new plants?"
"By runners and tubers, and that kind of outgrowth. That is easily explained. The
puzzle is, what are the flowers for?
"Very likely," he added, "my orchid may be something extraordinary in that way.
If so, I shall study it. I have often thought of making researches as Darwin did.
But hitherto I have not found the time, or something else has happened to prevent
it. The leaves are beginning to unfold now. I do wish you would come and see
them!"
But she said that the orchid-house was so hot it gave her the headache. She had
seen the plant once again, and the aerial rootlets, which were now some of them
more than a foot long, had unfortunately reminded her of tentacles reaching out
after something; and they got into her dreams, growing after her with incredible
rapidity. So that she had settled to her entire satisfaction that she would not see
that plant again, and Wedderburn had to admire its leaves alone. They were of
the ordinary broad form, and a deep glossy green, with splashes and dots of deep
red towards the base. He knew of no other leaves quite like them. The plant was
placed on a low bench near the thermometer, and close by was a simple
arrangement by which a tap dripped on the hot-water pipes and kept the air
steamy. And he spent his afternoons now with some regularity meditating on the
approaching flowering of this strange plant.
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And at last the great thing happened. Directly he entered the little glass house he
knew that the spike had burst out, although his great Palaeonopsis Lowii hid the
corner where his new darling stood. There was a new odour in the air, a rich,
intensely sweet scent, that overpowered every other in that crowded, steaming
little greenhouse.
Directly he noticed this he hurried down to the strange orchid. And, behold! The
trailing green spikes bore now three great splashes of blossom, from which this
overpowering sweetness proceeded. He stopped before them in an ecstasy of
admiration.
The flowers were white, with streaks of golden orange upon the petals; the heavy
labellum was coiled into an intricate projection, and a wonderful bluish purple
mingled there with the gold. He could see at once that the genus was altogether a
new one. And the insufferable scent! How hot the place was! The blossoms
swam before his eyes.
He would see if the temperature was right. He made a step towards the
thermometer. Suddenly everything appeared unsteady. The bricks on the floor
were dancing up and down. Then the white blossoms, the green leaves behind
them, the whole green house, seemed to sweep sideways, and then in a curve
upward.
At half-past four his cousin made the tea, according to their invariable custom.
But Wedderburn did not come in for his tea. "He is worshipping that horrid
orchid," she told herself, and waited ten minutes. "His watch must have stopped.
I will go and call him."
She went straight to the hothouse, and, opening the door, called his name. There
was no reply. She noticed that the air was very close, and loaded with an intense
perfume. Then she saw something lying on the bricks between the hot-water
pipes.
For a minute, perhaps, she stood motionless.
He was lying, face upward, at the foot of the strange orchid. The tentacle-like
aerial rootlets no longer swayed freely in the air, but were crowded together, a
tangle of grey ropes, and stretched tight, with their ends closely applied to his
chin and neck and hands.
She did not understand. Then she saw from one of the exultant tentacles upon his
cheek there trickled a little thread of blood.
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With an inarticulate cry she ran towards him, and tried to pull him away from the
leech-like suckers. She snapped two of these tentacles, and their sap dripped red.
Then the overpowering scent of the blossom began to make her head reel. How
they clung to him! She tore at the tough ropes, and he and the white inflorescence
swam about her. She felt she was fainting, knew she must not. She left him and
hastily opened the nearest door, and after she had panted for a moment in the
fresh air, she had a brilliant inspiration. She caught up a flower-pot and smashed
in the windows at the end of the greenhouse. Then she re-entered. She tugged
now with renewed strength at Wedderburn's motionless body, and brought the
strange orchid crashing to the floor. It still clung with the grimmest tenacity to its
victim. In a frenzy, she lugged it and him into the open air.
Then she thought of tearing through the sucker rootlets one by one, and in
another minute she had released him, and was dragging him away from the
horror.
He was white and bleeding from a dozen circular patches.
The odd-job man was coming up the garden, amazed at the smashing of glass,
and saw her emerge, hauling the inanimate body with red-stained hands. For a
moment he thought impossible things.
"Bring some water!" she cried, and her voice dispelled his fancies. When, with
unnatural alacrity, he returned with the water, he found her weeping with
excitement, and with Wedderburn's head upon her knee, wiping the blood from
his face.
"What's the matter?" said Wedderburn, opening his eyes feebly, and closing them
again at once.
"Go and tell Annie to come out here to me, and then go for Doctor Haddon at
once," she said to the odd-job man so soon as he had brought the water; and
added, seeing he hesitated, "I will tell you all about it when you come back."
Presently, Wedderburn opened his eyes again, and seeing that he was troubled by
the puzzle of his position, she explained to him, "You fainted in the hothouse."
"And the orchid?"
"I will see to that," she said.
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Wedderburn had lost a good deal of blood, but beyond that he had suffered no
very great injury. They gave him brandy mixed with some pink extract of meat,
and carried him upstairs to bed. His housekeeper told her incredible story in
fragments to Dr. Haddon. "Come to the orchid-house and see," she said.
The cold outer air was blowing in through the open door, and the sickly perfume
was almost dispelled. Most of the torn aerial rootlets lay already withered amidst
a number of dark stains upon the bricks. The stem of the inflorescence was
broken by the fall of the plant, and the flowers were growing limp and brown at
the edges of the petals. The doctor stooped towards it, then saw that one of the
aerial rootlets still stirred feebly, and hesitated.
The next morning the strange orchid still lay there, black now and putrescent.
The door banged intermittently in the morning breeze, and all the array of
Wedderburn's orchids was shrivelled and prostrate. But Wedderburn himself was
bright and garrulous upstairs in the glory of his strange adventure.
IN THE AVU OBSERVATORY
The observatory at Avu, in Borneo, stands on the spur of the mountain. To the
north rises the old crater, black at night against the unfathomable blue of the sky.
From the little circular building, with its mushroom dome, the slopes plunge
steeply downward into the black mysteries of the tropical forest beneath. The
little house in which the observer and his assistant live is about, fifty yards from
the observatory, and beyond this are the huts of their native attendants.
Thaddy, the chief observer, was down with a slight fever. His assistant,
Woodhouse, paused for a moment in silent contemplation of the tropical night
before commencing his solitary vigil. The night was very still. Now and then
voices and laughter came from the native huts, or the cry of some strange animal
was heard from the midst of the mystery of the forest. Nocturnal insects appeared
in ghostly fashion out of the darkness, and fluttered round his light. He thought,
perhaps, of all the possibilities of discovery that still lay in the black tangle
beneath him; for to the naturalist the virgin forests of Borneo are still a
wonderland full of strange questions and half-suspected discoveries. Woodhouse
carried a small lantern in his hand, and its yellow glow contrasted vividly with
the infinite series of tints between lavender-blue and black in which the
landscape was painted. His hands and face were smeared with ointment against
the attacks of the mosquitoes.
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Even in these days of celestial photography, work done in a purely temporary
erection, and with only the most primitive appliances, in addition to the
telescope, still involves a very large amount of cramped and motionless
watching. He sighed as he thought of the physical fatigues before him, stretched
himself, and entered the observatory.
The reader is probably familiar with the structure of an ordinary astronomical
observatory. The building is usually cylindrical in shape, with a very light
hemispherical roof capable of being turned round from the interior. The telescope
is supported upon a stone pillar in the centre, and a clockwork arrangement
compensates for the earth's rotation, and allows a star once found to be
continuously observed. Besides this, there is a compact tracery of wheels and
screws about its point of support, by which the astronomer adjusts it. There is, of
course, a slit in the movable roof which follows the eye of the telescope in its
survey of the heavens. The observer sits or lies on a sloping wooden
arrangement, which he can wheel to any part of the observatory as the position of
the telescope may require. Within it is advisable to have things as dark as
possible, in order to enhance the brilliance of the stars observed.
The lantern flared as Woodhouse entered his circular den, and the general
darkness fled into black shadows behind the big machine, from which it presently
seemed to creep back over the whole place again as the light waned. The slit was
a profound transparent blue, in which six stars shone with tropical brilliance, and
their light lay, a pallid gleam, along the black tube of the instrument. Woodhouse
shifted the roof, and then proceeding to the telescope, turned first one wheel and
then another, the great cylinder slowly swinging into a new position. Then he
glanced through the finder, the little companion telescope, moved the roof a little
more, made some further adjustments, and set the clockwork in motion. He took
off his jacket, for the night was very hot, and pushed into position the
uncomfortable seat to which he was condemned for the next four hours. Then
with a sigh, he resigned himself to his watch upon the mysteries of space.
There was no sound now in the observatory, and the lantern waned steadily.
Outside there was the occasional cry of some animal in alarm or pain, or calling
to its mate, and the intermittent sounds of the Malay and Dyak servants.
Presently one of the men began a queer chanting song, in which the others joined
at intervals. After this it would seem that they turned in for the night, for no
further sound came from their direction, and the whispering stillness became
more and more profound.
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The clockwork ticked steadily. The shrill hum of a mosquito explored the place,
and grew shriller in indignation at Woodhouse's ointment. Then the lantern went
out and all the observatory was black.
Woodhouse shifted his position presently, when the slow movement of the
telescope had carried it beyond the limits of his comfort.
He was watching a little group of stars in the Milky Way, in one of which his
chief had seen or fancied a remarkable colour variability. It was not a part of the
regular work for which the establishment existed, and for that reason perhaps
Woodhouse was deeply interested. He must have forgotten things terrestrial. All
his attention was concentrated upon the great blue circle of the telescope field--a
circle powdered, so it seemed, with an innumerable multitude of stars, and all
luminous against the blackness of its setting. As he watched he seemed to himself
to become incorporeal, as if he too were floating in the ether of space. Infinitely
remote was the faint red spot he was observing.
Suddenly the stars were blotted out. A flash of blackness passed, and they were
visible again.
"Queer," said Woodhouse. "Must have been a bird."
The thing happened again, and immediately after the great tube shivered as
though it had been struck. Then the dome of the observatory resounded with a
series of thundering blows. The stars seemed to sweep aside as the telescope-which had been unclamped--swung round and away from the slit in the roof.
"Great Scott!" cried Woodhouse. "What's this?"
Some huge vague black shape, with a flapping something like a wing, seemed to
be struggling in the aperture of the roof. In another moment the slit was clear
again, and the luminous haze of the Milky Way shone warm and bright.
The interior of the roof was perfectly black, and only a scraping sound marked
the whereabouts of the unknown creature.
Woodhouse had scrambled from the seat to his feet. He was trembling violently
and in a perspiration, with the suddenness of the occurrence. Was the thing,
whatever it was, inside or out? It was big, whatever else it might be. Something
shot across the skylight, and the telescope swayed. He started violently and put
his arm up. It was in the observatory then, with him. It was clinging to the roof
apparently. What the devil was it? Could it see him?
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He stood for perhaps a minute in a state of stupefaction. The beast, whatever it
was, clawed at the interior of the dome, and then something flapped almost into
his face, and he saw the momentary gleam of starlight on a skin like oiled leather.
His water-bottle was knocked off his little table with a smash.
The sense of some strange bird-creature hovering a few yards from his face in the
darkness was indescribably unpleasant to Woodhouse. As his thought returned he
concluded that it must be some night-bird or large bat. At any risk he would see
what it was, and pulling a match from his pocket, he tried to strike it on the
telescope seat. There was a smoking streak of phosphorescent light, the match
flared for a moment, and he saw a vast wing sweeping towards him, a gleam of
grey-brown fur, and then he was struck in the face and the match knocked out of
his hand. The blow was aimed at his temple, and a claw tore sideways down to
his cheek. He reeled and fell, and he heard the extinguished lantern smash.
Another blow followed as he fell. He was partly stunned, he felt his own warm
blood stream out upon his face. Instinctively he felt his eyes had been struck at,
and turning over on his face to save them, tried to crawl under the protection of
the telescope.
He was struck again upon the back, and he heard his jacket rip, and then the thing
hit the roof of the observatory. He edged as far as he could between the wooden
seat and the eyepiece of the instrument, and turned his body round so that it was
chiefly his feet that were exposed. With these he could at least kick. He was still
in a mystified state. The strange beast banged about in the darkness, and
presently clung to the telescope, making it sway and the gear rattle. Once it
flapped near him, and he kicked out madly and felt a soft body with his feet. He
was horribly scared now. It must be a big thing to swing the telescope like that.
He saw for a moment the outline of a head black against the starlight, with
sharply-pointed upstanding ears and a crest between them. It seemed to him to be
as big as a mastiff's. Then he began to bawl out as loudly as he could for help.
At that the thing came down upon him again. As it did so his hand touched
something beside him on the floor. He kicked out, and the next moment his ankle
was gripped and held by a row of keen teeth. He yelled again, and tried to free
his leg by kicking with the other. Then he realised he had the broken water-bottle
at his hand, and snatching it, he struggled into a sitting posture, and feeling in the
darkness towards his foot, gripped a velvety ear, like the ear of a big cat. He had
seized the water-bottle by its neck and brought it down, with a shivering crash
upon the head of the strange beast. He repeated the blow, and then stabbed and
jabbed with the jagged end of it, in the darkness, where he judged the face might
be.
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The small teeth relaxed their hold, and at once Woodhouse pulled his leg free and
kicked hard. He felt the sickening feel of fur and bone giving under his boot.
There was a tearing bite at his arm, and he struck over it at the face, as he judged,
and hit damp fur.
There was a pause; then he heard the sound of claws; and the dragging of a heavy
body away from him over the observatory floor. Then there was silence, broken
only by his own sobbing breathing, and a sound like licking. Everything was
black except the parallelogram of the blue skylight with the luminous dust of
stars, against which the end of the telescope now appeared in silhouette. He
waited, as it seemed, an interminable time.
Was the thing coming on again? He felt in his trouser-pocket for some matches,
and found one remaining. He tried to strike this, but the floor was wet, and it spat
and went out. He cursed. He could not see where the door was situated. In his
struggle he had quite lost his bearings. The strange beast, disturbed by the
splutter of the match, began to move again. "Time!" called Woodhouse, with a
sudden gleam of mirth, but the thing was not coming at him again. He must have
hurt it, he thought, with the broken bottle. He felt a dull pain in his ankle.
Probably he was bleeding there. He wondered if it would support him if he tried
to stand up. The night outside was very still. There was no sound of any one
moving. The sleepy fools had not heard those wings battering upon the dome, nor
his shouts. It was no good wasting strength in shouting. The monster flapped its
wings and startled him into a defensive attitude. He hit his elbow against the seat,
and it fell over with a crash. He cursed this, and then he cursed the darkness.
Suddenly the oblong patch of starlight seemed to sway to and fro. Was he going
to faint? It would never do to faint. He clenched his fists and set his teeth to hold
himself together. Where had the door got to? It occurred to him he could get his
bearings by the stars visible through the skylight. The patch of stars he saw was
in Sagittarius and south-eastward; the door was north--or was it north by west?
He tried to think. If he could get the door open he might retreat. It might be the
thing was wounded. The suspense was beastly. "Look here!" he said, "If you
don't come on, I shall come at you."
Then the thing began clambering up the side of the observatory, and he saw its
black outline gradually blot out the skylight. Was it in retreat? He forgot about
the door, and watched as the dome shifted and creaked. Somehow he did not feel
very frightened or excited now. He felt a curious sinking sensation inside him.
The sharply-defined patch of light, with the black form moving across it, seemed
to be growing smaller and smaller. That was curious. He began to feel very
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thirsty, and yet he did not feel inclined to get anything to drink. He seemed to be
sliding down a long funnel.
He felt a burning sensation in his throat, and then he perceived it was broad
daylight, and that one of the Dyak servants was looking at him with a curious
expression. Then there was the top of Thaddy's face upside down. Funny fellow,
Thaddy, to go about like that! Then he grasped the situation better, and perceived
that his head was on Thaddy's knee, and Thaddy was giving him brandy. And
then he saw the eyepiece of the telescope with a lot of red smears on it. He began
to remember.
"You've made this observatory in a pretty mess," said Thaddy.
The Dyak boy was beating up an egg in brandy. Woodhouse took this and sat up.
He felt a sharp twinge of pain. His ankle was tied up, so were his arm and the
side of his face. The smashed glass, red-stained, lay about the floor, the telescope
seat was overturned, and by the opposite wall was a dark pool. The door was
open, and he saw the grey summit of the mountain against a brilliant background
of blue sky.
"Pah!" said Woodhouse. "Who's been killing calves here? Take me out of it."
Then he remembered the Thing, and the fight he had, had with it.
"What was it?" he said to Thaddy--"The Thing I fought with?".
"You know that best," said Thaddy. "But, anyhow, don't worry yourself now
about it. Have some more to drink."
Thaddy, however, was curious enough, and it was a hard struggle between duty
and inclination to keep Woodhouse quiet until he was decently put away in bed,
and had slept upon the copious dose of meat extract Thaddy considered
advisable. They then talked it over together.
"It was," said Woodhouse, "more like a big bat than anything else in the world. It
had sharp, short ears, and soft fur, and its wings were leathery. Its teeth were
little but devilish sharp, and its jaw could not have been very strong or else it
would have bitten through my ankle."
"It has pretty nearly," said Thaddy.
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"It seemed to me to hit out with its claws pretty freely. That is about as much as I
know about the beast. Our conversation was intimate, so to speak, and yet not
confidential."
"The Dyak chaps talk about a Big Colugo, a Klangutang--whatever that may be.
It does not often attack man, but I suppose you made it nervous. They say there is
a Big Colugo and a Little Colugo, and a something else that sounds like gobble.
They all fly about at night. For my own part, I know there are flying foxes and
flying lemurs about here, but they are, none of them very big beasts."
"There are more things in heaven and earth," said Woodhouse--and Thaddy
groaned at the quotation--"and more particularly in the forests of Borneo, than
are dreamt of in our philosophies. On the whole, if the Borneo fauna is going to
disgorge any more of its novelties upon me, I should prefer that it did so when I
was not occupied in the observatory at night and alone."
THE TRIUMPHS OF A TAXIDERMIST
Here are some of the secrets of taxidermy. They were told me by the taxidermist
in a mood of elation. He told me them in the time between the first glass of
whisky and the fourth, when a man is no longer cautious and yet not drunk. We
sat in his den together; his library it was, his sitting and his eating-room-separated by a bead curtain, so far as the sense of sight went, from the noisome
den where he plied his trade.
He sat on a deck chair, and when he was not tapping refractory bits of coal with
them, he kept his feet--on which he wore, after the manner of sandals, the holey
relics of a pair of carpet slippers--out of the way upon the mantelpiece, among
the glass eyes. And his trousers, by-the-bye--though they have nothing to do with
his triumphs--were a most horrible yellow plaid, such as they made when our
fathers wore side-whiskers and there were crinolines in the land. Further, his hair
was black, his face rosy, and his eye a fiery brown; and his coat was chiefly of
grease upon a basis of velveteen. And his pipe had a bowl of china showing the
Graces, and his spectacles were always askew, the left eye glaring nakedly at
you, small and penetrating; the right, seen through a glass darkly, magnified and
mild. Thus his discourse ran: "There never was a man who could stuff like me,
Bellows, never. I have stuffed elephants and I have stuffed moths, and the things,
have looked all the livelier and better for it. And I have stuffed human beings-chiefly amateur ornithologists. But I stuffed a nigger once.
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"No, there is no law against it. I made him with all his fingers out and used him
as a hat-rack, but that fool Homersby got up a quarrel with him late one night and
spoilt him. That was before your time. It is hard to get skins, or I would have
another.
"Unpleasant? I don't see it. Seems to me taxidermy is a promising third course to
burial or cremation. You could keep all your dear ones by you. Bric-a-brac of
that sort stuck about the house would be as good as most company, and much
less expensive. You might have them fitted up with clockwork to do things.
"Of course they would have to be varnished, but they need not shine more than
lots of people do naturally. Old Manningtree's bald head...Anyhow, you could
talk to them without interruption. Even aunts. There is a great future before
taxidermy, depend upon it. There is fossils again...."
He suddenly became silent.
"No, I don't think I ought to tell you that." He sucked at his pipe thoughtfully.
"Thanks, yes. Not too much water."
"Of course, what I tell you now will go no further. You know I have made some
dodos and a great auk? No! Evidently you are an amateur at taxidermy. My dear
fellow, half the great auks in the world are about as genuine as the handkerchief
of Saint Veronica, as the Holy Coat of Treves. We make 'em of grebes' feathers
and the like. And the great auk's eggs too!"
"Good heavens!"
"Yes, we make them out of fine porcelain. I tell you it is worth while. They fetch-one fetched L300 only the other day. That one was really genuine, I believe, but
of course one is never certain. It is very fine work, and afterwards you have to get
them dusty, for no one who owns one of these precious eggs has ever the
temerity to clean the thing. That's the beauty of the business. Even if they suspect
an egg they do not like to examine it too closely. It's such brittle capital at the
best.
"You did not know that taxidermy rose to heights like that. My boy, it has risen
higher. I have rivalled the hands of Nature herself. One of the genuine great auks-" his voice fell to a whisper--"one of the genuine great auks was made by me.
"No. You must study ornithology, and find out which it is yourself. And what is
more, I have been approached by a syndicate of dealers to stock one of the
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unexplored skerries to the north of Iceland with specimens. I may--some day. But
I have another little thing in hand just now. Ever heard of the dinornis?
"It is one of those big birds recently extinct in New Zealand. 'Moa' is its common
name, so called because extinct: there is no moa now. See? Well, they have got
bones of it, and from some of the marshes even feathers and dried bits of skin.
Now, I am going to--well, there is no need to make any bones about it--going to
forge a complete stuffed moa. I know a chap out there who will pretend to make
the find in a kind of antiseptic swamp, and say he stuffed it at once, as it
threatened to fall to pieces. The feathers are peculiar, but I have got a simply
lovely way of dodging up singed bits of ostrich plume. Yes, that is the new smell
you noticed. They can only discover the fraud with a microscope, and they will
hardly care to pull a nice specimen to bits for that.
"In this way, you see, I give my little push in the advancement of science.
"But all this is merely imitating Nature. I have done more than that in my time. I
have--beaten her."
He took his feet down from the mantel-board, and leant over confidentially
towards me. "I have created birds," he said in a low voice. "New birds.
Improvements. Like no birds that was ever seen before."
He resumed his attitude during an impressive silence.
"Enrich the universe; rather. Some of the birds I made were new kinds of
humming birds, and very beautiful little things, but some of them were simply
rum. The rummest, I think, was the Anomalopteryx Jejuna. Jejunus-a-um-empty--so called because there was really nothing in it; a thoroughly empty bird-except for stuffing. Old Javvers has the thing now, and I suppose he is almost as
proud of it as I am. It is a masterpiece, Bellows. It has all the silly clumsiness of
your pelican, all the solemn want of dignity of your parrot, all the gaunt
ungainliness of a flamingo, with all the extravagant chromatic conflict of a
mandarin duck. Such a bird. I made it out of the skeletons of a stork and a toucan
and a job lot of feathers. Taxidermy of that kind is just pure joy, Bellows, to a
real artist in the art.
"How did I come to make it? Simple enough, as all great inventions are. One of
those young genii who write us Science Notes in the papers got hold of a German
pamphlet about the birds of New Zealand, and translated some of it by means of
a dictionary and his mother-wit--he must have been one of a very large family
with a small mother--and he got mixed between the living apteryx and the extinct
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anomalopteryx; talked about a bird five feet high, living in the jungles of the
North Island, rare, shy, specimens difficult to obtain, and so on. Javvers, who
even for a collector, is a miraculously ignorant man, read these paragraphs, and
swore he would have the thing at any price. Raided the dealers with enquiries. It
shows what a man can do by persistence--will-power. Here was a bird-collector
swearing he would have a specimen of a bird that did not exist, that never had
existed, and which for very shame of its own profane ungainliness, probably
would not exist now if it could help itself. And he got it. He got it.
"Have some more whisky, Bellows?" said the taxidermist, rousing himself from a
transient contemplation of the mysteries of will-power and the collecting turn of
mind. And, replenished, he proceeded to tell me of how he concocted a most
attractive mermaid, and how an itinerant preacher, who could not get an audience
because of it, smashed it because it was idolatry, or worse, at Burslem Wakes.
But as the conversation of all the parties to this transaction, creator, would-be
preserver, and destroyer, was uniformly unfit for publication, this cheerful
incident must still remain unprinted.
The reader unacquainted with the dark ways of the collector may perhaps be
inclined to doubt my taxidermist, but so far as great auks' eggs, and the bogus
stuffed birds are concerned, I find that he has the confirmation of distinguished
ornithological writers. And the note about the New Zealand bird certainly
appeared in a morning paper of unblemished reputation, for the taxidermist keeps
a copy and has shown it to me.
A DEAL IN OSTRICHES
"Talking of the prices of birds, I've seen an ostrich that cost three hundred
pounds," said the taxidermist, recalling his youth of travel. "Three hundred
pounds!"
He looked at me over his spectacles. "I've seen another that was refused at four."
"No," he said, "it wasn't any fancy points. They was just plain ostriches. A little
off colour, too--owing to dietary. And there wasn't any particular restriction of
the demand either. You'd have thought five ostriches would have ruled cheap on
an East Indiaman. But the point was, one of 'em had swallowed a diamond.
"The chap it got it off was Sir Mohini Padishah, a tremendous swell, a Piccadilly
swell you might say up to the neck of him, and then an ugly black head and a
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whopping turban, with this diamond in it. The blessed bird pecked suddenly and
had it, and when the chap made a fuss, it realised it had done wrong, I suppose,
and went and mixed itself with the others to preserve its incog. It all happened in
a minute. I was among the first to arrive, and there was this heathen going over
his gods, and two sailors and the man who had charge of the birds laughing, fit to
split. It was a rummy way of losing a jewel, come to think of it. The man in
charge hadn't been about just at the moment, so that he didn't know which bird it
was. Clean lost, you see. I didn't feel half sorry, to tell you the truth. The beggar
had been swaggering over his blessed diamond ever since he came aboard.
"A thing like that goes from stem to stern of a ship in no time. Every one was
talking about it. Padishah went below to hide his feelings. At dinner--he pigged
at a table by himself, him and two other Hindoos--the captain kind of jeered at
him about it, and he got very excited. He turned round and talked into my ear. He
would not buy the birds; he would have his diamond. He demanded his rights as
a British subject. His diamond must be found. He was firm upon that. He would
appeal to the House of Lords. The man in charge of the birds was one of those
wooden-headed chaps you can't get a new idea into anyhow. He refused any
proposal to interfere with the birds by way of medicine. His instructions were to
feed them so-and-so and treat them so-and-so, and it was as much as his place
was worth not to feed them so-and-so and treat them so-and-so. Padishah had
wanted a stomach-pump--though you can't do that to a bird, you know. This
Padishah was full of bad law, like most of these blessed Bengalis, and talked of
having a lien on the birds, and so forth. But an old boy, who said his son was a
London barrister, argued that what a bird swallowed became ipso facto part of
the bird, and that Padishah's only remedy lay in an action for damages, and even
then it might be possible to show contributory negligence. He hadn't any right of
way about an ostrich that didn't belong to him. That upset Padishah extremely,
the more so as most of us expressed an opinion that, that was the reasonable
view. There wasn't any lawyer aboard to settle the matter, so we all talked pretty
free. At last, after Aden, it appears that he came round to the general opinion, and
went privately to the man in charge and made an offer for all five ostriches.
"The next morning there was a fine shindy at breakfast. The man hadn't any
authority to deal with the birds, and nothing on earth would induce him to sell;
but it seems he told Padishah that a Eurasian named Potter had already made him
an offer, and on that Padishah denounced Potter before us all. But I think the
most of us thought it rather smart of Potter, and I know that when Potter said that
he'd wired at Aden to London to buy the birds, and would have an answer at
Suez, I cursed pretty richly at a lost opportunity.
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"At Suez, Padishah gave way to tears--actual wet tears--when Potter became the
owner of the birds, and offered him two hundred and fifty right off for the five,
being more than two hundred percent on what Potter had given. Potter said he'd
be hanged if he parted with a feather of them--that he meant to kill them off one
by one and find the diamond; but afterwards, thinking it over, he relented a little.
He was a gambling hound, was this Potter, a little queer at cards, and this kind of
prize-packet business must have suited him down to the ground. Anyhow, he
offered, for a lark, to sell the birds separately to separate people by auction at a
starting price of L80 for a bird. But one of them, he said, he meant to keep for
luck.
"You must understand this diamond was a valuable one--a little Jew chap, a
diamond merchant, who was with us, had put it at three or four thousand when
Padishah had shown it to him--and this idea of an ostrich gamble caught on. Now
it happened that I'd been having a few talks on general subjects with the man who
looked after these ostriches, and quite incidentally he'd said one of the birds was
ailing, and he fancied it had indigestion. It had one feather in its tail almost all
white, by which I knew it, and so when, next day, the auction started with it, I
capped Padishah's eighty-five by ninety. I fancy I was a bit too sure and eager
with my bid, and some of the others spotted the fact that I was in the know. And
Padishah went for that particular bird like an irresponsible lunatic. At last the Jew
diamond merchant got it for L175, and Padishah said L180 just after the hammer
came down--so Potter declared. At any rate the Jew merchant secured it, and
there and then he got a gun and shot it. Potter made a Hades of a fuss because he
said it would injure the sale of the other three, and Padishah, of course, behaved
like an idiot; but all of us were very much excited. I can tell you I was precious
glad when that dissection was over, and no diamond had turned up--precious
glad. I'd gone to one-forty on that particular bird myself.
"The little Jew was like most Jews--he didn't make any great fuss over bad luck;
but Potter declined to go on with the auction until it was understood that the
goods could not be delivered until the sale was over. The little Jew wanted to
argue that the case was exceptional, and as the discussion ran pretty even, the
thing was postponed until the next morning. We had a lively dinner-table that
evening, I can tell you, but in the end Potter got his way, since it would stand to
reason he would be safer if he stuck to all the birds, and that we owed him some
consideration for his sportsmanlike behaviour. And the old gentleman whose son
was a lawyer said he'd been thinking the thing over and that it was very doubtful
if, when a bird had been opened and the diamond recovered, it ought not to be
handed back to the proper owner. I remember I suggested it came under the laws
of treasure-trove--which was really the truth of the matter. There was a hot
argument, and we settled it was certainly foolish to kill the bird on board the
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ship. Then the old gentleman, going at large through his legal talk, tried to make
out the sale was a lottery and illegal, and appealed to the captain; but Potter said
he sold the birds as ostriches. He didn't want to sell any diamonds, he said, and
didn't offer that as an inducement. The three birds he put up, to the best of his
knowledge and belief, did not contain a diamond. It was in the one he kept--so he
hoped.
"Prices ruled high next day all the same. The fact that now there were four
chances instead of five of course caused a rise. The blessed birds averaged L227,
and, oddly enough, this Padishah didn't secure one of 'em--not one. He made too
much shindy, and when he ought to have been bidding he was talking about liens,
and besides, Potter was a bit down on him. One fell to a quiet little officer chap,
another to the little Jew, and the third was syndicated by the engineers. And then
Potter seemed suddenly sorry for having sold them, and said he'd flung away a
clear thousand pounds, and that very likely he'd draw a blank and that he always
had been a fool, but when I went and had a bit of a talk to him, with the idea of
getting him to hedge on his last chance, I found he'd already sold the bird he'd
reserved to a political chap that was on board, a chap who'd been studying Indian
morals and social questions in his vacation. That last was the three hundred
pounds bird. Well, they landed three of the blessed creatures at Brindisi--though
the old gentleman said it was a breach of the Customs regulations--and Potter and
Padishah landed too. The Hindoo seemed half mad as he saw his blessed
diamond going this way and that, so to speak. He kept on saying he'd get an
injunction--he had injunction on the brain--and giving his name and address to
the chaps who'd bought the birds, so that they'd know where to send the diamond.
None of them wanted his name and address, and none of them would give their
own. It was a fine row I can tell you--on the platform. They all went off by
different trains. I came on to Southampton, and there I saw the last of the birds,
as I came ashore; it was the one the engineers bought, and it was standing up near
the bridge, in a kind of crate, and looking as leggy and silly a setting for a
valuable diamond as ever you saw--if it was a setting for a valuable diamond.
"How did it end? Oh! Like that. Well--perhaps. Yes, there's one more thing that
may throw light on it. A week or so after landing I was down Regent Street doing
a bit of shopping, and who should I see arm-in-arm and having a purple time of it
but Padishah and Potter. If you come to think of it-"Yes. I've thought that. Only, you see, there's no doubt the diamond was real.
And Padishah was an eminent Hindoo. I've seen his name in the papers--often.
But whether the bird swallowed the diamond certainly is another matter, as you
say."
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THROUGH A WINDOW
After his legs were set, they carried Bailey into the study and put him on a couch
before the open window. There he lay, a live--even a feverish man down to the
loins, and below that a double-barrelled mummy swathed in white wrappings. He
tried to read, even tried to write a little, but most of the time he looked out of the
window.
He had thought the window cheerful to begin with, but now he thanked God for it
many times a day. Within, the room was dim and grey, and in the reflected light,
the wear of the furniture showed plainly. His medicine and drink stood on the
little table, with such litter as the bare branches of a bunch of grapes, or the ashes
of a cigar upon a green plate, or a day old evening paper. The view outside was
flooded with light, and across the corner of it came the head of the acacia, and at
the foot, the top of the balcony-railing of hammered iron. In the foreground was
the weltering silver of the river, never quiet and yet never tiresome. Beyond was
the reedy bank, a broad stretch of meadow land, and then a dark line of trees
ending in a group of poplars at the distant bend of the river, and upstanding
behind them, a square church tower.
Up and down the river, all day long, things were passing. Now a string of barges
drifting down to London, piled with lime or barrels of beer; then a steam-launch,
disengaging heavy masses of black smoke, and disturbing the whole width of the
river with long rolling waves; then an impetuous electric launch, and then a
boatload of pleasure-seekers, a solitary sculler, or a four from some rowing club.
Perhaps the river was quietest of a morning or late at night. One moonlight night
some people drifted down singing, and with a zither playing--it sounded very
pleasantly across the water.
In a few days Bailey began to recognise some of the craft; in a week he knew the
intimate history of half-a-dozen. The launch Luzon, from Fitzgibbon's, two miles
up, would go fretting by, sometimes three or four times a day, conspicuous with
its colouring of Indian-red and yellow, and its two Oriental attendants; and one
day, to Bailey's vast amusement, the house-boat Purple Emperor came to a stop
outside, and breakfasted in the most shameless domesticity. Then one afternoon,
the captain of a slow-moving barge began a quarrel with his wife as they came
into sight from the left, and had carried it to personal violence before he vanished
behind the window-frame to the right. Bailey regarded all this as an
entertainment got up to while away his illness, and applauded all the more, these
moving incidents. Mrs. Green, coming in at rare intervals with his meals, would
180
catch him clapping his hands or softly crying, "Encore!" But the river players had
other engagements, and his encore went unheeded.
"I should never have thought I could take such an interest in things that did not
concern me," said Bailey to Wilderspin, who used to come in, in his nervous,
friendly way and try to comfort the sufferer by being talked to. "I thought this
idle capacity was distinctive of little children and old maids. But it's just
circumstances. I simply can't work, and things have to drift; it's no good to fret
and struggle. And so I lie here and am as amused as a baby with a rattle, at this
river and its affairs.
"Sometimes, of course, it gets a bit dull, but not often.
"I would give anything, Wilderspin, for a swamp--just one swamp--once. Heads
swimming and a steam launch to the rescue, and a chap or so hauled out with a
boat-hook...There goes Fitzgibbon's launch! They have a new boat-hook, I see,
and the little blackie is still in the dumps. I don't think he's very well, Wilderspin.
He's been like that for two or three days, squatting sulky-fashion and meditating
over the churning of the water. Unwholesome for him to be always staring at the
frothy water running away from the stern."
They watched the little steamer fuss across the patch of sunlit river, suffer
momentary occultation from the acacia, and glide out of sight behind the dark
window-frame.
"I'm getting a wonderful eye for details," said Bailey: "I spotted that new boathook at once. The other nigger is a funny little chap. He never used to swagger
with the old boat-hook like that."
"Malays, aren't they?" said Wilderspin.
"Don't know," said Bailey. "I thought one called all that sort of mariner Lascar."
Then he began to tell Wilderspin what he knew of the private affairs of the
house-boat, Purple Emperor. "Funny," he said, "how these people come from all
points of the compass--from Oxford and Windsor, from Asia and Africa--and
gather and pass opposite the window just to entertain me. One man floated out of
the infinite the day before yesterday, caught one perfect crab opposite, lost and
recovered a scull, and passed on again. Probably he will never come into my life
again. So far as I am concerned, he has lived and had his little troubles, perhaps
thirty--perhaps forty--years on the earth, merely to make an ass of himself for
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three minutes in front of my window. Wonderful thing, Wilderspin, if you come
to think of it."
"Yes," said Wilderspin; "isn't it?"
A day or two after this Bailey had a brilliant morning. Indeed, towards the end of
the affair, it became almost as exciting as any window show, very well could be.
We will, however begin at the beginning.
Bailey was all alone in the house, for his housekeeper had gone into the town
three miles away to pay bills, and the servant had her holiday. The morning
began dull. A canoe went up about half-past nine, and later a boatload of
camping men came down. But this was mere margin. Things became cheerful
about ten o'clock.
It began with something white fluttering in the remote distance where the three
poplars marked the river bend. "Pocket-handkerchief," said Bailey, when he saw
it "No, too big! Flag perhaps."
However, it was not a flag, for it jumped about. "Man in whites running fast, and
this way," said Bailey. "That's luck! But his whites are precious loose!"
Then a singular thing happened. There was a minute pink gleam among the dark
trees in the distance, and a little puff of pale grey that began to drift and vanish
eastward. The man in white jumped and continued running. Presently the report
of the shot arrived.
"What the devil!" said Bailey. "Looks as if someone was shooting at him."
He sat up stiffly and stared hard. The white figure was coming along the pathway
through the corn. "It's one of those niggers from the Fitzgibbon's," said Bailey;
"or may I be hanged! I wonder why he keeps sawing with his arm."
Then three other figures became indistinctly visible against the dark background
of the trees.
Abruptly on the opposite bank a man walked into the picture. He was blackbearded, dressed in flannels, had a red belt, and a vast, grey felt hat. He walked,
leaning very much forward and with his hands swinging before him. Behind him
one could see the grass swept by the towing-rope of the boat he was dragging. He
was steadfastly regarding the white figure that was hurrying through the corn.
Suddenly he stopped. Then, with a peculiar gesture, Bailey could see that he
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began pulling in the tow-rope hand over hand. Over the water could be heard the
voices of the people in the still invisible boat.
"What are you after, Hagshot?" said someone.
The individual with the red belt shouted something that was inaudible, and went
on lugging in the rope, looking over his shoulder at the advancing white figure as
he did so. He came down the bank, and the rope bent a lane among the reeds and
lashed the water between his pulls.
Then just the bows of the boat came into view, with the towing-mast and a tall,
fair-haired man standing up and trying to see over the bank. The boat bumped
unexpectedly among the reeds, and the tall, fair-haired man disappeared
suddenly, having apparently fallen back into the invisible part of the boat. There
was a curse and some indistinct laughter. Hagshot did not laugh, but hastily
clambered into the boat and pushed off. Abruptly the boat passed out of Bailey's
sight.
But it was still audible. The melody of voices suggested that its occupants were
busy telling each other what to do.
The running figure was drawing near the bank. Bailey could now see clearly that
it was one of Fitzgibbon's Orientals, and began to realise what the sinuous thing
the man carried in his hand might be. Three other men followed one another
through the corn, and the foremost carried what was probably the gun. They were
perhaps two hundred yards or more behind the Malay.
"It's a man hunt, by all that's holy!" said Bailey.
The Malay stopped for a moment and surveyed the bank to the right. Then he left
the path, and breaking through the corn, vanished in that direction. The three
pursuers followed suit, and their heads and gesticulating arms above the corn,
after a brief interval, also went out of Bailey's field of vision.
Bailey so far forgot himself as to swear. "Just as things were getting lively!" he
said. Something like a woman's shriek came through the air. Then shouts, a howl,
a dull whack upon the balcony outside that made Bailey jump, and then the
report of a gun.
"This is precious hard on an invalid," said Bailey.
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But more was to happen yet in his picture. In fact, a great deal more. The Malay
appeared again, running now along the bank up stream. His stride had more
swing and less pace in it than before. He was threatening someone ahead with the
ugly krees he carried. The blade, Bailey noticed, was dull--it did not shine as
steel should.
Then came the tall, fair man, brandishing a boat-hook, and after him three other
men in boating costume, running clumsily with oars. The man with the grey hat
and red belt was not with them. After an interval the three men with the gun
reappeared, still in the corn, but now near the river bank. They emerged upon the
towing-path, and hurried after the others. The opposite bank was left blank and
desolate again.
The sick-room was disgraced by more profanity. "I would give my life to see the
end of this," said Bailey. There were indistinct shouts up stream. Once they
seemed to be coming nearer, but they disappointed him.
Bailey sat and grumbled. He was still grumbling when his eye caught something
black and round among the waves. "Hullo!" he said. He looked narrowly and saw
two triangular black bodies frothing every now and then about a yard in front of
this.
He was still doubtful when the little band of pursuers came into sight again, and
began to point to this floating object. They were talking eagerly. Then the man
with the gun took aim.
"He's swimming the river, by George!" said Bailey.
The Malay looked round, saw the gun, and went under. He came up so close to
Bailey's bank of the river that one of the bars of the balcony hid him for a
moment. As he emerged the man with the gun fired. The Malay kept steadily
onward--Bailey could see the wet hair on his forehead now and the krees
between his teeth--and was presently hidden by the balcony.
This seemed to Bailey an unendurable wrong. The man was lost to him for ever
now, so he thought. Why couldn't the brute have got himself decently caught on
the opposite bank, or shot in the water?
"It's worse than Edwin Drood," said Bailey.
Over the river, too, things had become an absolute blank. All seven men had
gone down stream again, probably to get the boat and follow across. Bailey
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listened and waited. There was silence. "Surely it's not over like this," said
Bailey.
Five minutes passed--ten minutes. Then a tug with two barges went up stream.
The attitudes of the men upon these were the attitudes of those who see nothing
remarkable in earth, water, or sky. Clearly the whole affair had passed out of
sight of the river. Probably the hunt had gone into the beech woods behind the
house.
"Confound it!" said Bailey. "To be continued again, and no chance this time of
the sequel. But this is hard on a sick man."
He heard a step on the staircase behind him and looking round saw the door
open. Mrs. Green came in and sat down, panting. She still had her bonnet on, her
purse in her hand, and her little brown basket upon her arm. "Oh, there!" she said,
and left Bailey to imagine the rest.
"Have a little whisky and water, Mrs. Green, and tell me about it," said Bailey.
Sipping a little, the lady began to recover her powers of explanation.
One of those black creatures at the Fitzgibbon's had gone mad, and was running
about with a big knife, stabbing people. He had killed a groom, and stabbed the
under-butler, and almost cut the arm off a boating gentleman.
"Running amuck with a krees," said Bailey. "I thought that was it."
And he was hiding in the wood when she came through it from the town.
"What! Did he run after you?" asked Bailey, with a certain touch of glee in his
voice.
"No, that was the horrible part of it." Mrs. Green explained. She had been right
through the woods and had never known he was there. It was only when she met
young Mr. Fitzgibbon carrying his gun in the shrubbery that she heard anything
about it. Apparently, what upset Mrs. Green was the lost opportunity for emotion.
She was determined, however, to make the most of what was left her.
"To think he was there all the time!" she said, over and over again.
Bailey endured this patiently enough for perhaps ten minutes. At last he thought
it advisable to assert himself. "It's twenty past one, Mrs. Green," he said. "Don't
you think it time you got me something to eat?"
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This brought Mrs. Green suddenly to her knees.
"Oh Lord, sir!" she said. "Oh! Don't go making me go out of this room sir, till I
know he's caught. He might have got into the house, sir. He might be creeping,
creeping, with that knife of his, along the passage this very--"
She broke off suddenly and glared over him at the window. Her lower jaw
dropped. Bailey turned his head sharply.
For the space of half a second things seemed just as they were. There was the
tree, the balcony, the shining river, the distant church tower. Then he noticed that
the acacia was displaced about a foot to the right, and that it was quivering, and
the leaves were rustling. The tree was shaken violently, and a heavy panting was
audible.
In another moment a hairy brown hand had appeared and clutched the balcony
railings, and in another the face of the Malay was peering through these at the
man on the couch. His expression was an unpleasant grin, by reason of the krees
he held between his teeth, and he was bleeding from an ugly wound in his cheek.
His hair wet to drying stuck out like horns from his head. His body was bare save
for the wet trousers that clung to him. Bailey's first impulse was to spring from
the couch, but his legs reminded him that this was impossible.
By means of the balcony and tree, the man slowly raised himself until he was
visible to Mrs. Green. With a choking cry she made for the door and fumbled
with the handle.
Bailey thought swiftly and clutched a medicine bottle in either hand. One he
flung, and it smashed against the acacia. Silently and deliberately, and keeping
his bright eyes fixed on Bailey, the Malay clambered into the balcony. Bailey,
still clutching his second bottle, but with a sickening, sinking feeling about his
heart, watched first one leg come over the railing and then the other.
It was Bailey's impression that the Malay took about an hour to get his second leg
over the rail. The period that elapsed before the sitting position was changed to a
standing one seemed enormous--days, weeks, possibly a year or so. Yet Bailey
had no clear impression of anything going on in his mind during that vast period,
except a vague wonder at his inability to throw the second medicine bottle.
Suddenly the Malay glanced over his shoulder. There was the crack of a rifle. He
flung up his arms and came down upon the couch. Mrs. Green began a dismal
shriek that seemed likely to last until Doomsday. Bailey stared at the brown body
with its shoulder blade driven in, that writhed painfully across his legs and
186
rapidly staining and soaking the spotless bandages. Then he looked at the long
krees, with the reddish streaks upon its blade, that lay an inch beyond the
trembling brown fingers upon the floor. Then at Mrs. Green, who had backed
hard against the door and was staring at the body and shrieking in gusty outbursts
as if she would wake the dead. And then the body was shaken by one last
convulsive effort.
The Malay gripped the krees, tried to raise himself with his left hand, and
collapsed. Then he raised his head, stared for a moment at Mrs. Green, and
twisting his face round looked at Bailey. With a gasping groan the dying man
succeeded in clutching the bed clothes with his disabled hand, and by a violent
effort, which hurt Bailey's legs exceedingly, writhed sideways towards what must
be his last victim. Then something seemed released in Bailey's mind and he
brought down the second bottle with all his strength on to the Malay's face. The
krees fell heavily upon the floor.
"Easy with those legs," said Bailey, as young Fitzgibbon and one of the boating
party lifted the body off him.
Young Fitzgibbon was very white in the face. "I didn't mean to kill him," he said.
"It's just as well," said Bailey.
THE TEMPTATION OF HARRINGAY
It is quite impossible to say whether this thing really happened. It depends
entirely on the word of R.M. Harringay, who is an artist.
Following his version of the affair, the narrative deposes that Harringay went into
his studio about ten o'clock to see what he could make of the head, that he had
been working at the day before. The head in question was that of an Italian
organ-grinder, and Harringay thought--but was not quite sure--that the title would
be the "Vigil." So far he is frank, and his narrative bears the stamp of truth. He
had seen the man expectant for pennies, and with a promptness that suggested
genius, had, had him in at once.
"Kneel. Look up at that bracket," said Harringay. "As if you expected pennies.
"Don't grin!" said Harringay. "I don't want to paint your gums. Look as though
you were unhappy."
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Now, after a night's rest, the picture proved decidedly unsatisfactory. "It's good
work," said Harringay. "That little bit in the neck...But."
He walked about the studio and looked at the thing from this point and from that.
Then he said a wicked word. In the original the word is given.
"Painting," he says he said. "Just a painting of an organ-grinder--a mere portrait.
If it was a live organ-grinder I wouldn't mind. But somehow I never make things
alive. I wonder if my imagination is wrong." This, too, has a truthful air. His
imagination is wrong.
"That creative touch! To take canvas and pigment and make a man--as Adam was
made of red ochre! But this thing! If you met it walking about the streets you
would know it was only a studio production. The little boys would tell it to
'Garnome and git frimed.' Some little touch...Well--it won't do as it is."
He went to the blinds and began to pull them down. They were made of blue
holland with the rollers at the bottom of the window, so that you pull them down
to get more light. He gathered his palette, brushes, and mahl stick from his table.
Then he turned to the picture and put a speck of brown in the corner of the
mouth; and shifted his attention thence to the pupil of the eye. Then he decided
that the chin was a trifle too impassive for a vigil.
Presently he put down his impedimenta, and lighting a pipe surveyed the
progress of his work. "I'm hanged if the thing isn't sneering at me," said
Harringay, and he still believes it sneered.
The animation of the figure had certainly increased, but scarcely in the direction
he wished. There was no mistake about the sneer. "Vigil of the Unbeliever," said
Harringay. "Rather subtle and clever that! But the left eyebrow isn't cynical
enough."
He went and dabbed at the eyebrow, and added a little to the lobe of the ear to
suggest materialism. Further consideration ensued. "Vigil's off, I'm afraid," said
Harringay. "Why not Mephistopheles? But that's a bit too common. 'A Friend of
the Doge--' not so seedy. The armour won't do, though. Too Camelot. How about
a scarlet robe and call him 'One of the Sacred College'? Humour in that, and an
appreciation of Middle Italian History.
"There's always Benvenuto Cellini," said Harringay; "with a clever suggestion of
a gold cup in one corner. But that would scarcely suit the complexion."
188
He describes himself as babbling in this way in order to keep down an
unaccountably unpleasant sensation of fear. The thing was certainly acquiring
anything but a pleasing expression. Yet it was as certainly becoming far more of
a living thing than it had been--if a sinister one--far more alive than anything he
had ever painted before. "Call it 'Portrait of a Gentleman,'" said Harringay; "'A
Certain Gentleman.'
"Won't do," said Harringay, still keeping up his courage. "Kind of thing they call
Bad Taste. That sneer will have to come out. That gone, and a little more fire in
the eye--never noticed how warm his eye was before--and he might do for--?
What price Passionate Pilgrim? But that devilish face won't do--this, side of the
Channel.
"Some little inaccuracy does it," he said; "eyebrows probably too oblique--"
therewith pulling the blind lower to get a better light, and resuming palette and
brushes.
The face on the canvas seemed animated by a spirit of its own. Where the
expression of diablerie came in he found impossible to discover. Experiment was
necessary. The eyebrows--it could scarcely be the eyebrows? But he altered
them. No, that was no better; in fact, if anything, a trifle more satanic. The corner
of the mouth? Pah! More than ever a leer--and now, retouched, it was ominously
grim. The eye, then? Catastrophe! He had filled his brush with vermilion instead
of brown, and yet he had felt sure it was brown! The eye seemed now to have
rolled in its socket, and was glaring at him an eye of fire. In a flash of passion,
possibly with something of the courage of panic, he struck the brush full of bright
red, athwart the picture; and then a very curious thing, a very strange thing
indeed, occurred--if it did occur.
The diabolified Italian before him shut both his eyes, pursed his mouth, and
wiped the colour off his face with his hand.
Then the red eye opened again, with a sound like the opening of lips, and the face
smiled. "That was rather hasty of you," said the picture.
Harringay states that, now that the worst had happened, his self-possession
returned. He had a saving persuasion that devils were reasonable creatures.
"Why do you keep moving about then," he said, "making faces and all that-sneering and squinting, while I am painting you?"
"I don't," said the picture.
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"You do," said Harringay.
"It's yourself," said the picture.
"It's not myself," said Harringay.
"It is yourself," said the picture. "No! Don't go hitting me with paint again,
because it's true. You have been trying to fluke an expression on my face all the
morning. Really, you haven't an idea what your picture ought to look like."
"I have," said Harringay.
"You have not," said the picture: "You never have with your pictures. You
always start with the vaguest presentiment of what you are going to do; it is to be
something beautiful--you are sure of that--and devout, perhaps, or tragic; but
beyond that it is all experiment and chance. My dear fellow! You don't think you
can paint a picture like that?"
Now it must be remembered that for what follows we have only Harringay's
word.
"I shall paint a picture exactly as I like," said Harringay, calmly.
This seemed to disconcert the picture a little. "You can't paint a picture without
an inspiration," it remarked.
"But I had an inspiration--for this."
"Inspiration!" sneered the sardonic figure; "A fancy that came from your seeing
an organ-grinder looking up at a window! Vigil! Ha, ha! You just started painting
on the chance of something coming--that's what you did. And when I saw you at
it I came. I want a talk with you!
"Art, with you," said the picture--, "it's a poor business. You potter. I don't know
how it is, but you don't seem able to throw your soul into it. You know too much.
It hampers you. In the midst of your enthusiasms you ask yourself whether
something like this has not been done before. And..."
"Look here," said Harringay, who had expected something better than criticism
from the devil. "Are you going to talk studio to me?" He filled his number twelve
hoghair with red paint.
190
"The true artist," said the picture, "is always an ignorant man. An artist who
theorises about his work is no longer artist but critic. Wagner...I say--! What's
that red paint for?"
"I'm going to paint you out," said Harringay. "I don't want to hear all that Tommy
Rot. If you think just because I'm an artist by trade I'm going to talk studio to
you, you make a precious mistake."
"One minute," said the picture, evidently alarmed. "I want to make you an offer-a genuine offer. It's right what I'm saying. You lack inspirations. Well. No doubt
you've heard of the Cathedral of Cologne, and the Devil's Bridge, and--"
"Rubbish," said Harringay. "Do you think I want to go to perdition simply for the
pleasure of painting a good picture, and getting it slated. Take that."
His blood was up. His danger only nerved him to action, so he says. So he
planted a dab of vermilion in his creature's mouth. The Italian spluttered and tried
to wipe it off--evidently horribly surprised. And then--according to Harringay-there began a very remarkable struggle, Harringay splashing away with the red
paint, and the picture wriggling about and wiping it off as fast as he put it on.
"Two masterpieces," said the demon. "Two indubitable masterpieces for a
Chelsea artist's soul. It's a bargain?" Harringay replied with the paint brush.
For a few minutes nothing could be heard but the brush going and the spluttering
and ejaculations of the Italian. A lot of the strokes he caught on his arm and hand,
though Harringay got over his guard often enough. Presently the paint on the
palette gave out and the two antagonists stood breathless, regarding each other.
The picture was so smeared with red that it looked as if it had been rolling about
a slaughterhouse, and it was painfully out of breath and very uncomfortable with
the wet paint trickling down its neck. Still, the first round was in its favour on the
whole. "Think," it said, sticking pluckily to its point, "two supreme masterpieces-in different styles. Each equivalent to the Cathedral..."
"I know," said Harringay, and rushed out of the studio and along the passage
towards his wife's boudoir.
In another minute he was back with a large tin of enamel--Hedge Sparrow's Egg
Tint, it was, and a brush. At the sight of that the artistic devil with the red eye
began to scream. "Three masterpieces--culminating masterpieces."
Harringay delivered cut two across the demon, and followed with a thrust in the
eye. There was an indistinct rumbling. "Four masterpieces," and a spitting sound.
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But Harringay had the upper hand now and meant to keep it. With rapid, bold
strokes he continued to paint over the writhing canvas, until at last it was a
uniform field of shining Hedge Sparrow tint. Once the mouth reappeared and got
as far as "Five master--" before he filled it with enamel; and near the end the red
eye opened and glared at him indignantly. But at last nothing remained save a
gleaming panel of drying enamel. For a little while a faint stirring beneath the
surface puckered it slightly here and there, but presently even that died away and
the thing was perfectly still.
Then Harringay--according to Harringay's account--lit his pipe and sat down and
stared at the enamelled canvas, and tried to make out clearly what had happened.
Then he walked round behind it, to see if the back of it was at all remarkable.
Then it was he began to regret he had not photographed the Devil before he
painted him out.
This is Harringay's story--not mine. He supports it by a small canvas (24 by 20)
enamelled a pale green, and by violent asseverations. It is also true that he never
has produced a masterpiece, and in the opinion of his intimate friends probably
never will.
THE FLYING MAN
The Ethnologist looked at the bhimraj feather thoughtfully. "They seemed loth to
part with it," he said.
"It is sacred to the Chiefs," said the lieutenant; "just as yellow silk, you know, is
sacred to the Chinese Emperor."
The Ethnologist did not answer. He hesitated. Then opening the topic abruptly,
"What on earth is this cock-and-bull story they have of a flying man?"
The lieutenant smiled faintly. "What did they tell you?"
"I see," said the Ethnologist, "that you know of your fame."
The lieutenant rolled himself a cigarette. "I don't mind hearing about it once
more. How does it stand at present?"
"It's so confoundedly childish," said the Ethnologist, becoming irritated. "How
did you play it off upon them?"
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The lieutenant made no answer, but lounged back in his folding-chair, still
smiling.
"Here am I, come four hundred miles out of my way to get what is left of the
folk-lore of these people, before they are utterly demoralised by missionaries and
the military, and all I find are a lot of impossible legends about a sandy-haired
scrub of an infantry lieutenant. How he is invulnerable--how he can jump over
elephants--how he can fly. That's the toughest nut. One old gentleman described
your wings, said they had black plumage and were not quite as long as a mule.
Said he often saw you by moonlight hovering over the crests out towards the
Shendu country. Confound it, man!"
The lieutenant laughed cheerfully. "Go on," he said. "Go on."
The Ethnologist did. At last he wearied. "To trade so," he said, "on these
unsophisticated children of the mountains. How could you bring yourself to do it,
man?"
"I'm sorry," said the lieutenant, "but truly the thing was forced upon me. I can
assure you I was driven to it. And at the time I had not the faintest idea of how
the Chin imagination would take it. Or curiosity. I can only plead it was an
indiscretion and not malice that made me replace the folk-lore by a new legend.
But as you seem aggrieved, I will try and explain the business to you.
"It was in the time of the last Lushai expedition but one, and Walters thought
these people, you have been visiting, were friendly. So, with an airy confidence
in my capacity for taking care of myself, he sent me up the gorge--fourteen miles
of it--with three of the Derbyshire men and half a dozen Sepoys, two mules, and
his blessing, to see what popular feeling was like at that village you visited. A
force of ten--not counting the mules--fourteen miles, and during a war! You saw
the road?"
"Road!" said the Ethnologist.
"It's better now than it was. When we went up, we had to wade in the river for a
mile, where the valley narrows, with a smart stream frothing round our knees and
the stones as slippery as ice. There it was I dropped my rifle. Afterwards the
Sappers blasted the cliff with dynamite and made the convenient way you came
by. Then below, where those very high cliffs come, we had to keep on dodging
across the river--I should say we crossed it a dozen times in a couple of miles.
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"We got in sight of the place early the next morning. You know how it lies, on a
spur halfway between the big hills, and as we began to appreciate how wickedly
quiet the village lay under the sunlight, we came to a stop to consider.
"At that they fired a lump of filed brass idol at us, just by way of a welcome. It
came twanging down the slope to the right of us where the boulders are, missed
my shoulder by an inch or so, and plugged the mule that carried all the provisions
and utensils. I never heard such a death-rattle before or since. And at that we
became aware of a number of gentlemen carrying matchlocks, and dressed in
things like plaid dusters, dodging about along the neck between the village and
the crest to the east.
"'Right about face,' I said. 'Not too close together.'
"And with that encouragement my expedition of ten men came round and set off
at a smart trot down the valley again hitherward. We did not wait to save
anything our dead had carried, but we kept the second mule with us--he carried
my tent and some other rubbish--out of a feeling of friendship.
"So ended the battle--ingloriously. Glancing back, I saw the valley dotted with
the victors, shouting and firing at us. But no one was hit. These Chins and their
guns are very little good except at a sitting shot. They will sit and finick over a
boulder for hours taking aim, and when they fire running it is chiefly for stage
effect. Hooker, one of the Derbyshire men, fancied himself rather with the rifle,
and stopped behind for half a minute to try his luck as we turned the bend. But he
got nothing.
"I'm not a Xenophon to spin much of a yarn about my retreating army. We had to
pull the enemy up twice in the next two miles when he became a bit pressing, by
exchanging shots with him, but it was a fairly monotonous affair--hard breathing
chiefly--until we got near the place where the hills run in towards the river and
pinch the valley into a gorge. And there we very luckily caught a glimpse of half
a dozen round black heads coming slanting-ways over the hill to the left of us-the east that is--and almost parallel with us.
"At that I called a halt. 'Look here,' says I to Hooker and the other Englishmen;
'what are we to do now?' and I pointed to the heads.
"'Headed orf, or I'm a nigger,' said one of the men."
"'We shall be,' said another. 'You know the Chin way, George?'
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"'They can pot every one of us at fifty yards,' says Hooker, 'in the place where the
river is narrow. It's just suicide to go on down.'
"I looked at the hill to the right of us. It grew steeper lower down the valley, but
it still seemed climbable. And all the Chins we had seen hitherto had been on the
other side of the stream.
"'It's that or stopping,' says one of the Sepoys.
"So we started slanting up the hill. There was something faintly suggestive of a
road running obliquely up the face of it, and that we followed. Some Chins
presently came into view up the valley, and I heard some shots. Then I saw one
of the Sepoys was sitting down about thirty yards below us. He had simply sat
down without a word, apparently not wishing to give trouble. At that I called a
halt again; I told Hooker to try another shot, and went back and found the man
was hit in the leg. I took him up, carried him along to put him on the mule-already pretty well laden with the tent and other things which we had no time to
take off. When I got up to the rest with him, Hooker had his empty Martini in his
hand, and was grinning and pointing to a motionless black spot up the valley. All
the rest of the Chins were behind boulders or back round the bend. 'Five hundred
yards,' says Hooker, 'if an inch. And I'll swear I hit him in the head.'
"I told him to go and do it again, and with that we went on again.
"Now the hillside kept getting steeper as we pushed on, and the road we were
following more and more of a shelf. At last it was mere cliff above and below us.
'It's the best road I have seen yet in Chin Lushai land,' said I to encourage the
men, though I had a fear of what was coming.
"And in a few minutes the way bent round a corner of the cliff. Then, finis! The
ledge came to an end.
"As soon as he grasped the position one of the Derbyshire men fell a-swearing at
the trap we had fallen into. The Sepoys halted quietly. Hooker grunted and
reloaded, and went back to the bend.
"Then two of the Sepoy chaps helped their comrade down and began to unload
the mule.
"Now, when I came to look about me, I began to think we had not been so very
unfortunate after all. We were on a shelf perhaps ten yards across it at widest.
Above it the cliff projected so that we could not be shot down upon, and below
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was an almost sheer precipice of perhaps two or three hundred feet. Lying down
we were invisible to anyone across the ravine. The only approach was along the
ledge, and on that one man was as good as a host. We were in a natural
stronghold, with only one disadvantage, our sole provision against hunger and
thirst was one live mule. Still we were at most eight or nine miles from the main
expedition, and no doubt, after a day or so, they would send up after us if we did
not return.
"After a day or so..."
The lieutenant paused. "Ever been thirsty, Graham?"
"Not that kind," said the Ethnologist.
"H'm. We had the whole of that day, the night, and the next day of it, and only a
trifle of dew we wrung out of our clothes and the tent. And below us was the
river going giggle, giggle, round a rock in mid stream. I never knew such a
barrenness of incident, or such a quantity of sensation. The sun might have had
Joshua's command still upon it for all the motion one could see; and it blazed like
a near furnace. Towards the evening of the first day one of the Derbyshire men
said something--nobody heard what--and went off round the bend of the cliff. We
heard shots, and when Hooker looked round the corner he was gone. And in the
morning the Sepoy whose leg was shot was in delirium, and jumped or fell over
the cliff. Then we took the mule and shot it, and that must needs go over the cliff
too in its last struggles, leaving eight of us.
"We could see the body of the Sepoy down below, with the head in the water. He
was lying face downwards, and so far as I could make out was scarcely smashed
at all. Badly as the Chins might covet his head, they had the sense to leave it
alone until the darkness came.
"At first we talked of all the chances there were of the main body hearing the
firing, and reckoned whether they would begin to miss us, and all that kind of
thing, but we dried up as the evening came on. The Sepoys played games with
bits of stone among themselves, and afterwards told stories. The night was rather
chilly. The second day nobody spoke. Our lips were black and our throats afire,
and we lay about on the ledge and glared at one another. Perhaps it's as well we
kept our thoughts to ourselves. One of the British soldiers began writing some
blasphemous rot on the rock with a bit of pipeclay, about his last dying will, until
I stopped it. As I looked over the edge down into the valley and saw the river
rippling I was nearly tempted to go after the Sepoy. It seemed a pleasant and
desirable thing to go rushing down through the air with something to drink--or no
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more thirst at any rate--at the bottom. I remembered in time, though, that I was
the officer in command, and my duty to set a good example, and that kept me
from any such foolishness.
"Yet, thinking of that, put an idea into my head. I got up and looked at the tent
and tent ropes, and wondered why I had not thought of it before. Then I came and
peered over the cliff again. This time the height seemed greater and the pose of
the Sepoy rather more painful. But it was that or nothing. And to cut it short, I
parachuted.
"I got a big circle of canvas out of the tent, about three times the size of that
table-cover, and plugged the hole in the centre, and I tied eight ropes round it to
meet in the middle and make a parachute. The other chaps lay about and watched
me as though they thought it was a new kind of delirium. Then I explained my
notion to the two British soldiers and how I meant to do it, and as soon as the
short dusk had darkened into night, I risked it. They held the thing high up, and I
took a run the whole length of the ledge. The thing filled with air like a sail, but
at the edge I will confess I funked and pulled up.
"As soon as I stopped I was ashamed of myself--as well I might be in front of
privates--and went back and started again. Off I jumped this time--with a kind of
sob, I remember--clean into the air, with the big white sail bellying out above me.
"I must have thought at a frightful pace. It seemed a long time before I was sure
that the thing meant to keep steady. At first it heeled sideways. Then I noticed the
face of the rock which seemed to be streaming up past me, and me motionless.
Then I looked down and saw in the darkness the river and the dead Sepoy
rushing up towards me. But in the indistinct light I also saw three Chins,
seemingly aghast at the sight of me, and that the Sepoy was decapitated. At that I
wanted to go back again.
"Then my boot was in the mouth of one, and in a moment he and I were in a heap
with the canvas fluttering down on the top of us. I fancy I dashed out his brains
with my foot. I expected nothing more than to be brained myself by the other
two, but the poor heathen had never heard of Baldwin, and incontinently bolted.
"I struggled out of the tangle of dead Chin and canvas, and looked round. About
ten paces off lay the head of the Sepoy staring in the moonlight. Then I saw the
water and went and drank. There wasn't a sound in the world but the footsteps of
the departing Chins, a faint shout from above, and the gluck of the water. So soon
as I had drunk my full I started off down the river.
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"That about ends the explanation of the flying man story. I never met a soul the
whole eight miles of the way. I got to Walters' camp by ten o'clock, and a born
idiot of a sentinel had the cheek to fire at me as I came trotting out of the
darkness. So soon as I had hammered my story into Winter's thick skull, about
fifty men started up the valley to clear the Chins out and get our men down. But
for my own part I had too good a thirst to provoke it, by going with them.
"You have heard what kind of a yarn the Chins made of it. Wings as long as a
mule, eh--? And black feathers! The gay lieutenant bird! Well, well."
The lieutenant meditated cheerfully for a moment. Then he added, "You would
scarcely credit it, but when they got to the ridge at last, they found two more of
the Sepoys had jumped over."
"The rest were all right?" asked the Ethnologist.
"Yes," said the lieutenant; "the rest were all right, barring a certain thirst, you
know."
And at the memory he helped himself to soda and whisky again.
THE DIAMOND MAKER
Some business had detained me in Chancery Lane, until nine in the evening, and
thereafter, having some inkling of a headache, I was disinclined either for
entertainment or further work. So much of the sky as the high cliffs of that
narrow canon of traffic left visible, spoke of a serene night, and I determined to
make my way down to the Embankment, and rest my eyes and cool my head by
watching the variegated lights upon the river. Beyond comparison the night is the
best time for this place; a merciful darkness hides the dirt of the waters, and the
lights of this transitional age, red glaring orange, gas-yellow, and electric white,
are set in shadowy outlines of every possible shade between grey and deep
purple. Through the arches of Waterloo Bridge a hundred points of light mark the
sweep of the Embankment, and above its parapet rise the towers of Westminster,
warm grey against the starlight. The black river goes by with only a rare ripple
breaking its silence, and disturbing the reflections of the lights that swim upon its
surface.
"A warm night," said a voice at my side.
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I turned my head, and saw the profile of a man who was leaning over the parapet
beside me. It was a refined face, not unhandsome, though pinched and pale
enough, and the coat collar turned up and pinned round the throat marked his
status in life as sharply as a uniform. I felt I was committed to the price of a bed
and breakfast if I answered him.
I looked at him curiously. Would he have anything to tell me worth the money,
or was he the common incapable--incapable even of telling his own story? There
was a quality of intelligence in his forehead and eyes, and a certain
tremulousness in his nether lip that decided me.
"Very warm," said I; "but not too warm for us here."
"No," he said, still looking across the water, "it is pleasant enough here...just
now.
"It is good," he continued after a pause, "to find anything so restful as this in
London. After one has been fretting about business all day, about getting on,
meeting obligations, and parrying dangers, I do not know what one would do if it
were not for such pacific corners." He spoke with long pauses between the
sentences. "You must know a little of the irksome labour of the world, or you
would not be here. But I doubt if you can be so brain-weary and footsore as I
am...Bah! Sometimes I doubt if the game is worth the candle. I feel inclined to
throw the whole thing over--name, wealth and position--and take to some modest
trade. But I know if I abandoned my ambition--hardly as she uses me--I should
have nothing but remorse left for the rest of my days."
He became silent. I looked at him in astonishment. If ever I saw a man hopelessly
hard-up it was the man in front of me. He was ragged and he was dirty, unshaven
and unkempt; he looked as though he had been left in a dust-bin for a week. And
he was talking to me of the irksome worries of a large business. I almost laughed
outright. Either he was mad or playing a sorry jest on his own poverty.
"If high aims and high positions," said I, "have their drawbacks of hard work and
anxiety, they have their compensations. Influence, the power of doing good, of
assisting those weaker and poorer than ourselves; and there is even a certain
gratification in display."
My banter under the circumstances was in very vile taste. I spoke on the spur of
the contrast of his appearance and speech. I was sorry even while I was speaking.
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He turned a haggard but very composed face upon me. Said he: "I forgot myself.
Of course you would not understand."
He measured me for a moment. "No doubt it is very absurd. You will not believe
me even when I tell you, so that it is fairly safe to tell you. And it will be a
comfort to tell someone. I really have a big business in hand, a very big business.
But there are troubles just now. The fact is...I make diamonds."
"I suppose," said I, "you are out of work just at present?"
"I am sick of being disbelieved," he said impatiently, and suddenly unbuttoning
his wretched coat he pulled out a little canvas bag that was hanging by a cord
round his neck. From this he produced a brown pebble. "I wonder if you know
enough, to know what that is?" He handed it to me.
Now, a year or so ago, I had occupied my leisure in taking a London science
degree, so that I have a smattering of physics and mineralogy. The thing was not
unlike an uncut diamond of the darker sort, though far too large, being almost as
big as the top of my thumb. I took it, and saw it had the form of a regular
octahedron, with the curved faces peculiar to the most precious of minerals. I
took out my penknife and tried to scratch it--vainly. Leaning forward towards the
gas-lamp, I tried the thing on my watch-glass, and scored a white line across that,
with the greatest ease.
I looked at my interlocutor with rising curiosity. "It certainly is rather like a
diamond. But, if so, it is a Behemoth of diamonds. Where did you get it?"
"I tell you I made it," he said. "Give it back to me."
He replaced it hastily and buttoned his jacket. "I will sell it to you for one
hundred pounds," he suddenly whispered eagerly. With that my suspicions
returned. The thing might, after all, be merely a lump of that almost equally hard
substance, corundum, with an accidental resemblance in shape to the diamond.
Or if it was a diamond, how came he by it, and why should he offer it at a
hundred pounds?
We looked into one another's eyes. He seemed eager, but honestly eager. At that
moment I believed it was a diamond he was trying to sell. Yet I am a poor man, a
hundred pounds would leave a visible gap in my fortunes and no sane man would
buy a diamond by gaslight from a ragged tramp on his personal warranty only.
Still, a diamond that size conjured up a vision of many thousands of pounds.
Then, thought I, such a stone could scarcely exist without being mentioned in
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every book on gems, and again I called to mind the stories of contraband and
light-fingered Kaffirs at the Cape. I put the question of purchase on one side.
"How did you get it?" said I.
"I made it."
I had heard something of Moissan, but I knew his artificial diamonds were very
small. I shook my head.
"You seem to know something of this kind of thing. I will tell you a little about
myself. Perhaps then you may think better of the purchase." He turned round
with his back to the river, and put his hands in his pockets. He sighed. "I know
you will not believe me."
"Diamonds," he began--and as he spoke his voice lost its faint flavour of the
tramp and assumed something of the easy tone of an educated man--"are to be
made by throwing carbon out of combination in a suitable flux and under a
suitable pressure; the carbon crystallises out, not as black-lead or charcoalpowder, but as small diamonds. So much has been known to chemists for years,
but no one yet had hit upon exactly the right flux in which to melt up the carbon,
or exactly the right pressure for the best results. Consequently the diamonds
made by chemists are small and dark, and worthless as jewels. Now I, you know,
have given up my life to this problem--given my life to it."
"I began to work at the conditions of diamond making when I was seventeen, and
now I am thirty-two. It seemed to me that it might take all the thought and
energies of a man for ten years, or twenty years, but, even if it did, the game was
still worth the candle. Suppose one to have at last just hit the right trick before
the secret got out and diamonds became as common as coal, one might realize
millions. Millions!"
He paused and looked for my sympathy. His eyes shone hungrily. "To think,"
said he, "that I am on the verge of it all, and here!
"I had," he proceeded, "about a thousand pounds when I was twenty-one, and
this, I thought, eked out by a little teaching, would keep my researches going. A
year or two was spent in study, at Berlin chiefly, and then I continued on my own
account. The trouble was the secrecy. You see, if once I had let out what I was
doing, other men might have been spurred on by my belief in the practicability of
the idea; and I do not pretend to be such a genius as to have been sure of coming
in first, in the case of a race for the discovery. And you see it was important that
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if I really meant to make a pile, people should not know it was an artificial
process and capable of turning out diamonds by the ton. So I had to work all
alone. At first I had a little laboratory, but as my resources began to run out I had
to conduct my experiments in a wretched unfurnished room in Kentish Town,
where I slept at last on a straw mattress on the floor among all my apparatus. The
money simply flowed away. I grudged myself everything except scientific
appliances. I tried to keep things going by a little teaching, but I am not a very
good teacher, and I have no university degree, nor very much education except in
chemistry, and I found I had to give a lot of time and labour for precious little
money. But I got nearer and nearer the thing. Three years ago I settled the
problem of the composition of the flux, and got near the pressure by putting this
flux of mine and a certain carbon composition into a closed-up gun-barrel, filling
up with water, sealing tightly, and heating."
He paused.
"Rather risky," said I.
"Yes. It burst, and smashed all my windows and a lot of my apparatus; but I got a
kind of diamond powder nevertheless. Following out the problem of getting a big
pressure upon the molten mixture from which the things were to crystallise, I hit
upon some researches of Daubree's at the Paris Laboratorie des Poudres et
Salpetres. He exploded dynamite in a tightly screwed steel cylinder, too strong to
burst, and I found he could crush rocks into a muck not unlike the South African
bed in which diamonds are found. It was a tremendous strain on my resources,
but I got a steel cylinder made for my purpose after his pattern. I put in all my
stuff and my explosives, built up a fire in my furnace, put the whole concern in,
and--went out for a walk."
I could not help laughing at his matter-of-fact manner. "Did you not think it
would blow up the house? Were there other people in the place?"
"It was in the interest of science," he said, ultimately. "There was a costermonger
family on the floor below, a begging-letter writer in the room behind mine, and
two flower-women were upstairs. Perhaps it was a bit thoughtless. But possibly
some of them were out.
"When I came back the thing was just where I left it, among the white-hot coals.
The explosive hadn't burst the case. And then I had a problem to face. You know
time is an important element in crystallisation. If you hurry the process the
crystals are small--it is only by prolonged standing that they grow to any size. I
resolved to let this apparatus cool for two years, letting the temperature go down
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slowly during the time. And I was now quite out of money; and with a big fire
and the rent of my room, as well as my hunger to satisfy, I had scarcely a penny
in the world.
"I can hardly tell you all the shifts I was put to while I was making the diamonds.
I have sold newspapers, held horses, opened cab-doors. For many weeks I
addressed envelopes. I had a place as assistant to a man who owned a barrow,
and used to call down one side of the road while he called down the other.
"Once for a week I had absolutely nothing to do, and I begged. What a week that
was! One day the fire was going out and I had eaten nothing all day, and a little
chap taking his girl out, gave me sixpence--to show-off. Thank heaven for
vanity! How the fish-shops smelt! But I went and spent it all on coals, and had
the furnace bright red again, and then--Well, hunger makes a fool of a man.
"At last, three weeks ago, I let the fire out. I took my cylinder and unscrewed it
while it was still so hot that it punished my hands, and I scraped out the
crumbling lava-like mass with a chisel, and hammered it into a powder upon an
iron plate. And I found three big diamonds and five small ones. As I sat on the
floor hammering, my door opened, and my neighbour, the begging-letter writer
came in. He was drunk--as he usually is, 'Nerchist,' said he. 'You're drunk,' said I.
'Structive scoundrel,' said he. 'Go to your father,' said I, meaning the Father of
Lies. 'Never you mind,' said he, and gave me a cunning wink, and hiccupped, and
leaning up against the door, with his other eye against the doorpost, began to
babble of how he had been prying in my room, and how he had gone to the police
that morning, and how they had taken down everything he had to say--'siffiwas a
ge'm,' said he. Then I suddenly realised I was in a hole. Either I should have to
tell these police my little secret, and get the whole thing blown upon, or be
lagged as an Anarchist. So I went up to my neighbour and took him by the collar,
and rolled him about a bit, and then I gathered up my diamonds and cleared out.
The evening newspapers called my den the Kentish-Town Bomb Factory. And
now I cannot part with the things for love or money.
"If I go in to respectable jewellers they ask me to wait, and go and whisper to a
clerk to fetch a policeman, and then I say I cannot wait. And I found out a
receiver of stolen goods, and he simply stuck to the one I gave him and told me
to prosecute if I wanted it back. I am going about now with several hundred
thousand pounds-worth of diamonds round my neck, and without either food or
shelter. You are the first person I have taken into my confidence. But I like your
face and I am hard-driven."
He looked into my eyes.
203
"It would be madness," said I, "for me to buy a diamond under the circumstances.
Besides, I do not carry hundreds of pounds about in my pocket. Yet I more than
half believe your story. I will, if you like, do this: come to my office tomorrow..."
"You think I am a thief!" said he keenly. "You will tell the police. I am not
coming into a trap."
"Somehow I am assured you are no thief. Here is my card. Take that, anyhow.
You need not come to any appointment. Come when you will."
He took the card, and an earnest of my good-will.
"Think better of it and come," said I.
He shook his head doubtfully. "I will pay back your half-crown with interest
some day--such interest as will amaze you," said he. "Anyhow, you will keep the
secret...? Don't follow me."
He crossed the road and went into the darkness towards the little steps under the
archway leading into Essex Street, and I let him go. And that was the last I ever
saw of him.
Afterwards I had two letters from him asking me to send bank-notes--not
cheques--to certain addresses. I weighed the matter over and took what I
conceived to be the wisest course. Once he called upon me when I was out. My
urchin described him as a very thin, dirty, and ragged man, with a dreadful
cough. He left no message. That was the finish of him so far as my story goes. I
wonder sometimes what has become of him. Was he an ingenious monomaniac,
or a fraudulent dealer in pebbles, or has he really made diamonds as he asserted?
The latter is just sufficiently credible to make me think at times that I have
missed the most brilliant opportunity of my life. He may of course be dead, and
his diamonds carelessly thrown aside--one, I repeat, was almost as big as my
thumb. Or he may be still wandering about trying to sell the things. It is just
possible he may yet emerge upon society, and, passing athwart my heavens in the
serene altitude sacred to the wealthy and the well-advertised, reproach me
silently for my want of enterprise. I sometimes think I might at least have risked
five pounds.
AEPYORNIS ISLAND
204
The man with the scarred face leant over the table and looked at my bundle.
"Orchids?" he asked.
"A few," I said.
"Cypripediums," he said.
"Chiefly," said I.
"Anything new? I thought not. I did these islands twenty-five--twenty-seven
years ago. If you find anything new here--well, it's brand new. I didn't leave
much."
"I'm not a collector," said I.
"I was young then," he went on. "Lord! How I used to fly round." He seemed to
take my measure. "I was in the East Indies two years, and in Brazil seven. Then I
went to Madagascar."
"I know a few explorers by name," I said, anticipating a yarn. "Whom did you
collect for?"
"Dawson's. I wonder if you've heard the name of Butcher ever?"
"Butcher--Butcher?" The name seemed vaguely present in my memory; then I
recalled Butcher vs. Dawson. "Why!" said I, "You are the man who sued them
for four years' salary--got cast away on a desert island..."
"Your servant," said the man with the scar, bowing. "Funny case, wasn't it? Here
was me, making a little fortune on that island, doing nothing for it neither, and
them quite unable to give me notice. It often used to amuse me thinking over it
while I was there. I did calculations of it--big--all over the blessed atoll in
ornamental figuring."
"How did it happen?" said I. "I don't rightly remember the case."
"Well...You've heard of the Aepyornis?"
"Rather. Andrews was telling me of a new species he was working on only a
month or so ago. Just before I sailed. They've got a thigh-bone, it seems, nearly a
yard long. Monster the thing must have been!"
205
"I believe you," said the man with the scar. "It was a monster. Sindbad's roc was
just a legend of 'em. But when did they find these bones?"
"Three or four years ago--'91, I fancy. Why?"
"Why? Because I found them--Lord--! It's nearly twenty years ago. If Dawson's
hadn't been silly about that salary they might have made a perfect ring in 'em...I
couldn't help the infernal boat going adrift."
He paused. "I suppose it's the same place. A kind of swamp about ninety miles
north of Antananarivo. Do you happen to know? You have to go to it along the
coast by boats. You don't happen to remember, perhaps?"
"I don't. I fancy Andrews said something about a swamp."
"It must be the same. It's on the east coast. And somehow there's something in
the water that keeps things from decaying. Like creosote it smells. It reminded
me of Trinidad. Did they get any more eggs? Some of the eggs I found were a
foot and a half long. The swamp goes circling round, you know, and cuts off this
bit. It's mostly salt, too. Well... What a time I had of it! I found the things quite
by accident. We went for eggs, me and two native chaps, in one of those rum
canoes all tied together, and found the bones at the same time. We had a tent and
provisions for four days, and we pitched on one of the firmer places. To think of
it brings that odd tarry smell back even now. It's funny work. You go probing
into the mud with iron rods, you know. Usually the egg gets smashed. I wonder
how long it is since these Aepyornises really lived. The missionaries say the
natives have legends about when they were alive, but I never heard any such
stories myself.* But certainly those eggs we got were as fresh as if they had been
new laid. Fresh! Carrying them down to the boat one of my nigger chaps dropped
one on a rock and it smashed. How I lammed into the beggar! But sweet it was,
as if it was new laid, not even smelly, and its mother dead these four hundred
years, perhaps. Said a centipede had bit him. However, I'm getting off the straight
with the story. It had taken us all day to dig into the slush and get these eggs out
unbroken, and we were all covered with beastly black mud, and naturally I was
cross. So far as I knew they were the only eggs that have ever been got out, not
even cracked. I went afterwards to see the ones they have at the Natural History
Museum in London; all of them were cracked and just stuck together like a
mosaic, and bits missing. Mine were perfect, and I meant to blow them when I
got back. Naturally I was annoyed at the silly duffer dropping three hours' work
just on account of a centipede. I hit him about rather."
206
[* No European is known to have seen a live Aepyornis, with the doubtful
exception of Macer, who visited Madagascar in 1745.--H. G. W.]
The man with the scar took out a clay pipe. I placed my pouch before him. He
filled up absent-mindedly.
"How about the others? Did you get those home? I don't remember--"
"That's the queer part of the story. I had three others. Perfectly fresh eggs. Well,
we put 'em in the boat, and then I went up to the tent to make some coffee,
leaving my two heathens down by the beach--the one fooling about with his sting
and the other helping him. It never occurred to me that the beggars would take
advantage of the peculiar position I was in to pick a quarrel. But I suppose the
centipede poison and the kicking I had given him had upset the one--he was
always a cantankerous sort--and he persuaded the other."
"I remember I was sitting and smoking and boiling up the water over a spiritlamp, business I used to take on these expeditions. Incidentally I was admiring
the swamp under the sunset. All black and blood-red it was, in streaks--a
beautiful sight. And up beyond the land rose grey and hazy to the hills, and the
sky behind them red, like a furnace mouth. And fifty yards behind the back of me
was these blessed heathens--quite regardless of the tranquil air of things--plotting
to cut off with the boat and leave me all alone with three days' provisions and a
canvas tent, and nothing to drink whatsoever beyond a little keg of water. I heard
a kind of yelp behind me, and there they were in this canoe affair--it wasn't
properly a boat--and, perhaps, twenty yards from land. I realised what was up in
a moment. My gun was in the tent, and besides, I had no bullets--only duck shot.
They knew that. But I had a little revolver in my pocket, and I pulled that out as I
ran down to the beach.
"'Come back!' says I, flourishing it.
"They jabbered something at me, and the man that broke the egg jeered. I aimed
at the other--because he was unwounded and had the paddle, and I missed. They
laughed. However, I wasn't beat. I knew I had to keep cool, and I tried him again
and made him jump with the whang of it. He didn't laugh that time. The third
time I got his head, and over he went, and the paddle with him. It was a precious
lucky shot for a revolver. I reckon it was fifty yards. He went right under. I don't
know if he was shot, or simply stunned and drowned. Then I began to shout to
the other chap to come back, but he huddled up in the canoe and refused to
answer. So I fired out my revolver at him and never got near him.
207
"I felt a precious fool, I can tell you. There I was on this rotten, black beach, flat
swamp all behind me, and the flat sea, cold after the sun set, and just this black
canoe drifting steadily out to sea. I tell you I damned Dawson's and Jamrach's
and Museums and all the rest of it just to rights. I bawled to this nigger to come
back, until my voice went up into a scream.
"There was nothing for it but to swim after him and take my luck with the sharks.
So I opened my clasp-knife and put it in my mouth, and took off my clothes and
waded in. As soon as I was in the water I lost sight of the canoe, but I aimed, as I
judged, to head it off. I hoped the man in it was too bad to navigate it, and that it
would keep on drifting in the same direction. Presently it came up over the
horizon again to the south-westward, about. The afterglow of sunset was well
over now and the dim of night creeping up. The stars were coming through the
blue. I swum like a champion, though my legs and arms were soon aching.
"However, I came up to him by the time the stars were fairly out. As it got darker
I began to see all manner of glowing things in the water--phosphorescence, you
know. At times it made me giddy. I hardly knew which was stars and which was
phosphorescence, and whether I was swimming on my head or my heels. The
canoe was as black as sin, and the ripple under the bows like liquid fire. I was
naturally chary of clambering up into it. I was anxious to see what he was up to
first. He seemed to be lying cuddled up in a lump in the bows, and the stern was
all out of water. The thing kept turning round slowly as it drifted--kind of
waltzing, don't you know. I went to the stern and pulled it down, expecting him
to wake up. Then I began to clamber in with my knife in my hand, and ready for
a rush. But he never stirred. So there I sat in the stern of the little canoe, drifting
away over the calm phosphorescent sea, and with all the host of the stars above
me, waiting for something to happen.
"After a long time I called him by name, but he never answered. I was too tired to
take any risks by going along to him. So we sat there. I fancy I dozed once or
twice. When the dawn came I saw he was as dead as a door-nail and all puffed up
and purple. My three eggs and the bones were lying in the middle of the canoe,
and the keg of water and some coffee and biscuits wrapped in a Cape Argus by
his feet, and a tin of methylated spirit underneath him. There was no paddle, nor
in fact, anything except the spirit tin that I could use as one, so I settled to drift
until I was picked up. I held an inquest on him, brought in a verdict against some
snake, scorpion, or centipede unknown, and sent him overboard.
"After that I had a drink of water and a few biscuits, and took a look round. I
suppose a man low down as I was don't see very far; leastways, Madagascar was
clean out of sight, and any trace of land at all. I saw a sail going south-westward208
-looked like a schooner but her hull never came up. Presently the sun got high in
the sky and began to beat down upon me. Lord! It pretty near made my brains
boil. I tried dipping my head in the sea, but after a while my eye fell on the Cape
Argus, and I lay down flat in the canoe and spread this over me. Wonderful
things these newspapers! I never read one through thoroughly before, but it's odd
what you get up to when you're alone, as I was. I suppose I read that blessed old
Cape Argus twenty times. The pitch in the canoe simply reeked with the heat and
rose up into big blisters.
"I drifted ten days," said the man with the scar. "It's a little thing in the telling,
isn't it? Every day was like the last. Except in the morning and the evening I
never kept a lookout even--the blaze was so infernal. I didn't see a sail after the
first three days, and those I saw took no notice of me. About the sixth night a
ship went by scarcely half a mile away from me, with all its lights ablaze and its
ports open, looking like a big firefly. There was music aboard. I stood up and
shouted and screamed at it. The second day I broached one of the Aepyornis
eggs, scraped the shell away at the end bit by bit, and tried it, and I was glad to
find it was good enough to eat. A bit flavoury--not bad, I mean--but with
something of the taste of a duck's egg. There was a kind of circular patch, about
six inches across, on one side of the yoke, and with streaks of blood and a white
mark like a ladder in it that I thought queer, but I did not understand what this
meant at the time, and I wasn't inclined to be particular. The egg lasted me three
days, with biscuits and a drink of water. I chewed coffee-berries too-invigorating stuff. The second egg I opened about the eighth day, and it scared
me."
The man with the scar paused. "Yes," he said, "Developing.
"I daresay you find it hard to believe. I did, with the thing before me. There the
egg had been, sunk in that cold black mud, perhaps three hundred years. But
there was no mistaking it. There was the--what is it--? Embryo, with its big head
and curved back, and its heart beating under its throat, and the yolk shrivelled up
and great membranes spreading inside of the shell and all over the yolk. Here
was I hatching out the eggs of the biggest of all extinct birds, in a little canoe in
the midst of the Indian Ocean. If old Dawson had known that! It was worth four
years' salary. What do you think?
"However, I had to eat that precious thing up, every bit of it, before I sighted the
reef, and some of the mouthfuls were beastly unpleasant. I left the third one
alone. I held it up to the light, but the shell was too thick for me to get any notion
of what might be happening inside; and though I fancied I heard blood pulsing, it
might have been the rustle in my own ears, like what you listen to in a seashell.
209
"Then came the atoll. Came out of the sunrise, as it were, suddenly, close up to
me. I drifted straight towards it until I was about half a mile from shore, not
more, and then the current took a turn, and I had to paddle as hard as I could with
my hands and bits of the Aepyornis shell to make the place. However, I got there.
It was just a common atoll about four miles round, with a few trees growing and
a spring in one place, and the lagoon full of parrot-fish. I took the egg ashore and
put it in a good place, well above the tide lines and in the sun, to give it all the
chance I could, and pulled the canoe up safe, and loafed about prospecting. It's
rum how dull an atoll is. As soon as I had found a spring all the interest seemed
to vanish. When I was a kid I thought nothing could be finer or more adventurous
than the Robinson Crusoe business, but that place was as monotonous as a book
of sermons. I went round finding eatable things and generally thinking; but I tell
you I was bored to death before the first day was out. It shows my luck--the very
day I landed the weather changed. A thunderstorm went by to the north and
flicked its wing over the island, and in the night there came a drencher and a
howling wind slap over us. It wouldn't have taken much, you know, to upset that
canoe.
"I was sleeping under the canoe, and the egg was luckily among the sand higher
up the beach, and the first thing I remember was a sound like a hundred pebbles
hitting the boat at once, and a rush of water over my body. I'd been dreaming of
Antananarivo, and I sat up and halloaed to Intoshi to ask her what the devil was
up, and clawed out at the chair where the matches used to be. Then I remembered
where I was. There were phosphorescent waves rolling up as if they meant to eat
me, and all the rest of the night as black as pitch. The air was simply yelling. The
clouds seemed down on your head almost, and the rain fell as if heaven was
sinking and they were baling out the waters above the firmament. One great
roller came writhing at me, like a fiery serpent, and I bolted. Then I thought of
the canoe, and ran down to it as the water went hissing back again; but the thing
had gone. I wondered about the egg then, and felt my way to it. It was all right
and well out of reach of the maddest waves, so I sat down beside it and cuddled it
for company. Lord! What a night that was!
"The storm was over before the morning. There wasn't a rag of cloud left in the
sky when the dawn came, and all along the beach there were bits of plank
scattered--which was the disarticulated skeleton, so to speak, of my canoe.
However, that gave me something to do, for, taking advantage of two of the trees
being together, I rigged up a kind of storm-shelter with these vestiges. And that
day the egg hatched.
"Hatched, sir, when my head was pillowed on it and I was asleep. I heard a
whack and felt a jar and sat up, and there was the end of the egg pecked out and a
210
rum little brown head looking out at me. 'Lord!' I said, 'You're welcome'; and
with a little difficulty he came out.
"He was a nice friendly little chap at first, about the size of a small hen--very
much like most other young birds, only bigger. His plumage was a dirty brown to
begin with, with a sort of grey scab that fell off it very soon, and scarcely
feathers--a kind of downy hair. I can hardly express how pleased I was to see
him. I tell you, Robinson Crusoe don't make near enough of his loneliness. But
here was interesting company. He looked at me and winked his eye from the
front backwards, like a hen, and gave a chirp and began to peck about at once, as
though being hatched three hundred years too late was just nothing. 'Glad to see
you, Man Friday!' says I, for I had naturally settled he was to be called Man
Friday if ever he was hatched, as soon as ever, I found the egg in the canoe had
developed. I was a bit anxious about his feed, so I gave him a lump of raw parrotfish at once. He took it, and opened his beak for more. I was glad of that for,
under the circumstances, if he'd been at all fanciful, I should have had to eat him
after all.
"You'd be surprised what an interesting bird that Aepyornis chick was. He
followed me about from the very beginning. He used to stand by me and watch
while I fished in the lagoon, and go shares in anything I caught. And he was
sensible, too. There were nasty green warty things, like pickled gherkins, used to
lie about on the beach, and he tried one of these and it upset him. He never even
looked at any of them again.
"And he grew. You could almost see him grow. And as I was never much of a
society man, his quiet, friendly ways suited me to a T. For nearly two years we
were as happy as we could be on that island. I had no business worries, for I
knew my salary was mounting up at Dawsons'. We would see a sail now and
then, but nothing ever came near us. I amused myself, too, by decorating the
island with designs worked in sea-urchins and fancy shells of various kinds. I put
'Aepyornis Island' all round the place very nearly, in big letters, like what you see
done with coloured stones at railway stations in the old country, and
mathematical calculations and drawings of various sorts. And I used to lie
watching the blessed bird stalking round and growing, growing; and think how I
could make a living out of him by showing him about if I ever got taken off.
After his first moult he began to get handsome, with a crest and a blue wattle, and
a lot of green feathers at the behind of him. And then I used to puzzle whether
Dawsons' had any right to claim him or not. Stormy weather and in the rainy
season we lay snug under the shelter, I had made out of the old canoe, and I used
to tell him lies about my friends at home. And after a storm we would go round
211
the island together to see if there was any drift. It was a kind of idyll, you might
say. If only I had, had some tobacco it would have been simply just like heaven.
"It was about the end of the second year our little paradise went wrong. Friday
was then about fourteen feet high to the bill of him, with a big, broad head like
the end of a pickaxe, and two huge brown eyes with yellow rims, set together like
a man's--not out of sight of each other like a hen's. His plumage was fine--none
of the half-mourning style of your ostrich--more like a cassowary as far as colour
and texture go. And then it was he began to cock his comb at me and give
himself airs, and show signs of a nasty temper...
"At last came a time when my fishing had been rather unlucky, and he began to
hang about me in a queer, meditative way. I thought he might have been eating
sea-cucumbers or something, but it was really just discontent on his part. I was
hungry too, and when at last I landed a fish I wanted it for myself. Tempers were
short that morning on both sides. He pecked at it and grabbed it, and I gave him a
whack on the head to make him leave go. And at that he went for me. Lord...!
"He gave me this in the face." The man indicated his scar. "Then he kicked me. It
was like a cart-horse. I got up, and seeing he hadn't finished, I started off full tilt
with my arms doubled up over my face. But he ran on those gawky legs of his
faster than a race-horse, and kept landing out at me with sledgehammer kicks,
and bringing his pickaxe down on the back of my head. I made for the lagoon,
and went in up to my neck. He stopped at the water, for he hated getting his feet
wet, and began to make a shindy, something like a peacock's, only hoarser. He
started strutting up and down the beach. I'll admit I felt small to see this blessed
fossil lording it there. And my head and face were all bleeding, and--well, my
body just one jelly of bruises.
"I decided to swim across the lagoon and leave him alone for a bit, until the affair
blew over. I shinned up the tallest palm-tree, and sat there thinking of it all. I
don't suppose I ever felt so hurt by anything before or since. It was the brutal
ingratitude of the creature. I'd been more than a brother to him. I'd hatched him,
educated him. A great gawky, out-of-date bird! And me a human being--heir of
the ages and all that.
"I thought after a time he'd begin to see things in that light himself, and feel a
little sorry for his behaviour. I thought if I was to catch some nice little bits of
fish, perhaps, and go to him presently in a casual kind of way, and offer them to
him, he might do the sensible thing. It took me some time to learn how
unforgiving and cantankerous an extinct bird can be. Malice!
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"I won't tell you all the little devices I tried to get that bird round again, I simply
can't. It makes my cheek burn with shame even now to think of the snubs and
buffets I had from this infernal curiosity. I tried violence. I chucked lumps of
coral at him from a safe distance, but he only swallowed them. I shied my open
knife at him and almost lost it, though it was too big for him to swallow. I tried
starving him out and struck fishing, but he took to picking along the beach at low
water after worms, and rubbed along on that. Half my time I spent up to my neck
in the lagoon, and the rest up the palm-trees. One of them was scarcely high
enough, and when he caught me up it he had a regular Bank Holiday with the
calves of my legs. It got unbearable. I don't know if you have ever tried sleeping
up a palm-tree. It gave me the most horrible nightmares. Think of the shame of it,
too! Here was this extinct animal mooning about my island like a sulky duke, and
me not allowed to rest the sole of my foot on the place. I used to cry with
weariness and vexation. I told him straight that I didn't mean to be chased about a
desert island by any damned anachronisms. I told him to go and peck a navigator
of his own age. But he only snapped his beak at me. Great ugly bird, all legs and
neck!
"I shouldn't like to say how long that went on altogether. I'd have killed him
sooner if I'd known how. However, I hit on a way of settling him at last. It is a
South American dodge. I joined all my fishing-lines together with stems of
seaweed and things, and made a stoutish string, perhaps twelve yards in length or
more, and I fastened two lumps of coral rock to the ends of this. It took me some
time to do, because every now and then I had to go into the lagoon or up a tree as
the fancy took me. This I whirled rapidly round my head, and then let it go at
him. The first time I missed, but the next time the string caught his legs
beautifully, and wrapped round them again and again. Over he went. I threw it
standing waist-deep in the lagoon, and as soon as he went down I was out of the
water and sawing at his neck with my knife...
"I don't like to think of that even now. I felt like a murderer while I did it, though
my anger was hot against him. When I stood over him and saw him bleeding on
the white sand, and his beautiful great legs and neck writhing in his last
agony...Pah!
"With that tragedy loneliness came upon me like a curse. Good Lord! You can't
imagine how I missed that bird. I sat by his corpse and sorrowed over him, and
shivered as I looked round the desolate, silent reef. I thought of what a jolly little
bird he had been when he was hatched, and of a thousand pleasant tricks he had
played before he went wrong. I thought if I'd only wounded him I might have
nursed him round into a better understanding. If I'd had any means of digging
into the coral rock I'd have buried him. I felt exactly as if he was human. As it
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was, I couldn't think of eating him, so I put him in the lagoon, and the little fishes
picked him clean. I didn't even save the feathers. Then one day a chap cruising
about in a yacht had a fancy to see if my atoll still existed.
"He didn't come a moment too soon, for I was about sick enough of the
desolation of it, and only hesitating whether I should walk out into the sea and
finish up the business that way, or fall back on the green things...
"I sold the bones to a man named Winslow--a dealer near the British Museum,
and he says he sold them to old Havers. It seems Havers didn't understand they
were extra large, and it was only after his death they attracted attention. They
called 'em Aepyornis--what was it?"
"Aepyornis vastus," said I. "It's funny, the very thing was mentioned to me by a
friend of mine. When they found an Aepyornis, with a thigh a yard long, they
thought they had reached the top of the scale, and called him Aepyornis
maximus. Then some one turned up another thigh-bone four feet six or more, and
that they called Aepyornis titan. Then your vastus was found after old Havers
died, in his collection, and then a vastissimus turned up."
"Winslow was telling me as much," said the man with the scar. "If they get any
more Aepyornises, he reckons some scientific swell will go and burst a bloodvessel. But it was a queer thing to happen to a man, wasn't it--altogether?"
THE REMARKABLE CASE OF DAVIDSON'S EYES
The transitory mental aberration of Sidney Davidson, remarkable enough in
itself, is still more remarkable if Wade's explanation is to be credited. It sets one
dreaming of the oddest possibilities of intercommunication in the future, of
spending an intercalary five minutes on the other side of the world, or being
watched in our most secret operations by unsuspected eyes. It happened that I
was the immediate witness of Davidson's seizure, and so it falls naturally to me
to put the story upon paper.
When I say that I was the immediate witness of his seizure, I mean that I was the
first on the scene. The thing happened at the Harlow Technical College just
beyond the Highgate Archway. He was alone in the larger laboratory when the
thing happened. I was in the smaller room, where the balances are, writing up
some notes. The thunderstorm had completely upset my work, of course. It was
just after one of the louder peals that I thought I heard some glass smash in the
214
other room. I stopped writing, and turned round to listen. For a moment I heard
nothing; the hail was playing the devil's tattoo on the corrugated zinc of the roof.
Then came another sound, a smash--no doubt of it this time. Something heavy
had been knocked off the bench. I jumped up at once and went and opened the
door leading into the big laboratory.
I was surprised to hear a queer sort of laugh, and saw Davidson standing
unsteadily in the middle of the room, with a dazzled look on his face. My first
impression was that he was drunk. He did not notice me. He was clawing out at
something invisible a yard in front of his face. He put out his hand slowly, rather
hesitatingly, and then clutched nothing. "What's come to it?" he said. He held up
his hands to his face, fingers spread out. "Great Scott!" he said. The thing
happened three or four years ago, when everyone swore by that personage. Then
he began raising his feet clumsily, as though he had expected to find them glued
to the floor.
"Davidson!" cried I. "What's the matter with you?" He turned round in my
direction and looked about for me. He looked over me and at me and on either
side of me, without the slightest sign of seeing me. "Waves," he said; "and a
remarkably neat schooner. I'd swear that was Bellows's voice. Hullo!" He
shouted suddenly at the top of his voice.
I thought he was up to some foolery. Then I saw littered about his feet the
shattered remains of the best of our electrometers. "What's up, man?" said I.
"You've smashed the electrometer!"
"Bellows again!" said he. "Friends left, if my hands are gone. Something about
electrometers. Which way are you, Bellows?" He suddenly came staggering
towards me. "The damned stuff cuts like butter," he said. He walked straight into
the bench and recoiled. "None so buttery, that!" he said, and stood swaying.
I felt scared. "Davidson," said I, "what on earth's come over you?"
He looked round him in every direction. "I could swear that was Bellows. Why
don't you show yourself like a man, Bellows?"
It occurred to me that he must be suddenly struck blind. I walked round the table
and laid my hand upon his arm. I never saw a man more startled in my life. He
jumped away from me, and came round into an attitude of self-defense, his face
fairly distorted with terror: "Good God!" he cried. "What was that?"
"It's I--Bellows. Confound it, Davidson!"
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He jumped when I answered him and stared--how can I express it--? Right
through me. He began talking, not to me, but to himself. "Here in broad daylight
on a clear beach. Not a place to hide in." He looked about him wildly. "Here! I'm
off." He suddenly turned and ran headlong into the big electromagnet--so
violently that, as we found afterwards, he bruised his shoulder and jawbone
cruelly. At that he stepped back a pace, and cried out with almost a whimper,
"What, in Heaven's name, has come over me?" He stood, blanched with terror
and trembling violently, with his right arm clutching his left, where that had
collided with the magnet.
By that time I was excited, and fairly excited. "Davidson," said I, "don't be
afraid."
He was startled at my voice, but not so excessively as before. I repeated my
words in as clear and firm a tone as I could assume. "Bellows," he said, "is that
you?"
"Can't you see it's me?"
He laughed. "I can't even see it's myself. Where the devil are we?" "Here," said I,
"in the laboratory."
"The laboratory!" he answered, in a puzzled tone, and put his hand to his
forehead. "I was in the laboratory--till that flash came, but I'm hanged if I'm there
now. What ship is that?"
"There's no ship," said I. "Do be sensible, old chap."
"No ship!" he repeated, and seemed to forget my denial forthwith. "I suppose,"
said he, slowly, "we're both dead. But the rummy part is I feel just as though I
still had a body. Don't get used to it all at once, I suppose. The old shop was
struck by lightning, I suppose. Jolly quick thing, Bellows--eigh?"
"Don't talk nonsense. You're very much alive. You are in the laboratory,
blundering about. You've just smashed a new electrometer. I don't envy you
when Boyce arrives."
He stared away from me towards the diagrams of cryohydrates. "I must be deaf,"
said he. "They've fired a gun, for there goes the puff of smoke, and I never heard
a sound."
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I put my hand on his arm again, and this time he was less alarmed. "We seem to
have a sort of invisible bodies," said he. "By Jove! There's a boat coming round
the headland! It's very much like the old life after all--in a different climate."
I shook his arm. "Davidson," I cried, "wake up!"
It was just then that Boyce came in. So soon as he spoke Davidson exclaimed:
"Old Boyce! Dead too! What a lark!" I hastened to explain that Davidson was in
a kind of somnambulistic trance. Boyce was interested at once. We both did all
we could to rouse the fellow out of his extraordinary state. He answered our
questions, and asked us some of his own, but his attention seemed distracted by
his hallucination about a beach and a ship. He kept interpolating observations
concerning some boat and the davits and sails filling with the wind. It made one
feel queer, in the dusky laboratory, to hear him saying such things.
He was blind and helpless. We had to walk him down the passage, one at each
elbow, to Boyce's private room, and while Boyce talked to him there, and
humored him about this ship idea, I went along the corridor and asked old Wade
to come and look at him. The voice of our Dean sobered him a little, but not very
much. He asked where his hands were, and why he had to walk about up to his
waist in the ground. Wade thought over him a long time--you know how he knits
his brows--and then made him feel the couch, guiding his hands to it. "That's a
couch," said Wade. "The couch in the private room of Professor Boyce.
Horsehair stuffing."
Davidson felt about, and puzzled over it, and answered presently that he could
feel it all right, but he couldn't see it.
"What do you see?" asked Wade. Davidson said he could see nothing but a lot of
sand and broken-up shells. Wade gave him some other things to feel, telling him
what they were, and watching him keenly.
"The ship is almost hull down," said Davidson, presently, apropos of nothing.
"Never mind the ship," said Wade. "Listen to me, Davidson. Do you know what
hallucination means?"
"Rather," said Davidson.
"Well, everything you see is hallucinatory."
"Bishop Berkeley," said Davidson.
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"Don't mistake me," said Wade. "You are alive, and in this room of Boyce's. But
something has happened to your eyes. You cannot see; you can feel and hear, but
not see. Do you follow me?"
"It seems to me that I see too much." Davidson rubbed his knuckles into his eyes.
"Well?" he said.
"That's all. Don't let it perplex you. Bellows, here, and I will take you home in a
cab."
"Wait a bit." Davidson thought. "Help me to sit down," said he, presently; "and
now--I'm sorry to trouble you--but will you tell me all that over again?"
Wade repeated it very patiently. Davidson shut his eyes, and pressed his hands
upon his forehead. "Yes," said he. "It's quite right. Now my eyes are shut I know
you're right. That's you, Bellows, sitting by me on the couch. I'm in England
again. And we're in the dark."
Then he opened his eyes. "And there," said he, "is the sun just rising, and the
yards of the ship, and a tumbled sea, and a couple of birds flying. I never saw
anything so real. And I'm sitting up to my neck in a bank of sand."
He bent forward and covered his face with his hands. Then he opened his eyes
again. "Dark sea and sunrise! And yet I'm sitting on a sofa in old Boyce's room...!
God help me!"
That was the beginning. For three weeks this strange affection of Davidson's eyes
continued unabated. It was far worse than being blind. He was absolutely
helpless, and had to be fed like a newly hatched bird, and led about and
undressed. If he attempted to move he fell over things or struck himself against
walls or doors. After a day or so he got used to hearing our voices without seeing
us, and willingly admitted he was at home, and that Wade was right in what he
told him. My sister, to whom he was engaged, insisted on coming to see him, and
would sit for hours every day while he talked about this beach of his. Holding her
hand seemed to comfort him immensely. He explained that when we left the
College and drove home--he lived in Hampstead Village--it appeared to him as if
we drove right through a sandhill--it was perfectly black until he emerged again-and through rocks and trees and solid obstacles, and when he was taken to his
own room it made him giddy and almost frantic with the fear of falling, because
going upstairs seemed to lift him thirty or forty feet above the rocks of his
imaginary island. He kept saying he should smash all the eggs. The end was that
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he had to be taken down into his father's consulting-room and laid upon a couch
that stood there.
He described the island as being a bleak kind of place on the whole, with very
little vegetation, except some peaty stuff, and a lot of bare rock. There were
multitudes of penguins, and they made the rocks white and disagreeable to see.
The sea was often rough, and once there was a thunderstorm, and he lay and
shouted at the silent flashes. Once or twice seals pulled up on the beach but, only
on the first two or three days. He said it was very funny the way in which the
penguins used to waddle right through him, and how he seemed to lie among
them without disturbing them.
I remember one odd thing, and that was when he wanted very badly to smoke.
We put a pipe in his hands--he almost poked his eye out with it--and lit it. But he
couldn't taste anything. I've since found it's the same with me--I don't know if it's
the usual case--that I cannot enjoy tobacco at all unless I can see the smoke.
But the queerest part of his vision came when Wade sent him out in a Bath-chair
to get fresh air. The Davidsons hired a chair, and got that deaf and obstinate
dependent of theirs, Widgery, to attend to it. Widgery's ideas of healthy
expeditions were peculiar. My sister, who had been to the Dog's Home, met them
in Camden Town, towards King's Cross. Widgery trotting along complacently,
and Davidson evidently most distressed, trying in his feeble, blind way to attract
Widgery's attention.
He positively wept when my sister spoke to him. "Oh, get me out of this horrible
darkness!" he said, feeling for her hand. "I must get out of it, or I shall die." He
was quite incapable of explaining what was the matter, but my sister decided he
must go home, and presently, as they went up the hill towards Hampstead, the
horror seemed to drop from him. He said it was good to see the stars again,
though it was then about noon and a blazing day.
"It seemed," he told me afterwards, "as if I was being carried irresistibly towards
the water. I was not very much alarmed at first. Of course it was night there--a
lovely night."
"Of course?" I asked, for that struck me as odd.
"Of course," said he. "It's always night there when it is day here... Well, we went
right into the water, which was calm and shining under the moonlight--just a
broad swell that seemed to grow broader and flatter as I came down into it. The
surface glistened just like a skin--it might have been empty space underneath for
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all I could tell to the contrary. Very slowly, for I rode slanting into it, the water
crept up to my eyes. Then I went under, and the skin seemed to break and heal
again about my eyes. The moon gave a jump up in the sky and grew green and
dim, and fish, faintly glowing, came darting round me--and things that seemed
made of luminous glass, and I passed through a tangle of seaweeds that shone
with an oily luster. And so I drove down into the sea, and the stars went out one
by one, and the moon grew greener and darker, and the seaweed became a
luminous purple-red. It was all very faint and mysterious, and everything seemed
to quiver. And all the while I could hear the wheels of the Bath-chair creaking,
and the footsteps of people going by, and a man in the distance selling the special
"Pall Mall."
"I kept sinking down deeper and deeper into the water. It became inky black
about me, not a ray from above came down into that darkness, and the
phosphorescent things grew brighter and brighter. The snaky branches of the
deeper weeds flickered like the flames of spirit-lamps; but after a time, there
were no more weeds. The fishes came staring and gaping towards me, and into
me and through me. I never imagined such fishes before. They had lines of fire
along the sides of them as though they had been outlined with a luminous pencil.
And there was a ghastly thing swimming backward with a lot of twining arms.
And then I saw, coming very slowly towards me through the gloom, a hazy mass
of light that resolved itself as it drew nearer into multitudes of fishes, struggling
and darting round something that drifted. I drove on straight towards it, and
presently I saw in the midst of the tumult, and by the light of the fish, a bit of
splintered spar looming over me, and a dark hull tilting over, and some glowing
phosphorescent forms that were shaken and writhed as the fish bit at them. Then
it was I began to try to attract Widgery's attention. A horror came upon me. Ugh!
I should have driven right into those half-eaten--things. If your sister had not
come! They had great holes in them, Bellows, and...Never mind. But it was
ghastly!"
For three weeks Davidson remained in this singular state, seeing what at the time
we imagined was an altogether phantasmal world, and stone blind to the world
around him. Then, one Tuesday, when I called, I met old Davidson in the
passage. "He can see his thumb!" the old gentleman said, in a perfect transport.
He was struggling into his overcoat. "He can see his thumb, Bellows!" he said,
with the tears in his eyes. "The lad will be all right yet."
I rushed in to Davidson. He was holding up a little book before his face, and
looking at it and laughing in a weak kind of way.
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"It's amazing," said he. "There's a kind of patch come there." He pointed with his
finger. "I'm on the rocks as usual, and the penguins are staggering and flapping
about as usual, and there's been a whale showing every now and then, but it's got
too dark now to make him out. But put something there, and I see it--I do see it.
It's very dim and broken in places, but I see it all the same, like a faint specter of
itself. I found it out this morning while they were dressing me. It's like a hole in
this infernal phantom world. Just put your hand by mine. No--not there. Ah! Yes!
I see it. The base of your thumb and a bit of cuff! It looks like the ghost of a bit
of your hand sticking out of the darkening sky. Just by it there's a group of stars
like a cross coming out."
From that time Davidson began to mend. His account of the change, like his
account of the vision, was oddly convincing. Over patches of his field of vision
the phantom world grew fainter, grew transparent, as it were, and through these
translucent gaps he began to see dimly the real world about him. The patches
grew in size and number, ran together and spread until only here and there were
blind spots left upon his eyes. He was able to get up and steer himself about, feed
himself once more, read, smoke, and behave like an ordinary citizen again. At
first it was very confusing to him to have these two pictures overlapping each
other like the changing views of a lantern, but in a little while he began to
distinguish the real from the illusory.
At first he was unfeignedly glad, and seemed only too anxious to complete his
cure by taking exercise and tonics. But as that odd island of his began to fade
away from him, he became queerly interested in it. He wanted particularly to go
down into the deep sea again, and would spend half his time wandering about the
low-lying parts of London, trying to find the water-logged wreck he had seen
drifting. The glare of real daylight very soon impressed him so vividly as to blot
out everything of his shadowy world, but of a night time, in a darkened room, he
could still see the white-splashed rocks of the island, and the clumsy penguins
staggering to and fro. But even these grew fainter and fainter, and at last, soon
after he married my sister, he saw them for the last time.
And now to tell of the queerest thing of all. About two years after his cure, I
dined with the Davidsons, and after dinner a man named Atkins called in. He is a
lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and a pleasant, talkative man. He was on friendly
terms with my brother-in-law, and was soon on friendly terms with me. It came
out that he was engaged to Davidson's cousin, and incidentally he took out a kind
of pocket photograph case to show us a new rendering of his fiancee. "And, by
the bye," said he, "here's the old Fulmar."
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Davidson looked at it casually. Then suddenly his face lit up. "Good heavens!"
said he. "I could almost swear--"
"What?" said Atkins.
"That I had seen that ship before."
"Don't see how you can have. She hasn't been out of the South Seas for six years,
and before then--"
"But," began Davidson, and then, "Yes--that's the ship I dreamt of. I'm sure that's
the ship I dreamt of. She was standing off an island that swarmed with penguins,
and she fired a gun."
"Good Lord!" said Atkins, who had never heard the particulars of the seizure.
"How the deuce could you dream that?"
And then, bit by bit, it came out that on the very day Davidson was seized,
'H.M.S. Fulmar' had actually been off a little rock to the south of Antipodes
Island. A boat had landed overnight to get penguins' eggs, had been delayed, and
a thunderstorm drifting up, the boat's crew had waited until the morning before
rejoining the ship. Atkins had been one of them, and he corroborated, word for
word, the descriptions Davidson had given of the island and the boat. There is not
the slightest doubt in any of our minds that Davidson has really seen the place. In
some unaccountable way, while he moved hither and thither in London, his sight
moved hither and thither in a manner that corresponded, about this distant island.
How is absolutely a mystery.
That completes the remarkable story of Davidson's eyes. It is perhaps the best
authenticated case in existence of a real vision at a distance. Explanation, there is
none forthcoming, except what Professor Wade has thrown out. But his
explanation invokes the Fourth Dimension, and a dissertation on theoretical kinds
of space. To talk of there being "a kink in space" seems mere nonsense to me; it
may be because I am no mathematician. When I said that nothing would alter the
fact that the place is eight thousand miles away, he answered that two points
might be a yard away on a sheet of paper and yet be brought together by bending
the paper round. The reader may grasp his argument, but I certainly do not. His
idea seems to be that Davidson, stooping between the poles of the big
electromagnet, had some extraordinary twist given to his retinal elements through
the sudden change in the field of force due to the lightning.
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He thinks, as a consequence of this, that it may be possible to live visually in one
part of the world, while one lives bodily in another. He has even made some
experiments in support of his views; but so far, he has simply succeeded in
blinding a few dogs. I believe that is the net result of his work, though I have not
seen him for some weeks. Latterly, I have been so busy with my work in
connection with the 'Saint Pancras' installation that I have had little opportunity
of calling to see him. But the whole of his theory seems fantastic to me. The facts
concerning Davidson stand on an altogether different footing, and I can testify
personally to the accuracy of every detail I have given.
THE LORD OF THE DYNAMOS
The chief attendant of the three dynamos that buzzed and rattled at Camberwell,
and kept the electric railway going, came out of Yorkshire, and his name was
James Holroyd. He was a practical electrician, but fond of whisky, a heavy redhaired brute with irregular teeth. He doubted the existence of the Deity, but
accepted Carnot's cycle, and he had read Shakespeare and found him weak in
chemistry. His helper came out of the mysterious East, and his name was Azumazi. But Holroyd called him Pooh-bah. Holroyd liked a nigger help because he
would stand kicking--a habit with Holroyd--and did not pry into the machinery
and try to learn the ways of it. Certain odd possibilities of the negro mind brought
into abrupt contact with the crown of our civilisation Holroyd never fully
realised, though just at the end he got some inkling of them.
To define Azuma-zi was beyond ethnology. He was, perhaps, more negroid than
anything else, though his hair was curly rather than frizzy, and his nose had a
bridge. Moreover, his skin was brown rather than black, and the whites of his
eyes were yellow. His broad cheek-bones and narrow chin gave his face
something of the viperine V. His head too, was broad behind, and low and
narrow at the forehead, as if his brain had been twisted round in the reverse way
to a European's. He was short of stature and still shorter of English. In
conversation he made numerous odd noises of no known marketable value, and
his infrequent words were carved and wrought into heraldic grotesqueness.
Holroyd tried to elucidate his religious beliefs, and--especially after whisky-lectured to him against superstition and missionaries. Azuma-zi, however,
shirked the discussion of his gods, even though he was kicked for it.
Azuma-zi had come, clad in white but insufficient raiment, out of the stoke-hole
of the Lord Clive, from the Straits Settlements, and beyond, into London. He had
heard even in his youth of the greatness and riches of London, where all the
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women are white and fair, and even the beggars in the streets are white, and he
arrived, with newly-earned gold coins in his pocket, to worship at the shrine of
civilisation. The day of his landing was a dismal one; the sky was dun, and a
wind-worried drizzle filtered down to the greasy streets, but he plunged boldly
into the delights of Shadwell, and was presently cast up, shattered in health,
civilised in costume, penniless and, except in matters of the direst necessity,
practically a dumb animal, to toil for James Holroyd and to be bullied by him in
the dynamo shed at Camberwell. And to James Holroyd bullying was a labour of
love.
There were three dynamos with their engines at Camberwell. The two that had
been there since the beginning were small machines; the larger one was new. The
smaller machines made a reasonable noise; their straps hummed over the drums,
every now and then the brushes buzzed and fizzled, and the air churned steadily,
whoo! Whoo! Whoo! Between their poles. One was loose in its foundations and
kept the shed vibrating. But the big dynamo drowned these little noises altogether
with the sustained drone of its iron core, which somehow set part of the ironwork
humming. The place made the visitor's head reel with the throb, throb, throb of
the engines, the rotation of the big wheels, the spinning ball-valves, the
occasional spittings of the steam, and over all the deep, unceasing, surging note
of the big dynamo. This last noise was from an engineering point of view a
defect, but Azuma-zi accounted it unto the monster for mightiness and pride.
If it were possible we would have the noises of that shed always about the reader
as he reads, we would tell all our story to such an accompaniment. It was a steady
stream of din, from which the ear picked out first one thread and then another;
there was the intermittent snorting, panting, and seething of the steam-engines,
the suck and thud of their pistons, the dull beat on the air as the spokes of the
great driving wheels came round, a note the leather straps made as they ran
tighter and looser, and a fretful tumult from the dynamos; and over all,
sometimes inaudible, as the ear tired of it, and then creeping back upon the
senses again, was this trombone note of the big machine. The floor never felt
steady and quiet beneath one's feet, but quivered and jarred. It was a confusing,
unsteady place, and enough to send anyone's thoughts jerking into odd zigzags.
And for three months, while the big strike of the engineers was in progress,
Holroyd, who was a blackleg, and Azuma-zi, who was a mere black, were never
out of the stir and eddy of it, but slept and fed in the little wooden shanty between
the shed and the gates.
Holroyd delivered a theological lecture on the text of his big machine soon after
Azuma-zi came. He had to shout to be heard in the din. "Look at that," said
Holroyd; "where's your 'eathen idol to match 'im?" And Azuma-zi looked. For a
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moment Holroyd was inaudible, and then Azuma-zi heard: "Kill a hundred men.
Twelve per cent. on the ordinary shares," said Holroyd, "and that's something
like a Gord!"
Holroyd was proud of his big dynamo, and expatiated upon its size and power to
Azuma-zi until heaven knows what odd currents of thought, that and the
incessant whirling and shindy, set up within the curly black cranium. He would
explain in the most graphic manner the dozen or so ways in which a man might
be killed by it, and once he gave Azuma-zi a shock as a sample of its quality.
After that, in the breathing times of his labour--it was heavy labour, being not
only his own, but most of Holroyd's--Azuma-zi would sit and watch the big
machine. Now and then the brushes would sparkle and spit blue flashes, at which
Holroyd would swear, but all the rest was as smooth and rhythmic as breathing.
The band ran shouting over the shaft, and ever behind one as one watched was
the complacent thud of the piston. So it lived all day in this big airy shed, with
him and Holroyd to wait upon it; not prisoned up and slaving to drive a ship as
the other engines he knew--mere captive devils of the British Solomon--had
been, but a machine enthroned. Those two smaller dynamos, Azuma-zi by force
of contrast despised; the large one he privately christened the Lord of the
Dynamos. They were fretful and irregular, but the big dynamo was steady. How
great it was! How serene and easy in its working! Greater and calmer even than
the Buddhas he had seen at Rangoon, and yet not motionless, but living! The
great black coils spun, spun, spun, the rings ran round under the brushes, and the
deep note of its coil steadied the whole. It affected Azuma-zi queerly.
Azuma-zi was not fond of labour. He would sit about and watch the Lord of the
Dynamos while Holroyd went away to persuade the yard porter to get whisky,
although his proper place was not in the dynamo shed but behind the engines
and, moreover if Holroyd caught him skulking he got hit for it with a rod of stout
copper wire. He would go and stand close to the colossus and look up at the great
leather band running overhead. There was a black patch on the band that came
round, and it pleased him somehow among all the clatter to watch this return
again and again. Odd thoughts spun with the whirl of it. Scientific people tell us
that savages give souls to rocks and trees--and a machine is a thousand times
more alive than a rock or a tree. And Azuma-zi was practically a savage still; the
veneer of civilisation lay no deeper than his slop suit, his bruises, and the coal
grime on his face and hands. His father before him had worshipped a meteoric
stone, kindred blood it may be had splashed the broad wheels of Juggernaut.
He took every opportunity Holroyd gave him of touching and handling the great
dynamo that was fascinating him. He polished and cleaned it until the metal parts
were blinding in the sun. He felt a mysterious sense of service in doing this. He
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would go up to it and touch its spinning coils gently. The gods he had
worshipped were all far away. The people in London hid their gods.
At last his dim feelings grew more distinct, and took shape in thoughts and at last
in acts. When he came into the roaring shed one morning he salaamed to the Lord
of the Dynamos, and then when Holroyd was away, he went and whispered to the
thundering machine that he was its servant, and prayed it to have pity on him and
save him from Holroyd. As he did so a rare gleam of light came in through the
open archway of the throbbing machine-shed, and the Lord of the Dynamos, as
he whirled and roared, was radiant with pale gold. Then Azuma-zi knew that his
service was acceptable to his Lord. After that he did not feel so lonely as he had
done, and he had indeed been very much alone in London. And even when his
work-time was over, which was rare, he loitered about the shed.
The next time Holroyd maltreated him, Azuma-zi went presently to the Lord of
the Dynamos and whispered, "Thou seest, O my Lord!" and the angry whir of the
machinery seemed to answer him. Thereafter it appeared to him that whenever
Holroyd came into the shed a different note mingled with the sounds of the
dynamo. "My Lord bides his time," said Azuma-zi to himself. "The iniquity of
the fool is not yet ripe." And he waited and watched for the day of reckoning.
One day there was evidence of short circuiting, and Holroyd, making an unwary
examination--it was in the afternoon--got a rather severe shock. Azuma-zi from
behind the engine saw him jump off and curse at the peccant coil.
"He is warned," said Azuma-zi to himself. "Surely my Lord is very patient."
Holroyd had at first initiated his "nigger" into such elementary conceptions of the
dynamo's working as would enable him to take temporary charge of the shed in
his absence. But when he noticed the manner in which Azuma-zi hung about the
monster he became suspicious. He dimly perceived his assistant was "up to
something," and connecting him with the anointing of the coils with oil that had
rotted the varnish in one place, he issued an edict, shouted above the confusion of
the machinery, "Don't 'ee go nigh that big dynamo any more, Pooh-bah, or a'll
take thy skin off!" Besides, if it pleased Azuma-zi to be near the big machine, it
was plain sense and decency to keep him away from it.
Azuma-zi obeyed at the time, but later he was caught bowing before the Lord of
the Dynamos. At which Holroyd twisted his arm and kicked him as he turned to
go away. As Azuma-zi presently stood behind the engine and glared at the back
of the hated Holroyd, the noises of the machinery took a new rhythm, and
sounded like four words in his native tongue.
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It is hard to say exactly what madness is. I fancy Azuma-zi was mad. The
incessant din and whirl of the dynamo shed may have churned up his little store
of knowledge and his big store of superstitious fancy, at last, into something akin
to frenzy. At any rate, when the idea of making Holroyd a sacrifice to the
Dynamo Fetich was thus suggested to him, it filled him with a strange tumult of
exultant emotion.
That night the two men and their black shadows were alone in the shed together.
The shed was lit with one big arc-light that winked and flickered purple. The
shadows lay black behind the dynamos, the ball governors of the engines whirled
from light to darkness, and their pistons beat loud and steady. The world outside
seen through the open end of the shed seemed incredibly dim and remote. It
seemed absolutely silent too, since the riot of the machinery drowned every
external sound. Far away was the black fence of the yard with grey shadowy
houses behind, and above was the deep blue sky and the pale little stars. Azumazi suddenly walked across the centre of the shed above which the leather bands
were running, and went into the shadow by the big dynamo. Holroyd heard a
click, and the spin of the armature changed.
"What are you dewin' with that switch?" he bawled in surprise. "Han't I told you-"
Then he saw the set expression of Azuma-zi's eyes as the Asiatic came out of the
shadow towards him.
In another moment the two men were grappling fiercely in front of the great
dynamo.
"You coffee-headed fool!" gasped Holroyd, with a brown hand at his throat.
"Keep off those contact rings." In another moment he was tripped and reeling
back upon the Lord of the Dynamos. He instinctively loosened his grip upon his
antagonist to save himself from the machine.
The messenger, sent in furious haste from the station, to find out what had
happened in the dynamo shed, met Azuma-zi at the porter's lodge by the gate.
Azuma-zi tried to explain something, but the messenger could make nothing of
the black's incoherent English, and hurried on to the shed. The machines were all
noisily at work, and nothing seemed to be disarranged. There was, however, a
queer smell of singed hair. Then he saw an odd-looking crumpled mass clinging
to the front of the big dynamo, and approaching, recognised the distorted remains
of Holroyd.
227
The man stared and hesitated a moment. Then he saw the face, and shut his eyes
convulsively. He turned on his heel before he opened them, so that he should not
see Holroyd again, and went out of the shed to get advice and help.
When Azuma-zi saw Holroyd die in the grip of the Great Dynamo he had been a
little scared about the consequences of his act. Yet he felt strangely elated, and
knew that the favour of the Lord Dynamo was upon him. His plan was already
settled when he met the man coming from the station, and the scientific manager
who speedily arrived on the scene jumped at the obvious conclusion of suicide.
This expert scarcely noticed Azuma-zi, except to ask a few questions. Did he see
Holroyd kill himself? Azuma-zi explained that he had been out of sight at the
engine furnace until he heard a difference in the noise from the dynamo. It was
not a difficult examination, being untinctured by suspicion.
The distorted remains of Holroyd, which the electrician removed from the
machine, were hastily covered by the porter with a coffee-stained tablecloth.
Somebody, by a happy inspiration, fetched a medical man. The expert was
chiefly anxious to get the machine at work again, for seven or eight trains had
stopped midway in the stuffy tunnels of the electric railway. Azuma-zi,
answering or misunderstanding the questions of the people who had by authority
or impudence come into the shed, was presently sent back to the stoke-hole by
the scientific manager. Of course a crowd collected outside the gates of the yard-a crowd, for no known reason, always hovers for a day or two near the scene of a
sudden death in London; two or three reporters percolated somehow into the
engine shed, and one even got to Azuma-zi; but the scientific expert cleared them
out again, being himself an amateur journalist.
Presently the body was carried away, and public interest departed with it.
Azuma-zi remained very quietly at his furnace, seeing over and over again in the
coals a figure that wriggled violently and became still. An hour after the murder,
to anyone coming into the shed it would have looked exactly as if nothing had
ever happened there. Peeping presently from his engine-room the black saw the
Lord Dynamo spin and whirl beside his little brothers, and the driving-wheels
were beating round, and the steam in the pistons went thud, thud, exactly as it
had been earlier in the evening. After all, from the mechanical point of view, it
had been a most insignificant incident--the mere temporary deflection of a
current. But now the slender form and slender shadow of the scientific manager
replaced the sturdy outline of Holroyd travelling up and down the lane of light
upon the vibrating floor under the straps between the engines and the dynamos.
"Have I not served my Lord?" said Azuma-zi inaudibly, from his shadow, and the
note of the great dynamo rang out full and clear. As he looked at the big whirling
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mechanism the strange fascination of it that had been a little in abeyance since
Holroyd's death, resumed its sway.
Never had Azuma-zi seen a man killed so swiftly and pitilessly. The big
humming machine had slain its victim without wavering for a second from its
steady beating. It was indeed a mighty god.
The unconscious scientific manager stood with his back to him, scribbling on a
piece of paper. His shadow lay at the foot of the monster.
"Was the Lord Dynamo still hungry? His servant was ready."
Azuma-zi made a stealthy step forward; then stopped. The scientific manager
suddenly ceased his writing, walked down the shed to the endmost of the
dynamos, and began to examine the brushes.
Azuma-zi hesitated, and then slipped across noiselessly into shadow by the
switch. There he waited. Presently the manager's footsteps could be heard
returning. He stopped in his old position, unconscious of the stoker crouching ten
feet away from him. Then the big dynamo suddenly fizzled, and in another
moment Azuma-zi had sprung out of the darkness upon him.
The scientific manager was gripped round the body and swung towards the big
dynamo. Kicking with his knee and forcing his antagonist's head down with his
hands, he loosened the grip on his waist and swung round away from the
machine. Then the black grasped him again, putting a curly head against his
chest, and they swayed and panted as it seemed for an age or so. Then the
scientific manager was impelled to catch a black ear in his teeth and bite
furiously. The black yelled hideously.
They rolled over on the floor, and the black, who had apparently slipped from the
vice of the teeth or parted with some ear--the scientific manager wondered which
at the time--tried to throttle him. The scientific manager was making some
ineffectual attempts to claw something with his hands and to kick, when the
welcome sound of quick footsteps sounded on the floor. The next moment
Azuma-zi had left him and darted towards the big dynamo. There was a splutter
amid the roar.
The officer of the company who had entered, stood staring as Azuma-zi caught
the naked terminals in his hands, gave one horrible convulsion, and then hung
motionless from the machine, his face violently distorted.
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"I'm jolly glad you came in when you did," said the scientific manager, still
sitting on the floor.
He looked at the still quivering figure.
"It's not a nice death to die, apparently--but it is quick."
The official was still staring at the body. He was a man of slow apprehension.
There was a pause.
The scientific manager got up on his feet rather awkwardly. He ran his fingers
along his collar thoughtfully, and moved his head to and fro several times.
"Poor Holroyd! I see now." Then almost mechanically he went towards the
switch in the shadow and turned the current into the railway circuit again. As he
did so the singed body loosened its grip upon the machine and fell forward on its
face. The core of the dynamo roared out loud and clear, and the armature beat the
air.
So ended prematurely the Worship of the Dynamo Deity, perhaps the most shortlived of all religions. Yet withal it could at least boast a Martyrdom and a Human
Sacrifice.
THE HAMMERPOND PARK BURGLARY
It is a moot point whether burglary is to be considered as a sport, a trade, or an
art. For a trade, the technique is scarcely rigid enough, and its claims to be
considered an art, are vitiated by the mercenary element that qualifies its
triumphs. On the whole it seems to be most justly ranked as sport, a sport for
which no rules are at present formulated, and of which the prizes are distributed
in an extremely informal manner. It was this informality of burglary that led to
the regrettable extinction of two promising beginners at Hammerpond Park.
The stakes offered in this affair consisted chiefly of diamonds and other personal
bric-a-brac belonging to the newly married Lady Aveling. Lady Aveling, as the
reader will remember, was the only daughter of Mrs. Montague Pangs, the wellknown hostess. Her marriage to Lord Aveling was extensively advertised in the
papers, the quantity and quality of her wedding presents, and the fact that the
honeymoon was to be spent at Hammerpond. The announcement of these
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valuable prizes, created a considerable sensation in the small circle in which Mr.
Teddy Watkins was the undisputed leader, and it was decided that, accompanied
by a duly qualified assistant, he should visit the village of Hammerpond in his
professional capacity.
Being a man of naturally retiring and modest disposition, Mr. Watkins
determined to make this visit incognito, and after due consideration of the
conditions of his enterprise, he selected the role of a landscape artist and the
unassuming surname of Smith. He preceded his assistant, who, it was decided,
should join him only on the last afternoon of his stay at Hammerpond. Now the
village of Hammerpond is perhaps one of the prettiest little corners in Sussex;
many thatched houses still survive, the flint-built church with its tall spire
nestling under the down is one of the finest and least restored in the county, and
the beech-woods and bracken jungles through which the road runs to the great
house are singularly rich in what the vulgar artist and photographer call "bits." So
that Mr. Watkins, on his arrival with two virgin canvases, a brand-new easel, a
paint-box, portmanteau, an ingenious little ladder made in sections (after the
pattern of the late lamented master Charles Peace), crowbar, and wire coils,
found himself welcomed with effusion and some curiosity by half-a-dozen other
brethren of the brush. It rendered the disguise he had chosen unexpectedly
plausible, but it inflicted upon him a considerable amount of aesthetic
conversation for which he was very imperfectly prepared.
"Have you exhibited very much?" said Young Person in the bar-parlour of the
"Coach and Horses," where Mr. Watkins was skilfully accumulating local
information, on the night of his arrival.
"Very little," said Mr. Watkins, "just a snack here and there."
"Academy?"
"In course. And the Crystal Palace."
"Did they hang you well?" said Porson.
"Don't rot," said Mr. Watkins; "I don't like it."
"I mean did they put you in a good place?"
"Whadyer mean?" said Mr. Watkins suspiciously. "One 'ud think you were trying
to make out I'd been put away."
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Porson had been brought up by aunts, and was a gentlemanly young man even
for an artist; he did not know what being "put away" meant, but he thought it best
to explain that he intended nothing of the sort. As the question of hanging
seemed a sore point with Mr. Watkins, he tried to divert the conversation a little.
"Do you do figure-work at all?"
"No, never had a head for figures," said Mr. Watkins, "my miss--Mrs. Smith, I
mean, does all that."
"She paints too!" said Porson. "That's rather jolly."
"Very," said Mr. Watkins, though he really did not think so, and feeling the
conversation was drifting a little beyond his grasp added, "I came down here to
paint Hammerpond House by moonlight."
"Really!" said Porson. "That's rather a novel idea."
"Yes," said Mr. Watkins, "I thought it rather a good notion when it occurred to
me. I expect to begin to-morrow night."
"What! You don't mean to paint in the open, by night?"
"I do, though."
"But how will you see your canvas?"
"Have a bloomin' cop's--" began Mr. Watkins, rising too quickly to the question,
and then realising this, bawled to Miss Durgan for another glass of cheer. "I'm
goin' to have a thing called a dark lantern," he said to Porson.
"But it's about new moon now," objected Porson. "There won't be any moon."
"There'll be the house," said Watkins, "at any rate. I'm goin', you see, to paint the
house first and the moon afterwards."
"Oh!" said Porson, too staggered to continue the conversation.
"They doo say," said old Durgan, the landlord, who had maintained a respectful
silence during the technical conversation, "as there's no less than three p'licemen
from 'Azelworth on dewty every night in the house--'count of this Lady Aveling
'n her jewellery. One'm won fower-and-six last night, off second footman-tossin'."
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Towards sunset next day Mr. Watkins, virgin canvas, easel, and a very
considerable case of other appliances in hand, strolled up the pleasant pathway
through the beech-woods to Hammerpond Park, and pitched his apparatus in a
strategic position commanding the house. Here he was observed by Mr. Raphael
Sant, who was returning across the park from a study of the chalk-pits. His
curiosity having been fired by Person's account of the new arrival, he turned
aside with the idea of discussing nocturnal art.
Mr. Watkins was apparently unaware of his approach. A friendly conversation
with Lady Hammerpond's butler had just terminated, and that individual,
surrounded by the three pet dogs, which it was his duty to take for an airing after
dinner had been served, was receding in the distance. Mr. Watkins was mixing
colour with an air of great industry. Sant, approaching more nearly, was surprised
to see the colour in question was as harsh and brilliant an emerald green as it is
possible to imagine. Having cultivated an extreme sensibility to colour from his
earliest years, he drew the air in sharply between his teeth at the very first
glimpse of this brew. Mr. Watkins turned round. He looked annoyed.
"What on earth are you going to do with that beastly green?" said Sant.
Mr. Watkins realised that his zeal to appear busy in the eyes of the butler had
evidently betrayed him into some technical error. He looked at Sant and
hesitated.
"Pardon my rudeness," said Sant; "but really, that green is altogether too
amazing. It came as a shock. What do you mean to do with it?"
Mr. Watkins was collecting his resources. Nothing could save the situation but
decision. "If you come here interrupting my work," he said, "I'm a-goin' to paint
your face with it."
Sant retired, for he was a humorist and a peaceful man. Going down the hill he
met Porson and Wainwright. "Either that man is a genius or he is a dangerous
lunatic," said he. "Just go up and look at his green." And he continued his way,
his countenance brightened by a pleasant anticipation of a cheerful affray round
an easel in the gloaming, and the shedding of much green paint.
But to Person and Wainwright Mr. Watkins was less aggressive, and explained
that the green was intended to be the first coating of his picture. It was, he
admitted in response to a remark, an absolutely new method, invented by
himself. But subsequently he became more reticent; he explained he was not
going to tell every passer-by the secret of his own particular style, and added
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some scathing remarks upon the meanness of people "hanging about" to pick up
such tricks of the masters as they could, which immediately relieved him of their
company.
Twilight deepened, first one then another star appeared. The rooks amid the tall
trees to the left of the house had long since lapsed into slumbrous silence, the
house itself lost all the details of its architecture and became a dark grey outline,
and then the windows of the salon shone out brilliantly, the conservatory was
lighted up, and here and there a bedroom window burnt yellow. Had anyone
approached the easel in the park it would have been found deserted. One brief
uncivil word in brilliant green sullied the purity of its canvas. Mr. Watkins was
busy in the shrubbery with his assistant, who had discreetly joined him from the
carriage-drive.
Mr. Watkins was inclined to be self-congratulatory upon the ingenious device by
which he had carried all his apparatus boldly, and in the sight of all men, right up
to the scene of operations. "That's the dressing-room," he said to his assistant,
"and, as soon as the maid takes the candle away and goes down to supper, we'll
call in. My! How nice the house do look, to be sure, against the starlight, and
with all its windows and lights! Swopme, Jim, I almost wish I was a painterchap. Have you fixed that there wire across the path from the laundry?"
He cautiously approached the house until he stood below the dressing-room
window, and began to put together his folding ladder. He was much too
experienced a practitioner to feel any unusual excitement. Jim was reconnoitring
the smoking-room. Suddenly, close beside Mr. Watkins in the bushes, there was
a violent crash and a stifled curse. Someone had tumbled over the wire which his
assistant had just arranged. He heard feet running on the gravel pathway beyond.
Mr. Watkins, like all true artists, was a singularly shy man, and he incontinently
dropped his folding ladder and began running circumspectly through the
shrubbery. He was indistinctly aware of two people hot upon his heels, and he
fancied that he distinguished the outline of his assistant in front of him. In
another moment he had vaulted the low stone wall bounding the shrubbery, and
was in the open park. Two thuds on the turf followed his own leap.
It was a close chase in the darkness through the trees. Mr. Watkins was a looselybuilt man and in good training, and he gained hand-over-hand upon the hoarsely
panting figure in front. Neither spoke, but as Mr. Watkins pulled up alongside, a
qualm of awful doubt came over him. The other man turned his head at the same
moment and gave an exclamation of surprise. "It's not Jim," thought Mr.
Watkins, and simultaneously the stranger flung himself, as it were, at Watkins'
knees, and they were forthwith grappling on the ground together. "Lend a hand,
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Bill," cried the stranger as the third man came up. And Bill did--two hands in
fact, and some accentuated feet. The fourth man, presumably Jim, had apparently
turned aside and made off in a different direction. At any rate, he did not join the
trio.
Mr. Watkins' memory of the incidents of the next two minutes is extremely
vague. He has a dim recollection of having his thumb in the corner of the mouth
of the first man, and feeling anxious about its safety, and for some seconds at
least he held the head of the gentleman answering to the name of Bill, to the
ground by the hair. He was also kicked in a great number of different places,
apparently by a vast multitude of people. Then the gentleman who was not Bill
got his knee below Mr. Watkins' diaphragm, and tried to curl him up upon it.
When his sensations became less entangled he was sitting upon the turf, and eight
or ten men--the night was dark, and he was rather too confused to count-standing round him, apparently waiting for him to recover. He mournfully
assumed that he was captured, and would probably have made some
philosophical reflections on the fickleness of fortune, had not his internal
sensations disinclined him for speech.
He noticed very quickly that his wrists were not handcuffed, and then a flask of
brandy was put in his hands. This touched him a little--it was such unexpected
kindness.
"He's a-comin' round," said a voice which he fancied he recognised as belonging
to the Hammerpond second footman.
"We've got 'em, sir, both of 'em," said the Hammerpond butler, the man who had
handed him the flask. "Thanks to you."
No one answered this remark. Yet he failed to see how it applied to him.
"He's fair dazed," said a strange voice; "the villains half-murdered him."
Mr. Teddy Watkins decided to remain fair dazed until he had a better grasp of the
situation. He perceived that two of the black figures round him stood side-by-side
with a dejected air, and there was something in the carriage of their shoulders
that suggested to his experienced eye, hands that were bound together. Two! In a
flash he rose to his position. He emptied the little flask and staggered-obsequious hands assisting him--to his feet. There was a sympathetic murmur.
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"Shake hands, sir, shake hands," said one of the figures near him. "Permit me to
introduce myself. I am very greatly indebted to you. It was the jewels of my wife,
Lady Aveling, which attracted these scoundrels to the house."
"Very glad to make your lordship's acquaintance," said Teddy Watkins.
"I presume you saw the rascals making for the shrubbery, and dropped down on
them?"
"That's exactly how it happened," said Mr. Watkins.
"You should have waited till they got in at the window," said Lord Aveling;
"they would get it hotter if they had actually committed the burglary. And it was
lucky for you two of the policemen were out by the gates, and followed up the
three of you. I doubt if you could have secured the two of them--though it was
confoundedly plucky of you, all the same."
"Yes, I ought to have thought of all that," said Mr. Watkins; "but one can't think
of everything."
"Certainly not," said Lord Aveling. "I am afraid they have mauled you a little,"
he added. The party was now moving towards the house. "You walk rather lame.
May I offer you my arm?"
And instead of entering Hammerpond House by the dressing-room window, Mr.
Watkins entered it--slightly intoxicated, and inclined now to cheerfulness again-on the arm of a real live peer, and by the front door. "This," thought Mr. Watkins,
"is burgling in style!" The "scoundrels," seen by the gaslight, proved to be mere
local amateurs unknown to Mr. Watkins, and they were taken down into the
pantry and there watched over by the three policemen, two gamekeepers with
loaded guns, the butler, an ostler, and a carman, until the dawn allowed of their
removal to Hazelhurst police-station. Mr. Watkins was made much of in the
salon. They devoted a sofa to him, and would not hear of a return to the village
that night. Lady Aveling was sure he was brilliantly original, and said her idea of
Turner was just such another rough, half-inebriated, deep-eyed, brave, and clever
man. Some one brought up a remarkable little folding-ladder that had been
picked up in the shrubbery, and showed him how it was put together. They also
described how wires had been found in the shrubbery, evidently placed there to
trip-up unwary pursuers. It was lucky he had escaped these snares. And they
showed him the jewels.
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Mr. Watkins had the sense not to talk too much, and in any conversational
difficulty fell back on his internal pains. At last he was seized with stiffness in
the back, and yawning. Everyone suddenly awoke to the fact that it was a shame
to keep him talking after his affray, so he retired early to his room, the little red
room next to Lord Aveling's suite.
The dawn found a deserted easel bearing a canvas with a green inscription, in the
Hammerpond Park, and it found Hammerpond House in commotion. But if the
dawn found Mr. Teddy Watkins and the Aveling diamonds, it did not
communicate the information to the police.
THE MOTH
Probably you have heard of Hapley--not W.T. Hapley, the son, but the celebrated
Hapley, the Hapley of 'Periplaneta Hapliia,' Hapley the entomologist.
If so you know at least of the great feud between Hapley and Professor Pawkins,
though certain of its consequences may be new to you. For those who have not, a
word or two of explanation is necessary, which the idle reader may go over with
a glancing eye, if his indolence so incline him.
It is amazing how very widely diffused is the ignorance of such really important
matters as this Hapley-Pawkins feud. Those epoch-making controversies, again
that have convulsed the Geological Society are, I verily believe, almost entirely
unknown outside the fellowship of that body. I have heard men of fair general
education even refer to the great scenes at these meetings as vestry-meeting
squabbles. Yet the great hate of the English and Scotch geologists has lasted now
half a century, and has "left deep and abundant marks upon the body of the
science." And this Hapley-Pawkins business, though perhaps a more personal
affair, stirred passions as profound, if not profounder. Your common man has no
conception of the zeal that animates a scientific investigator, the fury of
contradiction you can arouse in him. It is the odium theologicum (theological
hatred) in a new form. There are men, for instance, who would gladly burn
Professor Ray Lankester at Smithfield for his treatment of the Mollusca in the
Encyclopaedia. That fantastic extension of the Cephalopods to cover the
Pteropods...But I wander from Hapley and Pawkins.
It began years and years ago, with a revision of the Microlepidoptera (whatever
these may be) by Pawkins, in which he extinguished a new species created by
Hapley. Hapley, who was always quarrelsome, replied by a stinging
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impeachment of the entire classification of Pawkins*. Pawkins in his
"Rejoinder**" suggested that Hapley's microscope was as defective as his power
of observation, and called him an "irresponsible meddler--" Hapley was not a
professor at that time. Hapley in his retort***, spoke of "blundering collectors,"
and described, as if inadvertently, Pawkins' revision as a "miracle of ineptitude."
It was war to the knife. However, it would scarcely interest the reader to detail
how these two great men quarrelled, and how the split between them widened
until from the Microlepidoptera they were at war upon every open question in
entomology. There were memorable occasions. At times the Royal
Entomological Society meetings resembled nothing so much as the Chamber of
Deputies. On the whole, I fancy Pawkins was nearer the truth than Hapley. But
Hapley was skilful with his rhetoric, had a turn for ridicule rare in a scientific
man, was endowed with vast energy, and had a fine sense of injury in the matter
of the extinguished species; while Pawkins was a man of dull presence, prosy of
speech, in shape not unlike a water-barrel, over-conscientious with testimonials,
and suspected of jobbing museum appointments. So the young men gathered
round Hapley and applauded him. It was a long struggle, vicious from the
beginning and growing at last to pitiless antagonism. The successive turns of
fortune, now an advantage to one side and now to another--now Hapley
tormented by some success of Pawkins, and now Pawkins outshone by Hapley,
belong rather to the history of entomology than to this story.
[* "Remarks on a Recent Revision of Microlepidoptera," Quarterly Journal
Entomological Society, 1863.]
[** "Rejoinder to Certain Remarks," etc. Ibid. 1864.]
[*** "Further Remarks," etc. Ibid.]
But in 1891 Pawkins, whose health had been bad for some time, published some
work upon the "mesoblast" of the Death's-Head Moth. What the mesoblast of the
Death's-Head Moth may be does not matter a rap in this story. But the work was
far below his usual standard, and gave Hapley an opening he had coveted for
years. He must have worked night and day to make the most of his advantage.
In an elaborate critique he rent Pawkins to tatters--one can fancy the man's
disordered black hair, and his queer dark eyes flashing as he went for his
antagonist--and Pawkins made a reply, halting, ineffectual, with painful gaps of
silence, and yet malignant. There was no mistaking his will to wound Hapley, nor
his incapacity to do it. But few of those who heard him--I was absent from that
meeting--realised how ill the man was.
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Hapley got his opponent down, and meant to finish him. He followed with a
simply brutal attack upon Pawkins, in the form of a paper upon the development
of moths in general, a paper showing evidence of a most extraordinary amount of
mental labour, and yet couched in a violently controversial tone. Violent as it
was, an editorial note witnesses that it was modified. It must have covered
Pawkins with shame and confusion of face. It left no loophole; it was murderous
in argument, and utterly contemptuous in tone; an awful thing for the declining
years of a man's career.
The world of entomologists waited breathlessly for the rejoinder from Pawkins.
He would try one, for Pawkins had always been game. But when it came it
surprised them. For the rejoinder of Pawkins was to catch influenza, proceed to
pneumonia, and die.
It was perhaps as effectual a reply as he could make under the circumstances, and
largely turned the current of feeling against Hapley. The very people who had
most gleefully cheered on those gladiators became serious at the consequence.
There could be no reasonable doubt the fret of the defeat had contributed to the
death of Pawkins. There was a limit even to scientific controversy, said serious
people. Another crushing attack was already in the press and appeared on the day
before the funeral. I don't think Hapley exerted himself to stop it. People
remembered how Hapley had hounded down his rival, and forgot that rival's
defects. Scathing satire reads ill over fresh mould. The thing provoked comment
in the daily papers. This it was that made me think that you had probably heard
of Hapley and this controversy. But, as I have already remarked, scientific
workers live very much in a world of their own; half the people, I dare say, who
go along Piccadilly to the Academy every year, could not tell you where the
learned societies abide. Many even think that research is a kind of happy-family
cage in which all kinds of men lie down together in peace.
In his private thoughts Hapley could not forgive Pawkins for dying. In the first
place, it was a mean dodge to escape the absolute pulverisation Hapley had in
hand for him, and in the second, it left Hapley's mind with a queer gap in it. For
twenty years he had worked hard, sometimes far into the night, and seven days a
week, with microscope, scalpel, collecting-net, and pen, and almost entirely with
reference to Pawkins. The European reputation he had won had come as an
incident in that great antipathy. He had gradually worked up to a climax in this
last controversy. It had killed Pawkins, but it had also thrown Hapley out of gear,
so to speak, and his doctor advised him to give up work for a time, and rest. So
Hapley went down into a quiet village in Kent, and thought day and night of
Pawkins, and good things it was now impossible to say about him.
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At last Hapley began to realise in what direction the preoccupation tended. He
determined to make a fight for it, and started by trying to read novels. But he
could not get his mind off Pawkins, white in the face and making his last speech-every sentence a beautiful opening for Hapley. He turned to fiction--and found it
had no grip on him. He read the "Island Nights' Entertainments" until his "sense
of causation" was shocked beyond endurance by the Bottle Imp. Then he went to
Kipling, and found he "proved nothing," besides being irreverent and vulgar.
These scientific people have their limitations. Then unhappily, he tried Besant's
"Inner House," and the opening chapter set his mind upon learned societies and
Pawkins at once.
So Hapley turned to chess, and found it a little more soothing. He soon mastered
the moves and the chief gambits and commoner closing positions, and began to
beat the Vicar. But then the cylindrical contours of the opposite king began to
resemble Pawkins standing up and gasping ineffectually against checkmate, and
Hapley decided to give up chess.
Perhaps the study of some new branch of science would after all be better
diversion. The best rest is change of occupation. Hapley determined to plunge at
diatoms, and had one of his smaller microscopes and Halibut's monograph sent
down from London. He thought that perhaps if he could get up a vigorous quarrel
with Halibut, he might be able to begin life afresh and forget Pawkins. And very
soon he was hard at work in his habitual strenuous fashion, at these microscopic
denizens of the wayside pool.
It was on the third day of the diatoms that Hapley became aware of a novel
addition to the local fauna. He was working late at the microscope, and the only
light in the room was the brilliant little lamp with the special form of green
shade. Like all experienced microscopists, he kept both eyes open. It is the only
way to avoid excessive fatigue. One eye was over the instrument, and bright and
distinct before that was the circular field of the microscope, across which a
brown diatom was slowly moving. With the other eye Hapley saw, as it were,
without seeing. He was only dimly conscious of the brass side of the instrument,
the illuminated part of the tablecloth, a sheet of notepaper, the foot of the lamp,
and the darkened room beyond.
Suddenly his attention drifted from one eye to the other. The tablecloth was of
the material called tapestry by shopmen, and rather brightly coloured. The pattern
was in gold, with a small amount of crimson and pale blue upon a greyish
ground. At one point the pattern seemed displaced, and there was a vibrating
movement of the colours at this point.
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Hapley suddenly moved his head back and looked with both eyes. His mouth fell
open with astonishment.
It was a large moth or butterfly; its wings spread in butterfly fashion!
It was strange it should be in the room at all, for the windows were closed.
Strange that it should not have attracted his attention when fluttering to its
present position. Strange that it should match the tablecloth. Stranger far that to
him, Hapley, the great entomologist, it was altogether unknown. There was no
delusion. It was crawling slowly towards the foot of the lamp.
"New Genus, by heavens! And in England!" said Hapley, staring.
Then he suddenly thought of Pawkins. Nothing would have maddened Pawkins
more...And Pawkins was dead!
Something about the head and body of the insect became singularly suggestive of
Pawkins, just as the chess king had been.
"Confound Pawkins!" said Hapley. "But I must catch this." And looking round
him for some means of capturing the moth, he rose slowly out of his chair.
Suddenly the insect rose, struck the edge of the lamp-shade--Hapley heard the
"ping--" and vanished into the shadow.
In a moment Hapley had whipped off the shade, so that the whole room was
illuminated. The thing had disappeared, but soon his practised eye detected it
upon the wall-paper near the door. He went towards it poising the lamp-shade for
capture. Before he was within striking distance, however, it had risen and was
fluttering round the room. After the fashion of its kind, it flew with sudden starts
and turns, seeming to vanish here and reappear there. Once Hapley struck, and
missed; then again.
The third time he hit his microscope. The instrument swayed, struck and
overturned the lamp, and fell noisily upon the floor. The lamp turned over on the
table and, very luckily, went out. Hapley was left in the dark. With a start he felt
the strange moth blunder into his face.
It was maddening. He had no lights. If he opened the door of the room the thing
would get away. In the darkness he saw Pawkins quite distinctly laughing at him.
Pawkins had ever an oily laugh. He swore furiously and stamped his foot on the
floor.
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There was a timid rapping at the door.
Then it opened, perhaps a foot, and very slowly. The alarmed face of the
landlady appeared behind a pink candle flame; she wore a nightcap over her grey
hair and had some purple garment over her shoulders. "What was that fearful
smash?" she said. "Has anything--" The strange moth appeared fluttering about
the chink of the door. "Shut that door!" said Hapley, and suddenly rushed at her.
The door slammed hastily. Hapley was left alone in the dark. Then in the pause
he heard his landlady scuttle upstairs, lock her door, and drag something heavy
across the room and put against it.
It became evident to Hapley that his conduct and appearance had been strange
and alarming. Confound the moth! And Pawkins! However, it was a pity to lose
the moth now. He felt his way into the hall and found the matches, after sending
his hat down upon the floor with a noise like a drum. With the lighted candle he
returned to the sitting-room. No moth was to be seen. Yet once for a moment it
seemed that the thing was fluttering round his head. Hapley very suddenly
decided to give up the moth and go to bed. But he was excited. All night long his
sleep was broken by dreams of the moth, Pawkins, and his landlady. Twice in the
night he turned out and soused his head in cold water.
One thing was very clear to him. His landlady could not possibly understand
about the strange moth, especially as he had failed to catch it. No one but an
entomologist would understand quite how he felt. She was probably frightened at
his behaviour, and yet he failed to see how he could explain it. He decided to say
nothing further about the events of last night. After breakfast he saw her in her
garden, and decided to go out and talk, to reassure her. He talked to her about
beans and potatoes, bees, caterpillars, and the price of fruit. She replied in her
usual manner, but she looked at him a little suspiciously, and kept walking as he
walked, so that there was always a bed of flowers, or a row of beans, or
something of the sort, between them. After a while he began to feel singularly
irritated at this, and to conceal his vexation went indoors and presently went out
for a walk.
The moth, or butterfly, trailing an odd flavour of Pawkins with it, kept coming
into that walk, though he did his best to keep his mind off it. Once he saw it quite
distinctly, with its wings flattened out, upon the old stone wall that runs along the
west edge of the park, but going up to it he found it was only two lumps of grey
and yellow lichen. "This," said Hapley, "is the reverse of mimicry. Instead of a
butterfly looking like a stone, here is a stone looking like a butterfly!" Once
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something hovered and fluttered round his head, but by an effort of will he drove
that impression out of his mind again.
In the afternoon Hapley called upon the Vicar, and argued with him upon
theological questions. They sat in the little arbour covered with briar, and smoked
as they wrangled. "Look at that moth!" said Hapley, suddenly, pointing to the
edge of the wooden table.
"Where?" said the Vicar.
"You don't see a moth on the edge of the table there?" said Hapley.
"Certainly not," said the Vicar.
Hapley was thunderstruck. He gasped. The Vicar was staring at him. Clearly the
man saw nothing. "The eye of faith is no better than the eye of science," said
Hapley awkwardly.
"I don't see your point," said the Vicar, thinking it was part of the argument.
That night Hapley found the moth crawling over his counterpane. He sat on the
edge of the bed in his shirt-sleeves and reasoned with himself. Was it pure
hallucination? He knew he was slipping, and he battled for his sanity with the
same silent energy he had formerly displayed against Pawkins. So persistent is
mental habit, that he felt as if it were still a struggle with Pawkins. He was well
versed in psychology. He knew that such visual illusions do come as a result of
mental strain. But the point was, he did not only see the moth, he had heard it
when it touched the edge of the lamp-shade, and afterwards when it hit against
the wall, and he had felt it strike his face in the dark.
He looked at it. It was not at all dream-like, but perfectly clear and solid-looking
in the candle-light. He saw the hairy body, and the short feathery antennae, the
jointed legs, even a place where the down was rubbed from the wing. He
suddenly felt angry with himself for being afraid of a little insect.
His landlady had got the servant to sleep with her that night, because she was
afraid to be alone. In addition she had locked the door, and put the chest of
drawers against it. They listened and talked in whispers after they had gone to
bed, but nothing occurred to alarm them. About eleven they had ventured to put
the candle out, and had both dozed off to sleep. They woke up with a start, and
sat up in bed, listening in the darkness.
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Then they heard slippered feet going to and fro in Hapley's room. A chair was
overturned, and there was a violent dab at the wall. Then a china mantel
ornament smashed upon the fender. Suddenly the door of the room opened, and
they heard him upon the landing. They clung to one another, listening. He
seemed to be dancing upon the staircase. Now he would go down three or four
steps quickly, then up again, then hurry down into the hall. They heard the
umbrella-stand go over, and the fanlight break. Then the bolt shot and the chain
rattled. He was opening the door.
They hurried to the window. It was a dim grey night; an almost unbroken sheet of
watery cloud was sweeping across the moon, and the hedge and trees in front of
the house were black against the pale roadway. They saw Hapley, looking like a
ghost in his shirt and white trousers, running to and fro in the road, and beating
the air. Now he would stop, now he would dart very rapidly at something
invisible, now he would move upon it with stealthy strides. At last he went out of
sight up the road towards the down. Then, while they argued who should go
down and lock the door, he returned. He was walking very fast, and he came
straight into the house, closed the door carefully, and went quietly up to his
bedroom. Then everything was silent.
"Mrs. Colville," said Hapley, calling down the staircase next morning, "I hope I
did not alarm you last night."
"You may well ask that!" said Mrs. Colville.
"The fact is, I am a sleep-walker, and the last two nights I have been without my
sleeping mixture. There is nothing to be alarmed about, really. I am sorry I made
such an ass of myself. I will go over the down to Shoreham, and get some stuff to
make me sleep soundly. I ought to have done that yesterday."
But halfway over the down, by the chalk pits, the moth came upon Hapley again.
He went on, trying to keep his mind upon chess problems, but it was no good.
The thing fluttered into his face, and he struck at it with his hat in self-defence.
Then rage, the old rage--the rage he had so often felt against Pawkins--came
upon him again. He went on, leaping and striking at the eddying insect. Suddenly
he trod on nothing, and fell headlong.
There was a gap in his sensations, and Hapley found himself sitting on the heap
of flints in front of the opening of the chalk-pits, with a leg twisted back under
him. The strange moth was still fluttering round his head. He struck at it with his
hand, and turning his head saw two men approaching him. One was the village
doctor. It occurred to Hapley that this was lucky. Then it came into his mind with
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extraordinary vividness, that no one would ever be able to see the strange moth
except himself, and that it behooved him to keep silent about it.
Late that night however, after his broken leg was set, he was feverish and forgot
his self-restraint. He was lying flat on his bed, and he began to run his eyes round
the room to see if the moth was still about. He tried not to do this, but it was no
good. He soon caught sight of the thing resting close to his hand, by the
nightlight, on the green tablecloth. The wings quivered. With a sudden wave of
anger he smote at it with his fist, and the nurse woke up with a shriek. He had
missed it.
"That moth!" he said; and then, "It was fancy. Nothing!"
All the time he could see quite clearly the insect going round the cornice and
darting across the room, and he could also see that the nurse saw nothing of it
and looked at him strangely. He must keep himself in hand. He knew he was a
lost man if he did not keep himself in hand. But as the night waned the fever
grew upon him, and the very dread he had of seeing the moth made him see it.
About five, just as the dawn was grey, he tried to get out of bed and catch it,
though his leg was afire with pain. The nurse had to struggle with him.
On account of this, they tied him down to the bed. At this the moth grew bolder,
and once he felt it settle in his hair. Then, because he struck out violently with his
arms, they tied these also. At this the moth came and crawled over his face, and
Hapley wept, swore, screamed, prayed for them to take it off him, unavailingly.
The doctor was a blockhead, a just-qualified general practitioner, and quite
ignorant of mental science. He simply said there was no moth. Had he possessed
the wit, he might still, perhaps, have saved Hapley from his fate by entering into
his delusion, and covering his face with gauze, as he prayed might be done. But
as I say, the doctor was a blockhead, and until the leg was healed Hapley was
kept tied to his bed, and with the imaginary moth crawling over him. It never left
him while he was awake and it grew to a monster in his dreams. While he was
awake he longed for sleep, and from sleep he awoke screaming.
So now Hapley is spending the remainder of his days in a padded room, worried
by a moth that no one else can see. The asylum doctor calls it hallucination; but
Hapley, when he is in his easier mood, and can talk, says it is the ghost of
Pawkins, and consequently a unique specimen and well worth the trouble of
catching.
245
THE TREASURE IN THE FOREST
The canoe was now approaching the land. The bay opened out, and a gap in the
white surf of the reef marked where the little river ran out to the sea; the thicker
and deeper green of the virgin forest showed its course down the distant hill
slope. The forest here came close to the beach. Far beyond, dim and almost
cloudlike in texture, rose the mountains, like suddenly frozen waves. The sea was
still save for an almost imperceptible swell. The sky blazed.
The man with the carved paddle stopped. "It should be somewhere around here,"
he said. He shipped the paddle and held his arms out straight before him.
The other man had been in the fore part of the canoe, closely scrutinising the
land. He had a sheet of yellow paper on his knee.
"Come and look at this, Evans," he said.
Both men spoke in low tones, and their lips were hard and dry.
The man called Evans came swaying along the canoe until he could look over his
companion's shoulder.
The paper had the appearance of a rough map. By much folding it was creased
and worn to the pitch of separation, and the second man held the discoloured
fragments together where they had parted. On it one could dimly make out, in
almost obliterated pencil, the outline of the bay.
"Here," said Evans, "is the reef, and here is the gap." He ran his thumb-nail over
the chart.
"This curved and twisting line is the river--I could do with a drink now--! And
this star is the place."
"You see this dotted line," said the man with the map; "it is a straight line, and
runs from the opening of the reef to a clump of palm-trees. The star comes just
where it cuts the river. We must mark the place as we go into the lagoon."
"It's queer," said Evans, after a pause, "what these little marks down here are for.
It looks like the plan of a house or something; but what all these little dashes,
pointing this way and that, may mean I can't get a notion. And what's the
writing?"
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"Chinese," said the man with the map.
"Of course! He was a Chinese," said Evans.
"They all were," said the man with the map.
They both sat for some minutes staring at the land, while the canoe drifted
slowly. Then Evans looked towards the paddle.
"Your turn with the paddle now, Hooker," said he.
And his companion quietly folded up his map, put it in his pocket, passed Evans
carefully, and began to paddle. His movements were languid, like those of a man
whose strength was nearly exhausted.
Evans sat with his eyes half closed, watching the frothy breakwater of the coral
creep nearer and nearer. The sky was like a furnace now, for the sun was near the
zenith. Though they were so near the Treasure he did not feel the exaltation he
had anticipated. The intense excitement of the struggle for the plan, and the long
night voyage from the mainland in the unprovisioned canoe had, to use his own
expression, "taken it out of him." He tried to arouse himself by directing his mind
to the ingots the Chinamen had spoken of, but it would not rest there; it came
back headlong to the thought of sweet water rippling in the river, and to the
almost unendurable dryness of his lips and throat. The rhythmic wash of the sea
upon the reef was becoming audible now, and it had a pleasant sound in his ears;
the water washed along the side of the canoe, and the paddle dripped between
each stroke. Presently he began to doze.
He was still dimly conscious of the island, but a queer dream texture interwove
with his sensations. Once again it was the night when he and Hooker had hit
upon the Chinamen's secret; he saw the moonlit trees, the little fire burning, and
the black figures of the three Chinamen--silvered on one side by moonlight, and
on the other glowing from the firelight--and heard them talking together in
pigeon-English--for they came from different provinces. Hooker had caught the
drift of their talk first, and had motioned to him to listen. Fragments of the
conversation were inaudible, and fragments incomprehensible. A Spanish galleon
from the Philippines hopelessly aground, and its treasure buried against the day
of return, lay in the background of the story; a shipwrecked crew thinned by
disease, a quarrel or so, and the needs of discipline, and at last taking to their
boats never to be heard of again. Then Chang-hi, only a year since, wandering
ashore, had happened upon the ingots hidden for two hundred years, had deserted
his junk, and reburied them with infinite toil, single-handed but very safe. He laid
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great stress on the safety--it was a secret of his. Now he wanted help to return
and exhume them. Presently the little map fluttered and the voices sank. A fine
story for two, stranded British wastrels to hear! Evans' dream shifted to the
moment when he had Chang-hi's pigtail in his hand. The life of a Chinaman is
scarcely sacred like a European's. The cunning little face of Chang-hi, first keen
and furious like a startled snake, and then fearful, treacherous, and pitiful,
became overwhelmingly prominent in the dream. At the end Chang-hi had
grinned, a most incomprehensible and startling grin. Abruptly things became
very unpleasant, as they will do at times in dreams. Chang-hi gibbered and
threatened him. He saw in his dream heaps and heaps of gold, and Chang-hi
intervening and struggling to hold him back from it. He took Chang-hi by the
pigtail--how big the yellow brute was, and how he struggled and grinned! He
kept growing bigger, too. Then the bright heaps of gold turned to a roaring
furnace, and a vast devil, surprisingly like Chang-hi, but with a huge black tail,
began to feed him with coals. They burnt his mouth horribly. Another devil was
shouting his name: "Evans, Evans, you sleepy fool--!" Or was it Hooker?
He woke up. They were in the mouth of the lagoon.
"There are the three palm-trees. It must be in a line with that clump of bushes,"
said his companion. "Mark that. If we, go to those bushes and then strike into the
bush in a straight line from here, we shall come to it when we come to the
stream."
They could see now where the mouth of the stream opened out. At the sight of it
Evans revived. "Hurry up, man," he said, "or by heaven I shall have to drink sea
water!" He gnawed his hand and stared at the gleam of silver among the rocks
and green tangle.
Presently he turned almost fiercely upon Hooker. "Give me the paddle," he said.
So they reached the river mouth. A little way up Hooker took some water in the
hollow of his hand, tasted it, and spat it out. A little further he tried again. "This
will do," he said, and they began drinking eagerly.
"Curse this!" said Evans suddenly. "It's too slow." And, leaning dangerously over
the fore part of the canoe, he began to suck up the water with his lips.
Presently they made an end of drinking, and, running the canoe into a little creek,
were about to land among the thick growth that overhung the water.
248
"We shall have to scramble through this to the beach to find our bushes and get
the line to the place," said Evans.
"We had better paddle round," said Hooker.
So they pushed out again into the river and paddled back down it to the sea, and
along the shore to the place where the clump of bushes grew. Here they landed,
pulled the light canoe far up the beach, and then went up towards the edge of the
jungle until they could see the opening of the reef and the bushes in a straight
line. Evans had taken a native implement out of the canoe. It was L-shaped, and
the transverse piece was armed with polished stone. Hooker carried the paddle.
"It is straight now in this direction," said he; "we must push through this till we
strike the stream. Then we must prospect."
They pushed through a close tangle of reeds, broad fronds, and young trees, and
at first it was toilsome going, but very speedily the trees became larger and the
ground beneath them opened out. The blaze of the sunlight was replaced by
insensible degrees by cool shadow. The trees became at last, vast pillars that rose
up to a canopy of greenery far overhead. Dim white flowers hung from their
stems, and ropy creepers swung from tree to tree. The shadow deepened. On the
ground, blotched fungi and a red-brown incrustation became frequent.
Evans shivered. "It seems almost cold here after the blaze outside."
"I hope we are keeping to the straight," said Hooker.
Presently they saw, far ahead, a gap in the sombre darkness where white shafts of
hot sunlight smote into the forest. There also was brilliant green undergrowth and
coloured flowers. Then they heard the rush of water.
"Here is the river. We should be close to it now," said Hooker.
The vegetation was thick by the river bank. Great plants, as yet unnamed, grew
among the roots of the big trees, and spread rosettes of huge green fans towards
the strip of sky. Many flowers and a creeper with shiny foliage clung to the
exposed stems. On the water of the broad, quiet pool which the treasure seekers
now overlooked there floated big oval leaves and a waxen, pinkish-white flower
not unlike a water-lily. Further, as the river bent away from them, the water
suddenly frothed and became noisy in a rapid.
"Well?" said Evans.
249
"We have swerved a little from the straight," said Hooker. "That was to be
expected."
He turned and looked into the dim cool shadows of the silent forest behind them.
"If we beat a little way up and down the stream we should come to something."
"You said--" began Evans.
"He said there was a heap of stones," said Hooker.
The two men looked at each other for a moment.
"Let us try a little down-stream first," said Evans.
They advanced slowly, looking curiously about them. Suddenly Evans stopped.
"What the devil's that?" he said.
Hooker followed his finger. "Something blue," he said. It had come into view as
they topped a gentle swell of the ground. Then he began to distinguish what it
was.
He advanced suddenly with hasty steps, until the body that belonged to the limp
hand and arm had become visible. His grip tightened on the implement he
carried. The thing was the figure of a Chinaman lying on his face. The abandon
of the pose was unmistakable.
The two men drew closer together, and stood staring silently at this ominous dead
body. It lay in a clear space among the trees. Near by was a spade after the
Chinese pattern, and further off lay a scattered heap of stones, close to a freshly
dug hole.
"Somebody has been here before," said Hooker, clearing his throat.
Then suddenly Evans began to swear and rave, and stamp upon the ground.
Hooker turned white but said nothing. He advanced towards the prostrate body.
He saw the neck was puffed and purple, and the hands and ankles swollen.
"Pah!" he said, and suddenly turned away and went towards the excavation. He
gave a cry of surprise. He shouted to Evans, who was following him slowly.
"You fool! It's all right. It's here still." Then he turned again and looked at the
dead Chinaman, and then again at the hole.
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Evans hurried to the hole. Already half exposed by the ill-fated wretch beside
them lay a number of dull yellow bars. He bent down in the hole, and, clearing
off the soil with his bare hands, hastily pulled one of the heavy masses out. As he
did so a little thorn pricked his hand. He pulled the delicate spike out with his
fingers and lifted the ingot.
"Only gold or lead could weigh like this," he said exultantly.
Hooker was still looking at the dead Chinaman. He was puzzled.
"He stole a march on his friends," he said at last. "He came here alone, and some
poisonous snake has killed him...I wonder how he found the place."
Evans stood with the ingot in his hands. What did a dead Chinaman signify? "We
shall have to take this stuff to the mainland piecemeal, and bury it there for a
while. How shall we get it to the canoe?"
He took his jacket off and spread it on the ground, and flung two or three ingots
into it. Presently he found that another little thorn had punctured his skin.
"This is as much as we can carry," said he. Then suddenly, with a queer rush of
irritation, "What are you staring at?"
Hooker turned to him. "I can't stand him..." He nodded towards the corpse. "It's
so like--"
"Rubbish!" said Evans. "All Chinamen are alike."
Hooker looked into his face. "I'm going to bury that, anyhow, before I lend a
hand with this stuff."
"Don't be a fool, Hooker," said Evans. "Let that mass of corruption bide."
Hooker hesitated, and then his eye went carefully over the brown soil about
them. "It scares me somehow," he said.
"The thing is," said Evans, "what to do with these ingots. Shall we re-bury them
over here, or take them across the strait in the canoe?"
Hooker thought. His puzzled gaze wandered among the tall tree-trunks, and up
into the remote sunlit greenery overhead. He shivered again as his eye rested
upon the blue figure of the Chinaman. He stared searchingly among the grey
depths between the trees.
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"What's come to you, Hooker?" said Evans. "Have you lost your wits?"
"Let's get the gold out of this place, anyhow," said Hooker.
He took the ends of the collar of the coat in his hands, and Evans took the
opposite corners, and they lifted the mass. "Which way?" said Evans. "To the
canoe?"
"It's queer," said Evans, when they had advanced only a few steps, "but my arms
ache still with that paddling.
"Curse it!" he said. "But they ache! I must rest."
They let the coat down, Evans' face was white, and little drops of sweat stood out
upon his forehead. "It's stuffy, somehow, in this forest."
Then with an abrupt transition to unreasonable anger: "What is the good of
waiting here all the day? Lend a hand, I say! You have done nothing but moon
since we saw the dead Chinaman."
Hooker was looking steadfastly at his companion's face. He helped raise the coat
bearing the ingots, and they went forward perhaps a hundred yards in silence.
Evans began to breathe heavily. "Can't you speak?" he said.
"What's the matter with you?" said Hooker.
Evans stumbled, and then with a sudden curse flung the coat from him. He stood
for a moment staring at Hooker, and then with a groan clutched at his own throat.
"Don't come near me," he said, and went and leant against a tree. Then in a
steadier voice, "I'll be better in a minute."
Presently his grip upon the trunk loosened, and he slipped slowly down the stem
of the tree until he was a crumpled heap at its foot. His hands were clenched
convulsively. His face became distorted with pain. Hooker approached him.
"Don't touch me! Don't touch me!" said Evans in a stifled voice. "Put the gold
back on the coat."
"Can't I do anything for you?" said Hooker.
"Put the gold back on the coat."
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As Hooker handled the ingots he felt a little prick on the ball of his thumb. He
looked at his hand and saw a slender thorn, perhaps two inches in length.
Evans gave an inarticulate cry and rolled over.
Hooker's jaw dropped. He stared at the thorn for a moment with dilated eyes.
Then he looked at Evans, who was now crumpled together on the ground, his
back bending and straightening spasmodically. Then he looked through the
pillars of the trees and net-work of creeper stems, to where in the dim grey
shadow the blue-clad body of the Chinaman was still indistinctly visible. He
thought of the little dashes in the corner of the plan, and in a moment he
understood.
"God help me!" he said. For the thorns were similar to those the Dyaks poison
and use in their blowing-tubes. He understood now what Chang-hi's assurance of
the safety of his treasure meant. He understood that grin now.
"Evans!" he cried.
But Evans was silent and motionless, save for a horrible spasmodic twitching of
his limbs. A profound silence brooded over the forest.
Then Hooker began to suck furiously at the little pink spot on the ball of his
thumb--sucking for dear life. Presently he felt a strange aching pain in his arms
and shoulders, and his fingers seemed difficult to bend. Then he knew that
sucking was no good.
Abruptly he stopped, and sitting down by the pile of ingots, and resting his chin
upon his hands and his elbows upon his knees, stared at the distorted but still
stirring body of his companion. Chang-hi's grin came into his mind again. The
dull pain spread towards his throat and grew slowly in intensity. Far above him a
faint breeze stirred the greenery, and the white petals of some unknown flower
came floating down through the gloom.
THE PLATTNER STORY AND OTHERS
THE PLATTNER STORY
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Whether the story of Gottfried Plattner is to be credited or not, is a pretty
question in the value of evidence. On the one hand, we have seven witnesses--to
be perfectly exact, we have six and a half pairs of eyes, and one undeniable fact;
and on the other we have--what is it--? Prejudice, common sense, the inertia of
opinion. Never were there seven more honest-seeming witnesses; never was there
a more undeniable fact than the inversion of Gottfried Plattner's anatomical
structure, and--never was there a more preposterous story than the one they have
to tell! The most preposterous part of the story is the worthy Gottfried's
contribution (for I count him as one of the seven). Heaven forbid that I should be
led into giving countenance to superstition by a passion for impartiality, and so
come to share the fate of Eusapia's patrons! Frankly, I believe there is something
crooked about this business of Gottfried Plattner; but what that crooked factor is,
I will admit as frankly, I do not know. I have been surprised at the credit
accorded to the story in the most unexpected and authoritative quarters. The
fairest way to the reader, however will be for me to tell it without further
comment.
Gottfried Plattner is, in spite of his name, a free-born Englishman. His father was
an Alsatian who came to England in the Sixties, married a respectable English
girl of unexceptionable antecedents, and died, after a wholesome and uneventful
life (devoted, I understand, chiefly to the laying of parquet flooring), in 1887.
Gottfried's age is seven-and-twenty. He is, by virtue of his heritage of three
languages, Modern Languages Master in a small private school in the South of
England. To the casual observer he is singularly like any other Modern
Languages Master in any other small private school. His costume is neither very
costly nor very fashionable, but on the other hand it is not markedly cheap or
shabby; his complexion, like his height and his bearing, is inconspicuous. You
would notice, perhaps that, like the majority of people, his face was not
absolutely symmetrical, his right eye a little larger than the left, and his jaw a
trifle heavier on the right side. If you, as an ordinary careless person, were to bare
his chest and feel his heart beating, you would probably find it quite like the heart
of any one else. But here you and the trained observer would part company. If
you found his heart quite ordinary, the trained observer would find it quite
otherwise. And once the thing was pointed out to you, you too would perceive
the peculiarity easily enough. It is that Gottfried's heart beats on the right side of
his body.
Now, that is not the only singularity of Gottfried's structure, although it is the
only one that would appeal to the untrained mind. Careful sounding of Gottfried's
internal arrangements, by a well-known surgeon, seems to point to the fact that
all the other unsymmetrical parts of his body are similarly misplaced. The right
lobe of his liver is on the left side, the left on his right; while his lungs too, are
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similarly contraposed. What is still more singular, unless Gottfried is a
consummate actor, we must believe that his right hand has recently become his
left. Since the occurrences we are about to consider (as impartially as possible),
he has found the utmost difficulty in writing, except from right to left across the
paper with his left hand. He cannot throw with his right hand, he is perplexed at
meal times between knife and fork, and his ideas of the rule of the road--he is a
cyclist--are still a dangerous confusion. And there is not a scrap of evidence to
show that before these occurrences Gottfried was at all left-handed. There is yet
another wonderful fact in this preposterous business. Gottfried produces three
photographs of himself. You have him at the age of five or six, thrusting fat legs
at you from under a plaid frock, and scowling. In that photograph his left eye is a
little larger than his right, and his jaw is a trifle heavier on the left side. This is
the reverse of his present living conditions: The photograph of Gottfried at
fourteen seems to contradict these facts, but that is because it is one of those
cheap "Gem" photographs that were then in vogue, taken direct upon metal, and
therefore reversing things just as a looking-glass would. A third photograph
represents him at one-and-twenty and confirms the record of the others. There
seems here evidence of the strongest confirmatory character that Gottfried has
exchanged his left side for his right. Yet how a human being can be so changed,
short of a fantastic and pointless miracle, it is exceedingly hard to suggest.
In one way, of course, these facts might be explicable on the supposition that
Plattner has undertaken an elaborate mystification, on the strength of his heart's
displacement. Photographs may be fudged, and left-handedness imitated. But the
character of the man does not lend itself to any such theory. He is quiet, practical,
unobtrusive and thoroughly sane, from the Nordau standpoint. He likes beer, and
smokes moderately, takes walking exercise daily, and has a healthily high
estimate of the value of his teaching. He has a good but untrained tenor voice,
and takes a pleasure in singing airs of a popular and cheerful character. He is
fond, but not morbidly fond, of reading--, chiefly fiction pervaded with a vaguely
pious optimism--, sleeps well, and rarely dreams. He is in fact, the very last
person to evolve a fantastic fable. Indeed, so far from forcing this story upon the
world, he has been singularly reticent on the matter. He meets enquirers with a
certain engaging--bashfulness is almost the word, that disarms the most
suspicious. He seems genuinely ashamed that anything so unusual has occurred
to him.
It is to be regretted that Plattner's aversion to the idea of post-mortem dissection
may postpone, perhaps for ever, the positive proof that his entire body has had its
left and right sides transposed. Upon that fact mainly the credibility of his story
hangs. There is no way of taking a man and moving him about in space, as
ordinary people understand space, that will result in our changing his sides.
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Whatever you do, his right is still his right, his left his left. You can do that with
a perfectly thin and flat thing, of course. If you were to cut a figure out of paper,
any figure with a right and left side, you could change its sides simply by lifting
it up and turning it over. But with a solid it is different. Mathematical theorists
tell us that the only way in which the right and left sides of a solid body can be
changed is by taking that body clean out of space as we know it--, taking it out of
ordinary existence, that is, and turning it somewhere outside space. This is a little
abstruse, no doubt, but any one with any knowledge of mathematical theory will
assure the reader of its truth. To put the thing in technical language, the curious
inversion of Plattner's right and left sides is proof that he has moved out of our
space into what is called the Fourth Dimension, and that he has returned again to
our world. Unless we choose to consider ourselves the victims of an elaborate
and motiveless fabrication, we are almost bound to believe that this has occurred.
So much for the tangible facts. We come now to the account of the phenomena
that attended his temporary disappearance from the world. It appears that in the
Sussexville Proprietary School Plattner not only discharged the duties of Modern
Languages Master, but also taught chemistry, commercial geography, bookkeeping, shorthand, drawing, and any other additional subject to which the
changing fancies of the boys' parents might direct attention. He knew little or
nothing of these various subjects, but in secondary as distinguished from Board
or elementary schools, knowledge in the teacher is, very properly, by no means
so necessary as high moral character and gentlemanly tone. In chemistry he was
particularly deficient, knowing he says, nothing beyond the Three Gases
(whatever the three gases may be). As however, his pupils began by knowing
nothing, and derived all their information from him, this caused him (or any one)
but little inconvenience for several terms. Then a little boy named Whibble
joined the school, who had been educated (it seems) by some mischievous
relative into an enquiring habit of mind. This little boy followed Plattner's lessons
with marked and sustained interest, and in order to exhibit his zeal on the subject,
brought at various times, substances for Plattner to analyse. Plattner, flattered by
this evidence of his power of awakening interest, and trusting to the boy's
ignorance, analysed these, and even made general statements as to their
composition. Indeed he was so far stimulated by his pupil as to obtain a work
upon analytical chemistry and study it during his supervision of the evening's
preparation. He was surprised to find chemistry quite an interesting subject.
So far the story is absolutely commonplace. But now the greenish powder comes
upon the scene. The source of that greenish powder seems, unfortunately lost.
Master Whibble tells a tortuous story of finding it done up in a packet in a
disused limekiln near the Downs. It would have been an excellent thing for
Plattner, and possibly for Master Whibble's family, if a match could have been
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applied to that powder there and then. The young gentleman certainly did not
bring it to school in a packet, but in a common eight-ounce graduated medicine
bottle, plugged with masticated newspaper. He gave it to Plattner at the end of
the afternoon school. Four boys had been detained after school prayers in order to
complete some neglected tasks, and Plattner was supervising these in the small
classroom in which the chemical teaching was conducted. The appliances for the
practical teaching of chemistry in the Sussexville Proprietary School, as in most
small schools in this country, are characterised by a severe simplicity. They are
kept in a small cupboard standing in a recess, and having about the same capacity
as a common travelling trunk. Plattner, being bored with his passive
superintendence, seems to have welcomed the intervention of Whibble with his
green powder as an agreeable diversion, and unlocking this cupboard, proceeded
at once with his analytical experiments. Whibble sat, luckily for himself, at a safe
distance, regarding him. The four malefactors, feigning a profound absorption in
their work, watched him furtively with the keenest interest. For even within the
limits of the Three Gases, Plattner's practical chemistry was, I understand,
temerarious.
They are practically unanimous in their account of Plattner's proceedings. He
poured a little of the green powder into a test-tube, and tried the substance with
water, hydrochloric acid, nitric acid, and sulphuric acid in succession. Getting no
result, he emptied out a little heap--nearly half the bottleful, in fact--upon a slate
and tried a match. He held the medicine bottle in his left hand. The stuff began to
smoke and melt, and then--exploded with deafening violence and a blinding
flash.
The five boys, seeing the flash and being prepared for catastrophes, ducked
below their desks, and were none of them seriously hurt. The window was blown
out into the playground, and the blackboard on its easel was upset. The slate was
smashed to atoms. Some plaster fell from the ceiling. No other damage was done
to the school edifice or appliances, and the boys at first, seeing nothing of
Plattner, fancied he was knocked down and lying out of their sight below the
desks. They jumped out of their places to go to his assistance, and were amazed
to find the space empty. Being still confused by the sudden violence of the report,
they hurried to the open door, under the impression that he must have been hurt,
and have rushed out of the room. But Carson, the foremost, nearly collided in the
doorway with the principal, Mr. Lidgett.
Mr. Lidgett is a corpulent, excitable man with one eye. The boys describe him as
stumbling into the room mouthing some of those tempered expletives irritable
schoolmasters accustom themselves to use--lest worse befall. "Wretched
mumchancer!" he said. "Where's Mr. Plattner?" The boys are agreed on the very
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words. ("Wobbler," "snivelling puppy," and "mumchancer" are, it seems, among
the ordinary small change of Mr. Lidgett's scholastic commerce.)
Where's Mr. Plattner? That was a question that was to be repeated many times in
the next few days. It really seemed as though that frantic hyperbole, "blown to
atoms," had for once realise itself. There was not a visible particle of Plattner to
be seen; not a drop of blood nor a stitch of clothing to be found. Apparently he
had been blown clean out of existence and left not a wrack behind. Not so much
as would cover a sixpenny piece, to quote a proverbial expression! The evidence
of his absolute disappearance, as a consequence of that explosion, is indubitable.
It is not necessary to enlarge here upon the commotion excited in the Sussexville
Proprietary School, and in Sussexville and elsewhere, by this event. It is quite
possible indeed, that some of the readers of these pages may recall the hearing of
some remote and dying version of that excitement during the last summer
holidays. Lidgett, it would seem, did everything in his power to suppress and
minimise the story. He instituted a penalty of twenty-five lines for any mention
of Plattner's name among the boys, and stated in the schoolroom that he was
clearly aware of his assistant's whereabouts. He was afraid, he explains, that the
possibility of an explosion happening, in spite of the elaborate precautions taken
to minimise the practical teaching of chemistry, might injure the reputation of the
school; and so might any mysterious quality in Plattner's departure. Indeed, he
did everything in his power to make the occurrence seem as ordinary as possible.
In particular, he cross-examined the five eye-witnesses of the occurrence so
searchingly that they began to doubt the plain evidence of their senses. But in
spite of these efforts, the tale, in a magnified and distorted state, made a nine
days' wonder in the district, and several parents withdrew their sons on
colourable pretexts. Not the least remarkable point in the matter is the fact that a
large number of people in the neighbourhood dreamed singularly vivid dreams of
Plattner during the period of excitement before his return, and that these dreams
had a curious uniformity. In almost all of them Plattner was seen, sometimes
singly, sometimes in company, wandering about through a coruscating
iridescence. In all cases his face was pale and distressed, and in some he
gesticulated towards the dreamer. One or two of the boys, evidently under the
influence of nightmare, fancied that Plattner approached them with remarkable
swiftness, and seemed to look closely into their very eyes. Others fled with
Plattner from the pursuit of vague and extraordinary creatures of a globular
shape. But all these fancies were forgotten in enquiries and speculations when, on
the Wednesday next, but one after the Monday of the explosion, Plattner
returned.
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The circumstances of his return were as singular as those of his departure. So far
as Mr. Lidgett's somewhat choleric outline can be filled in from Plattner's
hesitating statements, it would appear that on Wednesday evening, towards the
hour of sunset, the former gentleman, having dismissed evening preparation, was
engaged in his garden, picking and eating strawberries, a fruit of which he is
inordinately fond. It is a large old-fashioned garden, secured from observation
fortunately, by a high and ivy-covered red-brick wall. Just as he was stooping
over a particularly prolific plant, there was a flash in the air and a heavy thud,
and before he could look round, some heavy body struck him violently from
behind. He was pitched forward, crushing the strawberries he held in his hand,
and that so roughly, that his silk hat--Mr. Lidgett adheres to the older ideas of
scholastic costume--was driven violently down upon his forehead, and almost
over one eye. This heavy missile, which slid over him sideways and collapsed
into a sitting posture among the strawberry plants, proved to be our long-lost Mr.
Gottfried Plattner, in an extremely dishevelled condition. He was collarless and
hatless, his linen was dirty, and there was blood upon his hands. Mr. Lidgett was
so indignant and surprised that he remained on all-fours, and with his hat jammed
down on his eye, while he expostulated vehemently with Plattner for his
disrespectful and unaccountable conduct.
This scarcely idyllic scene completes what I may call the exterior version of the
Plattner story--its exoteric aspect. It is quite unnecessary to enter here into all the
details of his dismissal by Mr. Lidgett. Such details, with the full names and
dates and references, will be found in the larger report of these occurrences that
was laid before the Society for the Investigation of Abnormal Phenomena. The
singular transposition of Plattner's right and left sides was scarcely observed for
the first day or so, and then first in connection with his disposition to write from
right to left across the blackboard. He concealed rather than ostended this curious
confirmatory circumstance, as he considered it would unfavourably affect his
prospects in a new situation. The displacement of his heart was discovered some
months after, when he was having a tooth extracted under anaesthetics. He then,
very unwillingly, allowed a cursory surgical examination to be made of himself,
with a view to a brief account in the "Journal of Anatomy." That exhausts the
statement of the material facts; and we may now go on to consider Plattner's
account of the matter.
But first let us clearly differentiate between the preceding portion of this story
and what is to follow. All I have told thus far is established by such evidence as
even a criminal lawyer would approve. Every one of the witnesses is still alive;
the reader, if he have the leisure, may hunt the lads out to-morrow, or even brave
the terrors of the redoubtable Lidgett, and cross-examine and trap and test to his
heart's content; Gottfried Plattner himself, and his twisted heart and his three
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photographs are producible. It may be taken as proved that he did disappear for
nine days as the consequence of an explosion; that he returned almost as
violently, under circumstances in their nature annoying to Mr. Lidgett, whatever
the details of those circumstances may be; and that he returned inverted, just as a
reflection returns from a mirror. From the last fact, as I have already stated, it
follows almost inevitably that Plattner, during those nine days, must have been in
some state of existence altogether out of space. The evidence to these statements
is indeed, far stronger than that upon which most murderers are hanged. But for
his own particular account of where he had been, with its confused explanations
and well-nigh self-contradictory details, we have only Mr. Gottfried Plattner's
word. I do not wish to discredit that, but I must point out--what so many writers
upon obscure psychic phenomena fail to do--that we are passing here from the
practically undeniable to that kind of matter which any reasonable man is entitled
to believe or reject as he thinks proper. The previous statements render it
plausible; its discordance with common experience tilts it towards the incredible.
I would prefer not to sway the beam of the reader's judgment either way, but
simply to tell the story as Plattner told it me. He gave me his narrative, I may
state, at my house at Chislehurst, and so soon as he had left me that evening, I
went into my study and wrote down everything as I remembered it. Subsequently
he was good enough to read over a type-written copy, so that its substantial
correctness is undeniable.
He states that at the moment of the explosion he distinctly thought he was killed.
He felt lifted off his feet and driven forcibly backward. It is a curious fact for
psychologists that he thought clearly during his backward flight, and wondered
whether he should hit the chemistry cupboard or the blackboard easel. His heels
struck ground, and he staggered and fell heavily into a sitting position on
something soft and firm. For a moment the concussion stunned him. He became
aware at once of a vivid scent of singed hair, and he seemed to hear the voice of
Lidgett asking for him. You will understand that for a time his mind was greatly
confused.
At first he was distinctly under the impression that he was still in the classroom.
He perceived quite distinctly the surprise of the boys and the entry of Mr.
Lidgett. He is quite positive upon that score. He did not hear their remarks; but
that he ascribed to the deafening effect of the experiment. Things about him
seemed curiously dark and faint, but his mind explained that on the obvious but
mistaken idea that the explosion had engendered a huge volume of dark smoke.
Through the dimness the figures of Lidgett and the boys moved, as faint and
silent as ghosts Plattner's face still tingled with the stinging heat of the flash. He
was, he says, "all muddled." His first definite thoughts seem to have been of his
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personal safety. He thought he was perhaps blinded and deafened. He felt his
limbs and face in a gingerly manner. Then his perceptions grew clearer, and he
was astonished to miss the old familiar desks and other schoolroom furniture
about him. Only dim, uncertain, grey shapes stood in the place of these. Then
came a thing that made him shout aloud, and awoke his stunned faculties to
instant activity. Two of the boys, gesticulating, walked one after the other clean
through him! Neither manifested the slightest consciousness of his presence. It is
difficult to imagine the sensation he felt. They came against him, he says, with no
more force than a wisp of mist.
Plattner's first thought after that was that he was dead. Having been brought up
with thoroughly sound views in these matters, however he was a little surprised
to find his body still about him. His second conclusion was that he was not dead,
but that the others were: that the explosion had destroyed the Sussexville
Proprietary School and every soul in it except himself. But that too, was scarcely
satisfactory. He was thrown back upon astonished observation.
Everything about him was extraordinarily dark: at first it seemed to have an
altogether ebony blackness. Overhead was a black firmament. The only touch of
light in the scene was a faint greenish glow at the edge of the sky in one
direction, which threw into prominence a horizon of undulating black hills. This I
say, was his impression at first. As his eye grew accustomed to the darkness, he
began to distinguish a faint quality of differentiating greenish colour in the
circumambient night. Against this background the furniture and occupants of the
classroom, it seems, stood out like phosphorescent spectres, faint and impalpable.
He extended his hand, and thrust it without an effort through the wall of the room
by the fireplace.
He describes himself as making a strenuous effort to attract attention. He shouted
to Lidgett, and tried to seize the boys as they went to and fro. He only desisted
from these attempts when Mrs. Lidgett, whom he (as an Assistant Master)
naturally disliked, entered the room. He says the sensation of being in the world,
and yet not a part of it, was an extraordinarily disagreeable one. He compared his
feelings, not inaptly, to those of a cat watching a mouse through a window.
Whenever he made a motion to communicate with the dim, familiar world about
him, he found an invisible, incomprehensible barrier preventing intercourse. He
then turned his attention to his solid environment. He found the medicine bottle
still unbroken in his hand, with the remainder of the green powder therein. He put
this in his pocket, and began to feel about him. Apparently, he was sitting on a
boulder of rock covered with a velvety moss. The dark country about him, he was
unable to see, the faint, misty picture of the schoolroom blotting it out, but he had
a feeling (due perhaps to a cold wind) that he was near the crest of a hill, and that
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a steep valley fell away beneath his feet. The green glow along the edge of the
sky seemed to be growing in extent and intensity. He stood up, rubbing his eyes.
It would seem that he made a few steps, going steeply downhill, and then
stumbled, nearly fell, and sat down again upon a jagged mass of rock to watch
the dawn. He became aware that the world about him was absolutely silent. It
was as still as it was dark, and though there was a cold wind blowing up the hillface, the rustle of grass, the soughing of the boughs that should have
accompanied it, were absent. He could hear, therefore, if he could not see, that
the hillside upon which he stood was rocky and desolate. The green grew brighter
every moment, and as it did so, a faint, transparent blood-red mingled with, but
did not mitigate, the blackness of the sky overhead and the rocky desolations
about him. Having regard to what follows, I am inclined to think that, that
redness may have been an optical effect due to contrast. Something black
fluttered momentarily against the livid yellow-green of the lower sky, and then
the thin and penetrating voice of a bell rose out of the black gulf below him. An
oppressive expectation grew with the growing light.
It is probable that an hour or more elapsed while he sat there, the strange green
light growing brighter every moment, and spreading slowly, in flamboyant
fingers, upward towards the zenith. As it grew, the spectral vision of our world
became relatively or absolutely fainter. Probably both, for the time must have
been about that of our earthly sunset. So far as his vision of our world went,
Plattner, by his few steps downhill, had passed through the floor of the
classroom, and was now, it seemed, sitting in mid-air in the larger schoolroom
downstairs. He saw the boarders distinctly, but much more faintly than he had
seen Lidgett. They were preparing their evening tasks, and he noticed with
interest that several were cheating with their Euclid riders by means of a crib, a
compilation whose existence he had hitherto never suspected. As the time passed,
they faded steadily, as steadily as the light of the green dawn increased.
Looking down into the valley, he saw that the light had crept far down its rocky
sides, and that the profound blackness of the abyss was now broken by a minute
green glow, like the light of a glow-worm. And almost immediately the limb of a
huge heavenly body of blazing green rose over the basaltic undulations of the
distant hills, and the monstrous hill-masses about him came out gaunt and
desolate, in green light and deep, ruddy black shadows. He became aware of a
vast number of ball-shaped objects drifting as thistledown drifts over the high
ground. There were none of these nearer to him than the opposite side of the
gorge. The bell below twanged quicker and quicker, with something like
impatient insistence, and several lights moved hither and thither. The boys at
work at their desks were now almost imperceptibly faint.
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This extinction of our world, when the green sun of this other universe rose, is a
curious point upon which Plattner insists. During the Other-World night, it is
difficult to move about, on account of the vividness with which the things of this
world are visible. It becomes a riddle to explain why, if this is the case, we in this
world catch no glimpse of the Other-World. It is due, perhaps, to the
comparatively vivid illumination of this world of ours. Plattner describes the
midday of the Other-World, at its brightest as not being nearly so bright as this
world at full moon, while its night is profoundly black. Consequently, the amount
of light, even in an ordinary dark room, is sufficient to render the things of the
Other-World invisible, on the same principle that faint phosphorescence is only
visible in the profoundest darkness. I have tried, since he told me his story, to see
something of the Other-World by sitting for a long space in a photographer's dark
room at night. I have certainly seen indistinctly the form of greenish slopes and
rocks, but only, I must admit, very indistinctly indeed. The reader may possibly
be more successful. Plattner tells me that since his return he has dreamt and seen
and recognised places in the Other-World, but this is probably due to his memory
of these scenes. It seems quite possible that people with unusually keen eyesight
may occasionally catch a glimpse of this strange Other-World about us.
However, this is a digression. As the green sun rose, a long street of black
buildings became perceptible, though only darkly and indistinctly, in the gorge,
and after some hesitation, Plattner began to clamber down the precipitous descent
towards them. The descent was long and exceedingly tedious, being so not only
by the extraordinary steepness, but also by reason of the looseness of the
boulders with which the whole face of the hill was strewn. The noise of his
descent--now and then his heels struck fire from the rocks--seemed now the only
sound in the universe, for the beating of the bell had ceased. As he drew nearer,
he perceived that the various edifices had a singular resemblance to tombs and
mausoleums and monuments, saving only that they were all uniformly black
instead of being white, as most sepulchres are. And then he saw, crowding out of
the largest building, very much as people disperse from church, a number of
pallid, rounded, pale-green figures. These dispersed in several directions about
the broad street of the place, some going through side alleys and reappearing
upon the steepness of the hill, others entering some of the small black buildings
which lined the way.
At the sight of these things drifting up towards him, Plattner stopped staring.
They were not walking, they were indeed limbless, and they had the appearance
of human heads, beneath which a tadpole-like body swung. He was too
astonished at their strangeness, too full, indeed of strangeness, to be seriously
alarmed by them. They drove towards him, in front of the chill wind that was
blowing uphill, much as soap-bubbles drive before a draught. And as he looked
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at the nearest of those approaching, he saw it was indeed a human head, albeit
with singularly large eyes, and wearing such an expression of distress and
anguish as he had never seen before upon mortal countenance. He was surprised
to find that it did not turn to regard him, but seemed to be watching and
following some unseen moving thing. For a moment he was puzzled, and then it
occurred to him that this creature was watching with its enormous eyes
something that was happening in the world he had just left. Nearer it came, and
nearer, and he was too astonished to cry out. It made a very faint fretting sound
as it came close to him. Then it struck his face with a gentle pat--, its touch was
very cold--, and drove past him, and upward towards the crest of the hill.
An extraordinary conviction flashed across Plattner's mind that this head had a
strong likeness to Lidgett. Then he turned his attention to the other heads that
were now swarming thickly up the hillside. None made the slightest sign of
recognition. One or two, indeed, came close to his head and almost followed the
example of the first, but he dodged convulsively out of the way. Upon most of
them he saw the same expression of unavailing regret he had seen upon the first,
and heard the same faint sounds of wretchedness from them. One or two wept,
and one rolling swiftly uphill wore an expression of diabolical rage. But others
were cold, and several had a look of gratified interest in their eyes. One at least,
was almost in an ecstasy of happiness. Plattner does not remember that he
recognised any more likenesses in those he saw at this time.
For several hours, perhaps Plattner watched these strange things dispersing
themselves over the hills, and not till long after they had ceased to issue from the
clustering black buildings in the gorge, did he resume his downward climb. The
darkness about him increased so much that he had a difficulty in stepping true.
Overhead the sky was now a bright, pale green. He felt neither hunger nor thirst.
Later, when he did, he found a chilly stream running down the centre of the
gorge, and the rare moss upon the boulders, when he tried it at last in desperation,
was good to eat.
He groped about among the tombs that ran down the gorge, seeking vaguely for
some clue to these inexplicable things. After a long time he came to the entrance
of the big mausoleum-like building from which the heads had issued. In this he
found a group of green lights burning upon a kind of basaltic altar, and a bellrope from a belfry overhead hanging down into the centre of the place. Round the
wall ran a lettering of fire in a character unknown to him. While he was still
wondering at the purport of these things, he heard the receding tramp of heavy
feet echoing far down the street. He ran out into the darkness again, but he could
see nothing. He had a mind to pull the bell-rope, and finally decided to follow the
footsteps. But, although he ran far, he never overtook them; and his shouting was
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of no avail. The gorge seemed to extend an interminable distance. It was as dark
as earthly starlight throughout its length, while the ghastly green day lay along
the upper edge of its precipices. There were none of the heads, now, below. They
were all, it seemed, busily occupied along the upper slopes. Looking up, he saw
them drifting hither and thither, some hovering stationary, some flying swiftly
through the air. It reminded him, he said, of "big snowflakes"; only these were
black and pale green.
In pursuing the firm, undeviating footsteps that he never overtook, in groping
into new regions of this endless devil's dyke, in clambering up and down the
pitiless heights, in wandering about the summits, and in watching the drifting
faces, Plattner states that he spent the better part of seven or eight days. He did
not keep count, he says. Though once or twice he found eyes watching him, he
had word with no living soul. He slept among the rocks on the hillside. In the
gorge things earthly were invisible, because from the earthly standpoint, it was
far underground. On the altitudes, so soon as the earthly day began, the world
became visible to him. He found himself sometimes stumbling over the dark
green rocks, or arresting himself on a precipitous brink, while all about him the
green branches of the Sussexville lanes were swaying; or again, he seemed to be
walking through the Sussexville streets, or watching unseen the private business
of some household. And then it was he discovered, that to almost every human
being in our world there pertained some of these drifting heads: that every one in
the world is watched intermittently by these helpless disembodiments.
What are they--these Watchers of the Living? Plattner never learned. But two,
that presently found and followed him, were like his childhood's memory of his
father and mother. Now and then other faces turned their eyes upon him: eyes
like those of dead people who had swayed him, or injured him, or helped him in
his youth and manhood. Whenever they looked at him, Plattner was overcome
with a strange sense of responsibility. To his mother he ventured to speak; but
she made no answer. She looked sadly, steadfastly, and tenderly--a little
reproachfully too, it seemed--into his eyes.
He simply tells this story: he does not endeavour to explain. We are left to
surmise who these Watchers of the Living may be, or if they are indeed the Dead,
why they should so closely and passionately watch a world they have left for
ever. It may be--indeed to my mind it seems just--that, when our life has closed,
when evil or good is no longer a choice for us, we may still have to witness the
working out of the train of consequences we have laid. If human souls continue
after death, then surely human interests continue after death. But that is merely
my own guess at the meaning of the things seen. Plattner offers no interpretation,
for none was given him. It is well the reader should understand this clearly. Day
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after day, with his head reeling, he wandered about this green-lit world outside
the world, weary and, towards the end, weak and hungry. By day--by our earthly
day, that is--the ghostly vision of the old familiar scenery of Sussexville, all
about him, irked and worried him. He could not see where to put his feet, and
ever and again with a chilly touch one of these Watching Souls would come
against his face. And after dark the multitude of these Watchers about him, and
their intent distress, confused his mind beyond describing. A great longing to
return to the earthly life that was so near and yet so remote consume him. The
unearthliness of things about him produced a positively painful mental distress.
He was worried beyond describing by his own particular followers. He would
shout at them to desist from staring at him, scold at them, hurry away from them.
They were always mute and intent. Run as he might over the uneven ground, they
followed his destinies.
On the ninth day, towards evening, Plattner heard the invisible footsteps
approaching, far away down the gorge. He was then wandering over the broad
crest of the same hill upon which he had fallen in his entry into this strange
Other-World of his. He turned to hurry down into the gorge, feeling his way
hastily, and was arrested by the sight of the thing that was happening in a room in
a back street near the school. Both of the people in the room he knew by sight.
The windows were open, the blinds up, and the setting sun shone clearly into it,
so that it came out quite brightly at first, a vivid oblong of room, lying like a
magic-lantern picture upon the black landscape and the livid green dawn. In
addition to the sunlight, a candle had just been lit in the room.
On the bed lay a lank man, his ghastly white face terrible upon the tumbled
pillow. His clenched hands were raised above his head. A little table beside the
bed carried a few medicine bottles, some toast and water, and an empty glass.
Every now and then the lank man's lips fell apart, to indicate a word he could not
articulate. But the woman did not notice that he wanted anything, because she
was busy turning out papers from an old-fashioned bureau in the opposite corner
of the room. At first the picture was very vivid indeed, but as the green dawn
behind it grew brighter and brighter, so it became fainter and more and more
transparent.
As the echoing footsteps paced nearer and nearer, those footsteps that sound so
loud in that Other-World and come so silently in this, Plattner perceived about
him a great multitude of dim faces gathering together out of the darkness and
watching the two people in the room. Never before had he seen so many of the
Watchers of the Living. A multitude had eyes only for the sufferer in the room,
another multitude, in infinite anguish, watched the woman as she hunted with
greedy eyes for something she could not find. They crowded about Plattner, they
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came across his sight and buffeted his face, the noise of their unavailing regrets
was all about him. He saw clearly only now and then. At other times the picture
quivered dimly, through the veil of green reflections upon their movements. In
the room it must have been very still, and Plattner says the candle flame streamed
up into a perfectly vertical line of smoke, but in his ears each footfall and its
echoes beat like a clap of thunder. And the faces! Two, more particularly near the
woman's: one a woman's also, white and clear-featured, a face which might have
once been cold and hard, but which was now softened by the touch of a wisdom
strange to earth. The other might have been the woman's father. Both were
evidently absorbed in the contemplation of some act of hateful meanness, so it
seemed, which they could no longer guard against and prevent. Behind were
others, teachers, it may be, who had taught ill, friends whose influence had failed.
And over the man, too--a multitude, but none that seemed to be parents or
teachers! Faces that might once have been coarse, now purged to strength by
sorrow! And in the forefront one face, a girlish one, neither angry nor remorseful,
but merely patient and weary, and as it seemed to Plattner, waiting for relief. His
powers of description fail him at the memory of this multitude of ghastly
countenances. They gathered on the stroke of the bell He saw them all in the
space of a second. It would seem that he was so worked on by his excitement
that, quite involuntarily, his restless fingers took the bottle of green powder out
of his pocket and held it before him. But he does not remember that.
Abruptly the footsteps ceased. He waited for the next, and there was silence, and
then suddenly cutting through the unexpected stillness like a keen, thin blade,
came the first stroke of the bell. At that the multitudinous faces swayed to and fro
and a louder crying began all about him. The woman did not hear; she was
burning something now in the candle flame. At the second stroke everything
grew dim, and a breath of wind, icy cold, blew through the host of watchers.
They swirled about him like an eddy of dead leaves in the spring, and at the third
stroke something was extended through them to the bed. You have heard of a
beam of light. This was like a beam of darkness, and looking again at it, Plattner
saw that it was a shadowy arm and hand.
The green sun was now topping the black desolations of the horizon, and the
vision of the room was very faint. Plattner could see that the white of the bed
struggled, and was convulsed; and that the woman looked round over her
shoulder at it, startled.
The cloud of watchers lifted high like a puff of green dust before the wind, and
swept swiftly downward towards the temple in the gorge. Then suddenly Plattner
understood the meaning of the shadowy black arm that stretched across his
shoulder and clutched its prey. He did not dare turn his head to see the Shadow
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behind the arm. With a violent effort, and covering his eyes, he set himself to
run, made perhaps twenty strides, then slipped on a boulder, and fell. He fell
forward on his hands; and the bottle smashed and exploded as he touched the
ground.
In another moment he found himself, stunned and bleeding, sitting face to face
with Lidgett in the old walled garden behind the school.
There the story of Plattner's experiences ends. I have resisted, I believe
successfully, the natural disposition of a writer of fiction to dress up incidents of
this sort. I have told the thing as far as possible in the order in which Plattner told
it to me. I have carefully avoided any attempt at style, effect, or construction. It
would have been easy, for instance, to have worked the scene of the death-bed
into a kind of plot in which Plattner might have been involved. But, quite apart
from the objectionableness of falsifying a most extraordinary true story, any such
trite devices would spoil to my mind, the peculiar effect of this dark world, with
its livid green illumination and its drifting Watchers of the Living, which, unseen
and unapproachable to us, is yet lying all about us.
It remains to add, that a death did actually occur in Vincent Terrace, just beyond
the school garden, and so far as can be proved, at the moment of Plattner's return.
Deceased was a rate-collector and insurance agent. His widow, who was much
younger than himself, married last month a Mr. Whymper, a veterinary surgeon
of Allbeeding. As the portion of this story given here has in various forms
circulated orally in Sussexville, she has consented to my use of her name, on
condition that I make it distinctly known that she emphatically contradicts every
detail of Plattner's account of her husband's last moments. She burnt no will, she
says, although Plattner never accused her of doing so; her husband made but one
will, and that just after their marriage. Certainly, from a man who had never seen
it, Plattner's account of the furniture of the room was curiously accurate.
One other thing, even at the risk of an irksome repetition, I must insist upon, lest
I seem to favour the credulous, superstitious view. Plattner's absence from the
world for nine days is, I think, proved. But that does not prove his story. It is
quite conceivable that even outside space hallucinations may be possible. That at
least, the reader must bear distinctly in mind.
THE ARGONAUTS OF THE AIR
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One saw Monson's Flying Machine from the windows of the trains passing either
along the South-Western main line or along the line between Wimbledon and
Worcester Park--, to be more exact, one saw the huge scaffolding which limited
the flight of the apparatus. They rose over the tree-tops, a massive alley of
interlacing iron and timber, and an enormous web of ropes and tackle, extending
the best part of two miles. From the Leatherhead branch this alley was
foreshortened and in part hidden by hill with villas; but from the main line one
had it in profile, a complex tangle of girders and curving bars, very impressive to
the excursionists from Portsmouth and Southampton and the West. Monson had
taken up the work where Maxim had left it, had gone on at first with an utter
contempt for the journalistic wit and ignorance that had irritated and hampered
his predecessor, and had spent (it was said) rather more than half his immense
fortune upon his experiments. The results, to an impatient generation, seemed
inconsiderable. When some five years had passed after the growth of the colossal
iron groves at Worcester Park, and Monson still failed to put in a fluttering
appearance over Trafalgar Square, even the Isle of Wight trippers felt their
liberty to smile. And such intelligent people as did not consider Monson a fool
stricken with the mania for invention, denounced him as being (for no particular
reason) a self-advertising quack.
Yet now and again a morning trainload of season-ticket holders would see a
white monster rush headlong through the airy tracery of guides and bars, and hear
the further stays, nettings and buffers snap, creak, and groan with the impact of
the blow. Then there would be an efflorescence of black-set white-rimmed faces
along the sides of the train, and the morning papers would be neglected for a
vigorous discussion of the possibility of flying (in which nothing new was ever
said by any chance), until the train reached Waterloo, and its cargo of seasonticket holders dispersed themselves over London. Or the fathers and mothers in
some multitudinous train of weary excursionists returning exhausted from a day
of rest by the sea, would find the dark fabric, standing out against the evening
sky, useful in diverting some bilious child from its introspection, and be suddenly
startled by the swift transit of a huge black flapping shape that strained upward
against the guides. It was a great and forcible thing beyond dispute, and excellent
for conversation; yet all the same, it was but flying in leading-strings, and most
of those who witnessed it scarcely counted its flight as flying. More of a
switchback it seemed to the run of the folk.
Monson, I say, did not trouble himself very keenly about the opinions of the
press at first. But possibly he, even had formed but a poor idea of the time it
would take before the tactics of flying were mastered, the swift assured
adjustment of the big soaring shape to every gust and chance movement of the
air; nor had he clearly reckoned the money this prolonged struggle against
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gravitation would cost him. And he was not so pachydermatous as he seemed.
Secretly he had his periodical bundles of cuttings sent him by Romeike, he had
his periodical reminders from his banker; and if he did not mind the initial
ridicule and scepticism, he felt the growing neglect as the months went by and
the money dribbled away. Time was when Monson had sent the enterprising
journalist, keen after readable matter, empty from his gates. But when the
enterprising journalist ceased from troubling, Monson was anything but satisfied
in his heart of hearts. Still day by day the work went on, and the multitudinous
subtle difficulties of steering diminished in number. Day by day, too the money
trickled away, until his balance was no longer a matter of hundreds of thousands,
but of tens. And at last came an anniversary.
Monson, sitting in the little drawing-shed, suddenly noticed the date on
Woodhouse's calendar.
"It was five years ago to-day that we began," he said to Woodhouse suddenly.
"Is it?" said Woodhouse.
"It's the alterations play the devil with us," said Monson, biting a paper-fastener.
The drawings for the new vans to the hinder screw lay on the table before him as
he spoke. He pitched the mutilated brass paper-fastener into the waste-paper
basket and drummed with his fingers. "These alterations! Will the
mathematicians ever be clever enough to save us all this patching and
experimenting? Five years--learning by rule of thumb, when one might think that
it was possible to calculate the whole thing out beforehand. The cost of it! I
might have hired three senior wranglers for life. But they'd only have developed
some beautifully useless theorems in pneumatics. What a time it has been,
Woodhouse!"
"These mouldings will take three weeks," said Woodhouse. "At special prices."
"Three weeks!" said Monson, and sat drumming.
"Three weeks certain," said Woodhouse, an excellent engineer, but no good as a
comforter. He drew the sheets towards him and began shading a bar.
Monson stopped drumming, and began to bite his finger-nails, staring the while
at Woodhouse's head.
"How long have they been calling this Monson's Folly?" he said suddenly.
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"Oh! Year or so," said Woodhouse carelessly, without looking up.
Monson sucked the air in between his teeth, and went to the window. The stout
iron columns carrying the elevated rails upon which the start of the machine was
made rose up close by, and the machine was hidden by the upper edge of the
window. Through the grove of iron pillars, red painted and ornate with rows of
bolts, one had a glimpse of the pretty scenery towards Esher. A train went gliding
noiselessly across the middle distance, its rattle drowned by the hammering of
the workmen overhead. Monson could imagine the grinning faces at the windows
of the carriages. He swore savagely under his breath, and dabbed viciously at a
blowfly that suddenly became noisy on the window-pane.
"What's up?" said Woodhouse, staring in surprise at his employer.
"I'm about sick of this."
Woodhouse scratched his cheek. "Oh!" he said, after an assimilating pause. He
pushed the drawing away from him.
"Here these fools...I'm trying to conquer a new element--trying to do a thing that
will revolutionise life. And instead of taking an intelligent interest, they grin and
make their stupid jokes, and call me and my appliances names."
"Asses!" said Woodhouse, letting his eye fall again on the drawing.
The epithet, curiously enough, made Monson wince. "I'm about sick of it,
Woodhouse, anyhow," he said, after a pause.
Woodhouse shrugged his shoulders.
"There's nothing for it but patience, I suppose," said Monson, sticking his hands
in his pockets. "I've started. I've made my bed, and I've got to lie on it. I can't go
back. I'll see it through, and spend every penny I have and every penny I can
borrow. But I tell you, Woodhouse, I'm infernally sick of it, all the same. If I'd
paid a tenth part of the money towards some political greaser's expenses--I'd have
been a baronet before this."
Monson paused. Woodhouse stared in front of him with a blank expression he
always employed to indicate sympathy, and tapped his pencil-case on the table.
Monson stared at him for a minute.
"Oh, damn!" said Monson suddenly, and abruptly rushed out of the room.
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Woodhouse continued his sympathetic rigour for perhaps half a minute. Then he
sighed and resumed the shading of the drawings. Something had evidently upset
Monson. Nice chap, and generous, but difficult to get on with. It was the way
with every amateur who had anything to do with engineering--wanted everything
finished at once. But Monson had usually the patience of the expert. Odd he was
so irritable. Nice and round that aluminium rod did look now! Woodhouse threw
back his head, and put it, first this side and then that, to appreciate his bit of
shading better.
"Mr. Woodhouse," said Hooper, the foreman of the labourers, putting his head in
at the door.
"Hullo!" said Woodhouse, without turning round.
"Nothing happened, sir?" said Hooper.
"Happened?" said Woodhouse.
"The governor just been up the rails swearing like a tornader."
"Oh!" said Woodhouse.
"It ain't like him, sir."
"No?"
"And I was thinking perhaps--"
"Don't think," said Woodhouse, still admiring the drawings.
Hooper knew Woodhouse, and shut the door suddenly with a vicious slam.
Woodhouse stared stonily before him for some further minutes, and then made an
ineffectual effort to pick his teeth with his pencil. Abruptly he desisted, pitched
that old, tried, and stumpy servitor across the room, got up, stretched himself, and
followed Hooper.
He looked ruffled--it was visible to every workman he met. When a millionaire
who has been spending thousands on experiments that employ quite a little army
of people suddenly indicates that he is sick of the undertaking, there is almost
invariably a certain amount of mental friction in the ranks of the little army he
employs. And even before he indicates his intentions there are speculations and
murmurs, a watching of faces and a study of straws. Hundreds of people knew
before the day was out that Monson was ruffled, Woodhouse ruffled, Hooper
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ruffled. A workman's wife, for instance (whom Monson had never seen), decided
to keep her money in the savings-bank instead of buying a velveteen dress. So
far-reaching are even the casual curses of a millionaire.
Monson found a certain satisfaction in going on the works and behaving
disagreeably to as many people as possible. After a time even that palled upon
him, and he rode off the grounds, to every one's relief there, and through the
lanes south-eastward, to the infinite tribulation of his house steward at Cheam.
And the immediate cause of it all, the little grain of annoyance that had suddenly
precipitated all this discontent with his life-work was--these trivial things that
direct all our great decisions--! Half a dozen ill-considered remarks made by a
pretty girl, prettily dressed, with a beautiful voice and something more than
prettiness in her soft grey eyes. And of these half-dozen remarks, two words
especially--"Monson's Folly." She had felt she was behaving charmingly to
Monson; she reflected the next day how exceptionally effective she had been,
and no one would have been more amazed than she, had she learned the effect
she had left on Monson's mind. I hope, considering everything, that she never
knew.
"How are you getting on with your flying-machine?" she asked. ("I wonder if I
shall ever meet any one with the sense not to ask that," thought Monson.) "It will
be very dangerous at first, will it not?" ("Thinks I'm afraid.") "Jorgon is going to
play presently; have you heard him before?" ("My mania being attended to, we
turn to rational conversation.") Gush about Jorgon; gradual decline of
conversation, ending with--"You must let me know when your flying-machine is
finished, Mr. Monson, and then I will consider the advisability of taking a ticket."
("One would think I was still playing inventions in the nursery.") But the bitterest
thing she said was not meant for Monson's ears. To Phlox, the novelist, she was
always conscientiously brilliant. "I have been talking to Mr. Monson, and he can
think of nothing, positively nothing, but that flying-machine of his. Do you
know, all his workmen call that place of his 'Monson's Folly'? He is quite
impossible. It is really very, very sad. I always regard him myself in the light of
sunken treasure--the Lost Millionaire, you know."
She was pretty and well educated--, indeed, she had written an epigrammatic
novelette; but the bitterness was that she was typical. She summarised what the
world thought of the man who was working sanely, steadily, and surely towards a
more tremendous revolution in the appliances of civilisation, a more far-reaching
alteration in the ways of humanity than has ever been effected since history
began. They did not even take his seriously. In a little while he would be
proverbial. "I must fly now," he said on his way home, smarting with a sense of
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absolute social failure. "I must fly soon. If it doesn't come off soon, by God! I
shall run amuck."
He said that before he had gone through his pass-book and his litter of papers.
Inadequate as the cause seems, it was that girl's voice and the expression of her
eyes that precipitated his discontent. But certainly the discovery that he had no
longer even one hundred thousand pounds' worth of realisable property behind
him was the poison that made the wound deadly.
It was the next day after this that he exploded upon Woodhouse and his
workmen, and thereafter his bearing was consistently grim for three weeks, and
anxiety dwelt in Cheam and Ewell, Maldon, Morden, and Worcester Park, places
that had thriven mightily on his experiments.
Four weeks after that first swearing of his, he stood with Woodhouse by the
reconstructed machine as it lay across the elevated railway, by means of which it
gained its initial impetus. The new propeller glittered a brighter white than the
rest of the machine, and a gilder, obedient to a whim of Monson's was picking
out the aluminium bars with gold. And looking down the long avenue between
the ropes (gilded now with the sunset), one saw red signals, and two miles away
an ant-hill of workmen busy altering the last falls of the run into a rising slope.
"I'll come," said Woodhouse. "I'll come right enough. But I tell you it's infernally
foolhardy. If only you would give another year--"
"I tell you I won't. I tell you the thing works. I've given years enough--"
"It's not that," said Woodhouse. "We're all right with the machine. But it's the
steering--"
"Haven't I been rushing, night and morning, backwards and forwards, through the
squirrel's cage? If the thing steers true here, it will steer true all across England.
It's just funk, I tell you, Woodhouse. We could have gone a year ago. And
besides--"
"Well?" said Woodhouse.
"The money!" snapped Monson over his shoulder.
"Hang it! I never thought of the money," said Woodhouse, and then, speaking
now in a very different tone to that with which he said the words before, he
repeated, "I'll come. Trust me."
274
Monson turned suddenly, and saw all that Woodhouse had not the dexterity to
say, shining on his sunset-lit face. He looked for a moment, then impulsively
extended his hand. "Thanks," he said.
"All right," said Woodhouse, gripping the hand, and with a queer softening of his
features. "Trust me."
Then both men turned to the big apparatus that lay with its flat wings extended
upon the carrier, and stared at it meditatively. Monson, guided perhaps by a
photographic study of flight of birds, and by Lilienthal's methods, had gradually
drifted from Maxim's shapes towards the bird form again. The thing, however,
was driven by a huge screw behind in the place of the tail; and so hovering,
which needs an almost vertical adjustment of a flat tail, was rendered impossible.
The body of the machine was small, almost cylindrical, and pointed. Forward and
aft on the pointed ends were two small petroleum engines for the screw, and the
navigators sat deep in a canoe-like recess, the foremost one steering, and being
protected by a low screen, with two plate-glass windows, from the blinding rush
of air. On either side a monstrous flat framework with a curved front border
could be adjusted so as either to lie horizontally, or to be tilted upward or down.
These wings worked rigidly together, or by releasing a pin, one could be tilted
through a small angle independently of its fellow. The front edge of either wing
could also be shifted back so as to diminish the wing-area about one-sixth. The
machine was not only not designed to hover, but it was also incapable of
fluttering. Monson's idea was to get into the air with the initial rush of the
apparatus, and then to skim, much as a playing-card may be skimmed, keeping
up the rush by means of the screw at the stern. Rooks and gulls fly enormous
distances in that way with scarcely a perceptible movement of the wings. The
bird really drives along on an aerial switchback. It glides slanting downward for a
space, until it has gained considerable momentum, and then altering the
inclination of its wings, glides up again almost to its original altitude. Even a
Londoner who has watched the birds in the aviary in Regent's Park knows that.
But the bird is practising this art from the moment it leaves its nest. It has not
only the perfect apparatus, but the perfect instinct to use it. A man off his feet has
the poorest skill in balancing. Even the simple trick of the bicycle costs him some
hours of labour. The instantaneous adjustments of the wings, the quick response
to a passing breeze, the swift recovery of equilibrium, the giddy, eddying
movements that require such absolute precision--all that he must learn, learn with
infinite labour and infinite danger, if ever he is to conquer flying. The flyingmachine that will start off some fine day, driven by neat "little levers," with a
nice open deck like a liner, and all loaded up with bombshells and guns, is the
easy dreaming of a literary man. In lives and in treasure the cost of the conquest
275
of the empire of air may even exceed all that has been spent in man's great
conquest of the sea. Certainly it will be costlier than the greatest war that has ever
devastated the world.
No one knew these things better than these two practical men. And they knew
they were in the front rank of the coming army. Yet there is hope even in a
forlorn hope. Men are killed outright in the reserves sometimes, while others who
have been left for dead in the thickest corner crawl out and survive.
"If we miss these meadows--" said Woodhouse presently in his slow way.
"My dear chap," said Monson, whose spirits had been rising fitfully during the
last few days, "we mustn't miss these meadows. There's a quarter of a square mile
for us to hit, fences removed, ditches levelled. We shall come down all right--rest
assured. And if we don't--"
"Ah!" said Woodhouse. "If we don't!"
Before the day of the start, the newspaper people got wind of the alterations at
northward end of the framework, and Monson was cheered by a decided change
in the comments Romeike forwarded him. "He will be off some day," said the
papers. "He will be off some day," said the South-Western season-ticket holders
one to another; the seaside excursionists, the Saturday-to-Monday trippers from
Sussex and Hampshire and Dorset and Devon, the eminent literary people from
Haslemere, all remarked eagerly one to another, "He will be off some day," as the
familiar scaffolding came in sight. And actually, one bright morning, in full view
of the ten-past-ten train from Basingstoke, Monson's flying-machine started on
its journey.
They saw the carrier running swiftly along its rail, and the white and gold screw
spinning in the air. They heard the rapid rumble of wheels, and thud as the carrier
reached the buffers at the end of its run. Then a whirr as the Flying-Machine was
shot forward into the networks. All that the majority of them had seen and heard
before. The thing went with a dropping flight through the framework and rose
again, and then every beholder shouted, or screamed, or yelled, or shrieked after
his kind. For instead of the customary concussion and stoppage, the FlyingMachine flew out of its five years' cage like a bolt from a crossbow, and drove
slantingly upward into the air, curved round a little, so as to cross the line, and
soared in the direction of Wimbledon Common.
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It seemed to hang momentarily in the air and grow smaller, then it ducked and
vanished over the clustering blue tree-tops to the east of Coombe Hill, and no one
stopped staring and gasping until long after it had disappeared.
That was what the people in the train from Basingstoke saw. If you had drawn a
line down the middle of that train, from engine to guard's van, you would not
have found a living soul on the opposite side to the flying-machine. It was a mad
rush from window to window as the thing crossed the line. And the engine-driver
and stoker never took their eyes off the low hills about Wimbledon, and never
noticed that they had run clean through Coombe and Malden and Raynes Park,
until with returning animation, they found themselves pelting, at the most
indecent pace, into Wimbledon station.
From the moment when Monson had started the carrier with a "Now!" neither he
nor Woodhouse said a word. Both men sat with clenched teeth. Monson had
crossed the line with a curve that was too sharp, and Woodhouse had opened and
shut his white lips; but neither spoke. Woodhouse simply gripped his seat, and
breathed sharply through his teeth, watching the blue country to the west rushing
past, and down, and away from him. Monson knelt at his post forward, and his
hands trembled on the spoked wheel that moved the wings. He could see nothing
before him but a mass of white clouds in the sky.
The machine went slanting upward, travelling with an enormous speed still, but
losing momentum every moment. The land ran away underneath with
diminishing speed.
"Now!" said Woodhouse at last, and with a violent effort Monson wrenched over
the wheel and altered the angle of the wings. The machine seemed to hang for
half a minute motionless in mid-air, and then he saw the hazy blue house-covered
hills of Kilburn and Hampstead jump up before his eyes and rise steadily, until
the little sunlit dome of the Albert Hall appeared through his windows. For a
moment he scarcely understood the meaning of this upward rush of the horizon,
but as the nearer and nearer houses came into view, he realised what he had done.
He had turned the wings over too far, and they were swooping steeply downward
towards the Thames.
The thought, the question, the realisation were all the business of a second of
time. "Too much!" gasped Woodhouse. Monson brought the wheel halfway back
with a jerk, and forthwith the Kilburn and Hampstead ridge dropped again to the
lower edge of his windows. They had been a thousand feet above Coombe and
Malden station; fifty seconds after they whizzed, at a frightful pace, not eighty
feet above the East Putney station, on the Metropolitan District line, to the
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screaming astonishment of a platformful of people. Monson flung up the vans
against the air, and over Fulham they rushed up their atmospheric switchback
again, steeply--too steeply. The 'buses went floundering across the Fulham Road,
the people yelled.
Then down again, too steeply still, and the distant trees and houses about
Primrose Hill leapt up across Monson's window, and then suddenly he saw
straight before him the greenery of Kensington Gardens and the towers of the
Imperial Institute. They were driving straight down upon South Kensington. The
pinnacles of the Natural History Museum rushed up into view. There came one
fatal second of swift thought, a moment of hesitation. Should he try and clear the
towers, or swerve eastward?
He made a hesitating attempt to release the right wing, left the catch half
released, and gave a frantic clutch at the wheel.
The nose of the machine seemed to leap up before him. The wheel pressed his
hand with irresistible force, and jerked itself out of his control.
Woodhouse, sitting crouched together, gave a hoarse cry, and sprang up towards
Monson. "Too far!" he cried, and then he was clinging to the gunwale for dear
life, and Monson had been jerked clean overhead, and was falling backwards
upon him.
So swiftly had the thing happened that barely a quarter of the people going to and
fro in Hyde Park, and Brompton Road, and the Exhibition Road saw anything of
the aerial catastrophe. A distant winged shape had appeared above the clustering
houses to the south, had fallen and risen, growing larger as it did so; had
swooped swiftly down towards the Imperial Institute, a broad spread of flying
wings, had swept round in a quarter circle, dashed eastward, and then suddenly
sprang vertically into the air. A black object shot out of it, and came spinning
downward. A man! Two men clutching each other! They came whirling down,
separated as they struck the roof of Students' Club, and bounded off into the
green bushes on its southward side.
For perhaps half a minute, the pointed stem of the big machine still pierced
vertically upward, the screw spinning desperately. For one brief instant, that yet
seemed an age to all who watched, it had hung motionless in mid-air. Then a
spout of yellow flame licked up its length from the stern engine, and swift,
swifter, swifter, and flaring like a rocket, it rushed down upon the solid mass of
masonry which was formerly the Royal College of Science. The big screw of
white and gold touched the parapet, and crumpled up like wet linen. Then the
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blazing spindle-shaped body smashed and splintered, smashing and splintering in
its fall, upon the north-westward angle of the building.
But the crash, the flame of blazing paraffin that shot heavenward from the
shattered engines of the machine, the crushed horrors that were found in the
garden beyond the Students' Club, the masses of yellow parapet and red brick
that fell headlong into the roadway, the running to and fro of people like ants in a
broken ant-hill, the galloping of fire-engines, the gathering of crowds--all these
things do not belong to this story, which was written only to tell how the first of
all successful flying-machines was launched and flew. Though he failed, and
failed disastrously, the record of Monson's work remains a sufficient monument-to guide the next of that band of gallant experimentalists who will sooner or later
master this great problem of flying. And between Worcester Park and Malden
there still stands that portentous avenue of iron-work, rusting now, and dangerous
here and there, to witness to the first desperate struggle for man's right of way
through the air.
THE STORY OF THE LATE MR. ELVESHAM
I set this story down, not expecting it will be believed, but if possible, to prepare
a way of escape for the next victim. He perhaps, may profit by my misfortune.
My own case, I know is hopeless, and I am now in some measure prepared to
meet my fate.
My name is Edward George Eden. I was born at Trentham, in Staffordshire, my
father being employed in the gardens there. I lost my mother when I was three
years old, and my father when I was five, my uncle, George Eden, then adopting
me as his own son. He was a single man, self-educated, and well-known in
Birmingham as an enterprising journalist; he educated me generously, fired my
ambition to succeed in the world, and at his death, which happened four years
ago, left me his entire fortune, a matter of about five hundred pounds after all
outgoing charges were paid. I was then eighteen. He advised me in his will to
expend the money in completing my education. I had already chosen the
profession of medicine, and through his posthumous generosity and my good
fortune in a scholarship competition, I became a medical student at University
College, London. At the time of the beginning of my story I lodged at 11A
University Street in a little upper room, very shabbily furnished and draughty,
overlooking the back of Shoolbred's premises. I used this little room both to live
in and sleep in, because I was anxious to eke out my means to the very last
shillingsworth.
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I was taking a pair of shoes to be mended at a shop in the Tottenham Court Road
when I first encountered the little old man with the yellow face, with whom my
life has now become so inextricably entangled. He was standing on the kerb, and
staring at the number on the door in a doubtful way, as I opened it. His eyes--they
were dull grey eyes, and reddish under the rims--fell to my face, and his
countenance immediately assumed an expression of corrugated amiability.
"You come," he said, "apt to the moment. I had forgotten the number of your
house. How do you do, Mr. Eden?"
I was a little astonished at his familiar address, for I had never set eyes on the
man before. I was a little annoyed too, at his catching me with my boots under
my arm. He noticed my lack of cordiality.
"Wonder who the deuce I am, eh? A friend, let me assure you. I have seen you
before, though you haven't seen me. Is there anywhere where I can talk to you?"
I hesitated. The shabbiness of my room upstairs was not a matter for every
stranger. "Perhaps," said I, "we might walk down the street. I'm unfortunately
prevented--" My gesture explained the sentence before I had spoken it.
"The very thing," he said, and faced this way, and then that. "The street? Which
way shall we go?" I slipped my boots down in the passage. "Look here!" he said
abruptly; "this business of mine is a rigmarole. Come and lunch with me, Mr.
Eden. I'm an old man, a very old man, and not good at explanations, and what
with my piping voice and the clatter of the traffic--"
He laid a persuasive skinny hand that trembled a little upon my arm.
I was not so old that an old man might not treat me to a lunch. Yet at the same
time I was not altogether pleased by this abrupt invitation. "I had rather--" I
began. "But I had rather," he said, catching me up, "and a certain civility is surely
due to my grey hairs."
And so I consented, and went with him.
He took me to Blavitiski's; I had to walk slowly to accommodate myself to his
paces; and over such a lunch as I had never tasted before, he fended off my
leading question, and I took a better note of his appearance. His clean-shaven
face was lean and wrinkled, his shrivelled, lips fell over a set of false teeth, and
his white hair was thin and rather long; he seemed small to me--though, indeed,
most people seemed small to me--and his shoulders were rounded and bent. And
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watching him, I could not help but observe that he too was taking note of me,
running his eyes, with a curious touch of greed in them, over me, from my broad
shoulders to my sun-tanned hands, and up to my freckled face again. "And now,"
said he, as we lit our cigarettes, "I must tell you of the business in hand.
"I must tell you then, that I am an old man, a very old man." He paused
momentarily. "And it happens that I have money that I must presently be leaving,
and never a child have I to leave it to." I thought of the confidence trick, and
resolved I would be on the alert for the vestiges of my five hundred pounds. He
proceeded to enlarge on his loneliness, and the trouble he had to find a proper
disposition of his money. "I have weighed this plan and that plan, charities,
institutions, and scholarships, and libraries, and I have come to this conclusion at
last--," he fixed his eyes on my face--, "that I will find some young fellow,
ambitious, pure-minded, and poor, healthy in body and healthy in mind, and in
short, make him my heir, give him all that I have." He repeated, "Give him all
that I have. So that he will suddenly be lifted out of all the trouble and struggle in
which his sympathies have been educated, to freedom and influence."
I tried to seem disinterested. With a transparent hypocrisy I said, "And you want
my help, my professional services maybe, to find that person."
He smiled, and looked at me over his cigarette, and I laughed at his quiet
exposure of my modest pretence.
"What a career such a man might have!" he said. "It fills me with envy to think
how I have accumulated that another man may spend-"But there are conditions, of course, burdens to be imposed. He must, for
instance, take my name. You cannot expect everything without some return. And
I must go into all the circumstances of his life before I can accept him. He must
be sound. I must know his heredity, how his parents and grandparents died, have
the strictest inquiries made into his private morals--"
This modified my secret congratulations a little.
"And do I understand," said I, "that I--?"
"Yes," he said, almost fiercely. "You. You."
I answered never a word. My imagination was dancing wildly, my innate
scepticism was useless to modify its transports. There was not a particle of
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gratitude in my mind--I did not know what to say nor how to say it. "But why me
in particular?" I said at last.
He had chanced to hear of me from Professor Haslar, he said, as a typically
sound and sane young man, and he wished, as far as possible, to leave his money
where health and integrity were assured.
That was my first meeting with the little old man. He was mysterious about
himself; he would not give his name yet, he said, and after I had answered some
questions of his, he left me at the Blavitski portal. I noticed that he drew a
handful of gold coins from his pocket when it came to paying for the lunch. His
insistence upon bodily health was curious. In accordance with an arrangement we
had made I applied that day for a life policy in the Loyal Insurance Company for
a large sum, and I was exhaustively overhauled by the medical advisers of that
company in the subsequent week. Even that did not satisfy him, and he insisted I
must be re-examined by the great Doctor Henderson. It was Friday in Whitsun
week before he came to a decision. He called me down, quite late in the evening-, nearly nine it was--, from cramming chemical equations for my Preliminary
Scientific examination. He was standing in the passage under the feeble gaslamp, and his face was a grotesque interplay of shadows. He seemed more bowed
than when I had first seen him, and his cheeks had sunk in a little.
His voice shook with emotion. "Everything is satisfactory, Mr. Eden," he said.
"Everything is quite, quite satisfactory. And this night of all nights, you must
dine with me and celebrate your--accession." He was interrupted by a cough.
"You won't have long to wait, either," he said, wiping his handkerchief across his
lips, and gripping my hand with his long bony claw that was disengaged.
"Certainly not very long to wait."
We went into the street and called a cab. I remember every incident of that drive
vividly, the swift, easy motion, the vivid contrast of gas and oil and electric light,
the crowds of people in the streets, the place in Regent Street to which we went,
and the sumptuous dinner we were served with there. I was disconcerted at first
by the well-dressed waiter's glances at my rough clothes, bothered by the stones
of the olives, but as the champagne warmed my blood, my confidence revived.
At first the old man talked of himself. He had already told me his name in the
cab; he was Egbert Elvesham, the great philosopher, whose name I had known
since I was a lad at school. It seemed incredible to me that this man, whose
intelligence had so early dominated mine, this great abstraction, should suddenly
realise itself as this decrepit, familiar figure. I dare say every young fellow who
has suddenly fallen among celebrities has felt something of my disappointment.
He told me now of the future that the feeble streams of his life would presently
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leave dry for me, houses, copyrights, investments; I had never suspected that
philosophers were so rich. He watched me drink and eat with a touch of envy.
"What a capacity for living you have!" he said; and then with a sigh, a sigh of
relief I could have thought it, "It will not be long."
"Ay," said I, my head swimming now with champagne; "I have a future perhaps-of a fairly agreeable sort, thanks to you. I shall now have the honour of your
name. But you have a past. Such a past as is worth all my future."
He shook his head and smiled, as I thought, with half-sad appreciation of my
flattering admiration. "That future," he said, "would you in truth change it?" The
waiter came with liqueurs. "You will not perhaps mind taking my name, taking
my position, but would you indeed--willingly--take my years?"
"With your achievements," said I gallantly.
He smiled again. "Kummel--both," he said to the waiter, and turned his attention
to a little paper packet he had taken from his pocket. "This hour," said he, "this
after-dinner hour is the hour of small things. Here is a scrap of my unpublished
wisdom." He opened the packet with his shaking yellow fingers, and showed a
little pinkish powder on the paper. "This," said he--"well, you must guess what it
is. But Kummel--put but a dash of this powder in it--is Himmel." His large
greyish eyes watched mine with an inscrutable expression.
It was a bit of a shock to me to find this great teacher gave his mind to the
flavour of liqueurs. However, I feigned an interest in his weakness, for I was
drunk enough for such small sycophancy.
He parted the powder between the little glasses, and rising suddenly, with a
strange unexpected dignity, held out his hand towards me. I imitated his action,
and the glasses rang. "To a quick succession," said he, and raised his glass
towards his lips.
"Not that," I said hastily. "Not that."
He paused with the liqueur at the level of his chin, and his eyes blazing into
mine.
"To a long life," said I.
He hesitated. "To a long life," said he, with a sudden bark of laughter, and with
eyes fixed on one another we tilted the little glasses. His eyes looked straight into
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mine, and as I drained the stuff off, I felt a curiously intense sensation. The first
touch of it set my brain in a furious tumult; I seemed to feel an actual physical
stirring in my skull, and a seething humming filled my ears. I did not notice the
flavour in my mouth, the aroma that filled my throat; I saw only the grey
intensity of his gaze that burnt into mine. The draught, the mental confusion, the
noise and stirring in my head, seemed to last an interminable time. Curious vague
impressions of half-forgotten things danced and vanished on the edge of my
consciousness. At last he broke the spell. With a sudden explosive sigh he put
down his glass.
"Well?" he said.
"It's glorious," said I, though I had not tasted the stuff.
My head was spinning. I sat down. My brain was chaos. Then my perception
grew clear and minute as though I saw things in a concave mirror. His manner
seemed to have changed into something nervous and hasty. He pulled out his
watch and grimaced at it. "Eleven-seven! And to-night I must--Seven-twentyfive. Waterloo! I must go at once." He called for the bill, and struggled with his
coat. Officious waiters came to our assistance. In another moment I was wishing
him good-bye, over the apron of a cab, and still with an absurd feeling of minute
distinctness, as though--how can I express it--? I not only saw but felt through an
inverted opera-glass.
"That stuff," he said. He put his hand to his forehead. "I ought not to have given
it to you. It will make your head split to-morrow. Wait a minute. Here." He
handed me out a little flat thing like a seidlitz-powder. "Take that in water as you
are going to bed. The other thing was a drug. Not till you're ready to go to bed,
mind. It will clear your head. That's all. One more shake--Futurus!"
I gripped his shrivelled claw. "Good-bye," he said, and by the droop of his
eyelids I judged he too was a little under the influence of that brain-twisting
cordial.
He recollected something else with a start, felt in his breast-pocket, and produced
another packet, this time a cylinder the size and shape of a shaving-stick. "Here,"
said he. "I'd almost forgotten. Don't open this until I come to-morrow--but take it
now."
It was so heavy that I well-nigh dropped it. "All ri'!" said I, and he grinned at me
through the cab window as the cabman flicked his horse into wakefulness. It was
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a white packet he had given me, with red seals at either end and along its edge.
"If this isn't money," said I, "it's platinum or lead."
I stuck it with elaborate care into my pocket, and with a whirling brain walked
home through the Regent Street loiterers and the dark back streets beyond
Portland Road. I remember the sensations of that walk very vividly, strange as
they were. I was still so far myself that I could notice my strange mental state,
and wonder whether this stuff I had, had was opium--a drug beyond my
experience. It is hard now to describe the peculiarity of my mental strangeness-mental doubling vaguely expresses it. As I was walking up Regent Street I found
in my mind a queer persuasion that it was Waterloo Station, and had an odd
impulse to get into the Polytechnic as a man might get into a train. I put a
knuckle in my eye, and it was Regent Street. How can I express it? You see a
skilful actor looking quietly at you, he pulls a grimace, and lo--! Another person.
Is it too extravagant if I tell you that it seemed to me as if Regent Street had, for
the moment, done that? Then, being persuaded it was Regent Street again, I was
oddly muddled about some fantastic reminiscences that cropped up. "Thirty years
ago," thought I, "it was here that I quarrelled with my brother." Then I burst out
laughing, to the astonishment and encouragement of a group of night prowlers.
Thirty years ago I did not exist, and never in my life had I boasted a brother. The
stuff was surely liquid folly, for the poignant regret for that lost brother still
clung to me. Along Portland Road the madness took another turn. I began to
recall vanished shops, and to compare the street with what it used to be.
Confused, troubled thinking is comprehensible enough after the drink I had
taken, but what puzzled me were these curiously vivid phantasm memories that
had crept into my mind, and not only the memories that had crept in, but also the
memories that had slipped out. I stopped opposite Stevens', the natural history
dealer's, and cudgelled my brains to think what he had to do with me. A 'bus
went by, and sounded exactly like the rumbling of a train. I seemed to be dipping
into some dark, remote pit for the recollection. "Of course," said I, at last, "he has
promised me three frogs to-morrow. Odd I should have forgotten."
Do they still show children dissolving views? In those I remember one view
would begin like a faint ghost, and grow and oust another. In just that way it
seemed to me that a ghostly set of new sensations was struggling with those of
my ordinary self.
I went on through Euston Road to Tottenham Court Road, puzzled, and a little
frightened, and scarcely noticed the unusual way I was taking, for commonly I
used to cut through the intervening network of back streets. I turned into
University Street, to discover that I had forgotten my number. Only by a strong
effort did I recall 11A, and even then it seemed to me that it was a thing some
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forgotten person had told me. I tried to steady my mind by recalling the incidents
of the dinner, and for the life of me I could conjure up no picture of my host's
face; I saw him only as a shadowy outline, as one might see oneself reflected in a
window through which one was looking. In his place however, I had a curious
exterior vision of myself, sitting at a table, flushed, bright-eyed, and talkative.
"I must take this other powder," said I. "This is getting impossible."
I tried the wrong side of the hall for my candle and the matches, and had a doubt
of which landing my room might be on. "I'm drunk," I said, "that's certain," and
blundered needlessly on the staircase to sustain the proposition.
At the first glance my room seemed unfamiliar. "What rot!" I said, and stared
about me. I seemed to bring myself back by the effort, and the odd phantasmal
quality passed into the concrete familiar. There was the old looking-glass, with
my notes on the albumens stuck in the corner of the frame, my old everyday suit
of clothes pitched about the floor. And yet it was not so real after all. I felt an
idiotic persuasion trying to creep into my mind, as it were, that I was in a railway
carriage in a train just stopping, that I was peering out of the window at some
unknown station. I gripped the bed-rail firmly to reassure myself. "It's
clairvoyance, perhaps," I said. "I must write to the Psychical Research Society."
I put the rouleau on my dressing-table, sat on my bed, and began to take off my
boots. It was as if the picture of my present sensations was painted over some
other picture that was trying to show through. "Curse it!" Said I; "My wits are
going, or am I in two places at once?" Half-undressed, I tossed the powder into a
glass and drank it off. It effervesced, and became a fluorescent amber colour.
Before I was in bed my mind was already tranquillised. I felt the pillow at my
cheek, and thereupon I must have fallen asleep.
I awoke abruptly out of a dream of strange beasts, and found myself lying on my
back. Probably every one knows that dismal, emotional dream from which one
escapes, awake indeed, but strangely cowed. There was a curious taste in my
mouth, a tired feeling in my limbs, a sense of cutaneous discomfort. I lay with
my head motionless on my pillow, expecting that my feeling of strangeness and
terror would pass away, and that I should then doze off again to sleep. But
instead of that, my uncanny sensations increased. At first I could perceive
nothing wrong about me. There was a faint light in the room, so faint that it was
the very next thing to darkness, and the furniture stood out in it as vague blots of
absolute darkness. I stared with my eyes just over the bedclothes.
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It came into my mind that some one had entered the room to rob me of my
rouleau of money, but after lying for some moments, breathing regularly to
simulate sleep, I realised this was mere fancy. Nevertheless, the uneasy assurance
of something wrong kept fast hold of me. With an effort I raised my head from
the pillow, and peered about me at the dark. What it was I could not conceive. I
looked at the dim shapes around me, the greater and lesser darknesses that
indicated curtains, table, fireplace, bookshelves, and so forth. Then I began to
perceive something unfamiliar in the forms of the darkness. Had the bed turned
round? Yonder should be the bookshelves, and something shrouded and pallid
rose there, something that would not answer to the bookshelves, however I
looked at it. It was far too big to be my shirt thrown on a chair.
Overcoming a childish terror, I threw back the bedclothes and thrust my leg out
of bed. Instead of coming out of my truckle-bed upon the floor, I found my foot
scarcely reached the edge of the mattress. I made another step, as it were, and sat
up on the edge of the bed. By the side of my bed should be the candle, and the
matches upon the broken chair. I put out my hand and touched--nothing. I waved
my hand in the darkness, and it came against some heavy hanging, soft and thick
in texture, which gave a rustling noise at my touch. I grasped this and pulled it; it
appeared to be a curtain suspended over the head of my bed.
I was now thoroughly awake, and beginning to realise that I was in a strange
room. I was puzzled. I tried to recall the overnight circumstances, and I found
them now, curiously enough, vivid in my memory: the supper, my reception of
the little packages, my wonder whether I was intoxicated, my slow undressing,
the coolness to my flushed face of my pillow. I felt a sudden distrust. Was that
last night, or the night before? At any rate, this room was strange to me, and I
could not imagine how I had got into it. The dim, pallid outline was growing
paler, and I perceived it was a window, with the dark shape of an oval toilet-glass
against the weak intimation of the dawn that filtered through the blind. I stood
up, and was surprised by a curious feeling of weakness and unsteadiness. With
trembling hands outstretched, I walked slowly towards the window, getting,
nevertheless, a bruise on the knee from a chair by the way. I fumbled round the
glass, which was large, with handsome brass sconces, to find the blind-cord. I
could not find any. By chance I took hold of the tassel, and with the click of a
spring the blind ran up.
I found myself looking out upon a scene that was altogether strange to me. The
night was overcast, and through the flocculent grey of the heaped clouds there
filtered a faint half-light of dawn. Just at the edge of the sky the cloud-canopy
had a blood-red rim. Below everything was dark and indistinct, dim hills in the
distance, a vague mass of buildings running up into pinnacles, trees like spilt ink,
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and below the window a tracery of black bushes and pale grey paths. It was so
unfamiliar that for the moment I thought myself still dreaming. I felt the toilettable; it appeared to be made of some polished wood, and was rather elaborately
furnished--there were little cut-glass bottles and a brush upon it. There was also a
queer little object, horse-shoe-shaped it felt, with smooth, hard projections, lying
in a saucer. I could find no matches nor candlestick.
I turned my eyes to the room again. Now the blind was up, faint spectres of its
furnishing came out of the darkness. There was a huge curtained bed, and the
fireplace at its foot had a large white mantel with something of the shimmer of
marble.
I leant against the toilet-table, shut my eyes and opened them again, and tried to
think. The whole thing was far too real for dreaming. I was inclined to imagine
there was still some hiatus in my memory, as a consequence of my draught of
that strange liqueur; that I had come into my inheritance perhaps, and suddenly
lost my recollection of everything since my good fortune had been announced.
Perhaps if I waited a little, things would be clearer to me again. Yet my dinner
with old Elvesham was now singularly vivid and recent. The champagne, the
observant waiters, the powder, and the liqueurs--I could have staked my soul it
all happened a few hours ago.
And then occurred a thing so trivial and yet so terrible to me that I shiver now to
think of that moment. I spoke aloud. I said, "How the devil did I get here...?" And
the voice was not my own.
It was not my own, it was thin, the articulation was slurred, the resonance of my
facial bones was different. Then to reassure myself, I ran one hand over the other,
and felt loose folds of skin, the bony laxity of age. "Surely," I said, in that
horrible voice that had somehow established itself in my throat, "surely this thing
is a dream!" Almost as quickly as if I did it involuntarily, I thrust my fingers into
my mouth. My teeth had gone. My finger-tips ran on the flaccid surface of an
even row of shrivelled gums. I was sick with dismay and disgust.
I felt then a passionate desire to see myself, to realise at once in its full horror the
ghastly change that had come upon me. I tottered to the mantel, and felt along it
for matches. As I did so, a barking cough sprang up in my throat, and I clutched
the thick flannel nightdress I found about me. There were no matches there, and I
suddenly realised that my extremities were cold. Sniffing and coughing,
whimpering a little, perhaps, I fumbled back to bed. "It is surely a dream," I
whispered to myself as I clambered back, "surely a dream." It was a senile
repetition. I pulled the bedclothes over my shoulders, over my ears, I thrust my
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withered hand under the pillow, and determined to compose myself to sleep. Of
course it was a dream. In the morning the dream would be over, and I should
wake up strong and vigorous again to my youth and studies. I shut my eyes,
breathed regularly, and finding myself wakeful, began to count slowly through
the powers of three.
But the thing I desired would not come. I could not get to sleep. And the
persuasion of the inexorable reality of the change that had happened to me grew
steadily. Presently I found myself with my eyes wide open, the powers of three
forgotten, and my skinny fingers upon my shrivelled gums, I was indeed,
suddenly and abruptly, an old man. I had in some unaccountable manner fallen
through my life and come to old age, in some way I had been cheated of all the
best of my life, of love, of struggle, of strength, and hope. I grovelled into the
pillow and tried to persuade myself that such hallucination was possible.
Imperceptibly, steadily, the dawn grew clearer.
At last, despairing of further sleep, I sat up in bed and looked about me. A chill
twilight rendered the whole chamber visible. It was spacious and well-furnished,
better furnished than any room I had ever slept in before. A candle and matches
became dimly visible upon a little pedestal in a recess. I threw back the
bedclothes, and shivering with the rawness of the early morning, albeit it was
summer-time, I got out and lit the candle. Then trembling horribly, so that the
extinguisher rattled on its spike, I tottered to the glass and saw--Elvesham's face!
It was none the less horrible because I had already dimly feared as much. He had
already seemed physically weak and pitiful to me, but seen now, dressed only in
a coarse flannel nightdress, that fell apart and showed the stringy neck, seen now
as my own body, I cannot describe its desolate decrepitude. The hollow cheeks,
the straggling tail of dirty grey hair, the rheumy bleared eyes, the quivering,
shrivelled lips, the lower displaying a gleam of the pink interior lining, and those
horrible dark gums showing. You who are mind and body together, at your
natural years, cannot imagine what this fiendish imprisonment meant to me. To
be young and full of the desire and energy of youth, and to be caught, and
presently to be crushed in this tottering ruin of a body...
But I wander from the course of my story. For some time I must have been
stunned at this change that had come upon me. It was daylight when I did so far
gather myself together as to think. In some inexplicable way I had been changed,
though how short of magic, the thing had been done, I could not say. And as I
thought, the diabolical ingenuity of Elvesham came home to me. It seemed plain
to me that as I found myself in his, so he must be in possession of my body, of
my strength, that is, and my future. But how to prove it? Then, as I thought, the
thing became so incredible, even to me, that my mind reeled, and I had to pinch
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myself, to feel my toothless gums, to see myself in the glass, and touch the things
about me, before I could steady myself to face the facts again. Was all life
hallucination? Was I indeed Elvesham, and he me? Had I been dreaming of Eden
overnight? Was there any Eden? But if I was Elvesham, I should remember
where I was on the previous morning, the name of the town in which I lived,
what happened before the dream began. I struggled with my thoughts. I recalled
the queer doubleness of my memories overnight. But now my mind was clear.
Not the ghost of any memories but those proper to Eden could I raise.
"This way lies insanity!" I cried in my piping voice. I staggered to my feet,
dragged my feeble, heavy limbs to the washhand-stand, and plunged my grey
head into a basin of cold water. Then, towelling myself, I tried again. It was no
good. I felt beyond all question that I was indeed Eden, not Elvesham. But Eden
in Elvesham's body!
Had I been a man of any other age, I might have given myself up to my fate as
one enchanted. But in these sceptical days miracles do not pass current. Here was
some trick of psychology. What a drug and a steady stare could do, a drug and a
steady stare, or some similar treatment, could surely undo. Men have lost their
memories before. But to exchange memories as one does umbrellas! I laughed.
Alas! Not a healthy laugh, but a wheezing, senile titter. I could have fancied old
Elvesham laughing at my plight, and a gust of petulant anger, unusual to me,
swept across my feelings. I began dressing eagerly in the clothes I found lying
about on the floor, and only realised when I was dressed that it was an evening
suit I had assumed. I opened the wardrobe and found some more ordinary
clothes, a pair of plaid trousers, and an old-fashioned dressing-gown. I put a
venerable smoking-cap on my venerable head, and coughing a little from my
exertions, tottered out upon the landing.
It was then, perhaps a quarter to six, and the blinds were closely drawn and the
house quite silent. The landing was a spacious one, a broad, richly-carpeted
staircase went down into the darkness of the hall below, and before me a door
ajar showed me a writing-desk, a revolving bookcase, the back of a study chair,
and a fine array of bound books, shelf upon shelf.
"My study," I mumbled, and walked across the landing. Then at the sound of my
voice a thought struck me, and I went back to the bedroom and put in the set of
false teeth. They slipped in with the ease of old, habit. "That's better," said I,
gnashing them, and so returned to the study.
The drawers of the writing-desk were locked. Its revolving top was also locked. I
could see no indications of the keys, and there were none in the pockets of my
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trousers. I shuffled back at once to the bedroom, and went through the dress suit,
and afterwards the pockets of all the garments I could find. I was very eager, and
one might have imagined that burglars had been at work, to see my room when I
had done. Not only were there no keys to be found, but not a coin, nor a scrap of
paper--save only the receipted bill of the overnight dinner.
A curious weariness asserted itself. I sat down and stared at the garments flung
here and there, their pockets turned inside out. My first frenzy had already
flickered out. Every moment I was beginning to realise the immense intelligence
of the plans of my enemy, to see more and more clearly the hopelessness of my
position. With an effort I rose and hurried hobbling into the study again. On the
staircase was a housemaid pulling up the blinds. She stared, I think, at the
expression of my face. I shut the door of the study behind me, and seizing a
poker, began an attack upon the desk. That is how they found me. The cover of
the desk was split, the lock smashed, the letters torn out of the pigeon-holes, and
tossed about the room. In my senile rage I had flung about the pens and other
such light stationery, and overturned the ink. Moreover, a large vase upon the
mantel had got broken--I do not know how. I could find no cheque-book, no
money, no indications of the slightest use for the recovery of my body. I was
battering madly at the drawers, when the butler, backed by two women-servants,
intruded upon me.
That simply is the story of my change. No one will believe my frantic assertions.
I am treated as one demented, and even at this moment I am under restraint. But I
am sane, absolutely sane, and to prove it I have sat down to write this story
minutely as the things happened to me. I appeal to the reader, whether there is
any trace of insanity in the style or method, of the story he has been reading. I am
a young man locked away in an old man's body. But the clear fact is incredible to
everyone. Naturally I appear demented to those who will not believe this,
naturally I do not know the names of my secretaries, of the doctors who come to
see me, of my servants and neighbours, of this town (wherever it is) where I find
myself. Naturally I lose myself in my own house, and suffer inconveniences of
every sort. Naturally I ask the oddest questions. Naturally I weep and cry out, and
have paroxysms of despair. I have no money and no cheque-book. The bank will
not recognise my signature, for I suppose that, allowing for the feeble muscles I
now have, my handwriting is still Eden's. These people about me will not let me
go to the bank personally. It seems, indeed, that there is no bank in this town, and
that I have an account in some part of London. It seems that Elvesham kept the
name of his solicitor secret from all his household--I can ascertain nothing.
Elvesham was, of course, a profound student of mental science, and all my
declarations of the facts of the case merely confirm the theory that my insanity is
the outcome of overmuch brooding upon psychology. Dreams of the personal
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identity indeed! Two days ago I was a healthy youngster, with all life before me;
now I am a furious old man, unkempt, and desperate, and miserable, prowling
about a great, luxurious, strange house, watched, feared, and avoided as a lunatic
by everyone about me. And in London, there is Elvesham beginning life again in
a vigorous body, and with all the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of
threescore and ten. He has stolen my life.
What has happened I do not clearly know. In the study are volumes of
manuscript notes referring chiefly to the psychology of memory, and parts of
what may be either calculations or ciphers in symbols absolutely strange to me.
In some passages there are indications that he was also occupied with the
philosophy of mathematics. I take it he has transferred the whole of his
memories, the accumulation that makes up his personality, from this old withered
brain of his to mine, and similarly, that he has transferred mine to his discarded
tenement. Practically, that is, he has changed bodies. But how such a change may
be possible is without the range of my philosophy. I have been a materialist for
all my thinking life, but here suddenly, is a clear case of man's detachability from
matter.
One desperate experiment I am about to try. I sit writing here before putting the
matter to issue. This morning, with the help of a table-knife that I had secreted at
breakfast, I succeeded in breaking open a fairly obvious secret drawer in this
wrecked writing-desk. I discovered nothing save a little green glass phial
containing a white powder. Round the neck of the phial was a label, and thereon
was written this one word, "Release." This may be--is most probably, poison. I
can understand Elvesham placing poison in my way, and I should be sure that it
was his intention so to get rid of the only living witness against him, were it not
for this careful concealment. The man has practically solved the problem of
immortality. Save for the spite of chance, he will live in my body until it has
aged, and then, again throwing that aside, he will assume some other victim's
youth and strength. When one remembers his heartlessness, it is terrible to think
of the ever-growing experience that...How long has he been leaping from body to
body...? But I tire of writing. The powder appears to be soluble in water. The
taste is not unpleasant.
There the narrative found upon Mr. Elvesham's desk ends. His dead body lay
between the desk and the chair. The latter had been pushed back, probably by his
last convulsions. The story was written in pencil and in a crazy hand, quite unlike
his usual minute characters. There remain only two curious facts to record.
Indisputably there was some connection between Eden and Elvesham, since the
whole of Elvesham's property was bequeathed to the young man. But he never
inherited. When Elvesham committed suicide, Eden was, strangely enough,
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already dead. Twenty-four hours before, he had been knocked down by a cab and
killed instantly, at the crowded crossing at the intersection of Gower Street and
Euston Road. So that the only human being who could have thrown light upon
this fantastic narrative is beyond the reach of questions.
IN THE ABYSS
The lieutenant stood in front of the steel sphere and gnawed a piece of pine
splinter. "What do you think of it, Steevens?" he said.
"It's an idea," said Steevens, in the tone of one who keeps an open mind.
"I believe it will smash--flat," said the lieutenant.
"He seems to have calculated it all out pretty well," said Steevens, still impartial.
"But think of the pressure," said the lieutenant. "At the surface of the water it's
fourteen pounds to the inch, thirty feet down it's double that; sixty, treble; ninety,
four times; nine hundred, forty times; five thousand, three hundred--that's a mile-it's two hundred and forty times fourteen pounds; that's--let's see--thirty
hundredweight--a ton and a half, Steevens; a ton and a half to the square inch.
And the ocean where he's going is five miles deep. That's seven and a half--"
"Sounds a lot," said Steevens, "but it's jolly thick steel."
The lieutenant made no answer, but resumed his pine splinter. The object of their
conversation was a huge ball of steel, having an exterior diameter of perhaps nine
feet. It looked like the shot for some Titanic piece of artillery. It was elaborately
nested in a monstrous scaffolding built into the framework of the vessel, and the
gigantic spars that were presently to sling it overboard gave the stern of the ship
an appearance that had raised the curiosity of every decent sailor who had sighted
it, from the Pool of London to the Tropic of Capricorn. In two places, one above
the other, the steel gave place to a couple of circular windows of enormously
thick glass, and one of these, set in steel frame of great solidity, was now
partially unscrewed. Both the men had seen the interior of this globe for the first
time that morning. It was elaborately padded with air cushions, with little studs
sunk between bulging pillows to work the simple mechanism of the affair.
Everything was elaborately padded, even the Myers apparatus which was to
absorb carbonic acid and replace the oxygen inspired by its tenant, when he had
crept in by the glass manhole, and had been screwed in. It was so elaborately
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padded that a man might have been fired from a gun in it with perfect safety. And
it had need to be, for presently a man was to crawl in through that glass manhole,
to be screwed up tightly, and to be flung overboard, and to sink down--down-down, for five miles, even as the lieutenant said. It had taken the strongest hold
of his imagination; it made him a bore at mess; and he found Steevens the new
arrival aboard, a godsend to talk to about it, over and over again.
"It's my opinion," said the lieutenant, "that, that glass will simply bend in and
bulge and smash, under a pressure of that sort. Daubree has made rocks run like
water under big pressures--and you mark my words--"
"If the glass did break in," said Steevens, "what then?"
"The water would shoot in like a jet of iron. Have you ever felt a straight jet of
high pressure water? It would hit as hard as a bullet. It would simply smash him
and flatten him. It would tear down his throat, and into his lungs; it would blow
in his ears--"
"What a detailed imagination you have!" protested Steevens, who saw things
vividly.
"It's a simple statement of the inevitable," said the lieutenant.
"And the globe?"
"Would just give out a few little bubbles, and it would settle down comfortably
against the Day of Judgment, among the oozes and the bottom clay--with poor
Elstead spread over his own smashed cushions like butter over bread."
He repeated this sentence as though he liked it very much. "Like butter over
bread," he said.
"Having a look at the jigger?" said a voice, and Elstead stood behind them, spick
and span in white, with a cigarette between his teeth, and his eyes smiling out of
the shadow of his ample hat-brim. "What's that about bread and butter,
Weybridge? Grumbling as usual about the insufficient pay of naval officers? It
won't be more than a day now before I start. We are to get the slings ready today. This clean sky and gentle swell is just the kind of thing for swinging off a
dozen tons of lead and iron, isn't it?"
"It won't affect you much," said Weybridge.
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"No. Seventy or eighty feet down, and I shall be there in a dozen seconds, there's
not a particle moving, though the wind shriek itself hoarse up above, and the
water lifts halfway to the clouds. No. Down there--" He moved to the side of the
ship and the other two followed him. All three leant forward on their elbows and
stared down into the yellow-green water.
"Peace," said Elstead, finishing his thought aloud.
"Are you dead certain that clockwork will act?" asked Weybridge presently.
"It has worked thirty-five times," said Elstead. "It's bound to work."
"But if it doesn't?"
"Why shouldn't it?"
"I wouldn't go down in that confounded thing," said Weybridge, "for twenty
thousand pounds."
"Cheerful chap you are," said Elstead, and spat sociably at a bubble below.
"I don't understand yet how you mean to work the thing," said Steevens.
"In the first place, I'm screwed into the sphere," said Elstead, "and when I've
turned the electric light off on three times to show I'm cheerful, I'm swung out
over the stern by that crane, with all those big lead sinkers slung below me. The
top lead weight has a roller carrying a hundred fathoms of strong cord rolled up,
and that's all that joins the sinkers to the sphere, except the slings that will be cut
when the affair is dropped. We use cord rather than wire rope because it's easier
to cut and more buoyant--necessary points, as you will see.
"Through each of these lead weights you notice there is a hole, and an iron rod
will be run through that and will project six feet on the lower side. If that rod is
rammed up from below, it knocks up a lever and sets the clockwork in motion at
the side of the cylinder on which the cord winds.
"Very well. The whole affair is lowered gently into the water, and the slings are
cut. The sphere floats--, with the air in it, it's lighter than water--, but the lead
weights go down straight and the cord runs out. When the cord is all paid out, the
sphere will go down too, pulled down by the cord."
"But why the cord?" asked Steevens. "Why not fasten the weights directly to the
sphere?"
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"Because of the smash down below. The whole affair will go rushing down, mile
after mile, at a headlong pace at last. It would be knocked to pieces on the bottom
if it wasn't for that cord. But the weights will hit the bottom, and directly they do,
the buoyancy of the sphere will come into play. It will go on sinking slower and
slower; come to stop at last, and then begin to float upward again.
"That's where the clockwork comes in. Directly the weights smash against the sea
bottom, the rod will be knocked through and will kick up the clockwork, and the
cord will be rewound on the reel. I shall be lugged down to the sea bottom. There
I shall stay for half an hour, with the electric light on, looking about me. Then the
clockwork will release a spring knife, the cord will be cut, and up I shall rush
again, like a soda-water bubble. The cord itself will help the flotation."
"And if you should chance to hit a ship?" said Weybridge.
"I should come up at such a pace, I should go clean through it," said Elstead,
"like a cannon ball. You needn't worry about that."
"And suppose some nimble crustacean should wriggle into your clockwork--"
"It would be a pressing sort of invitation for me to stop," said Elstead, turning his
back on the water and staring at the sphere.
They had swung Elstead overboard by eleven o'clock. The day was serenely
bright and calm, with the horizon lost in haze. The electric glare in the little
upper compartment beamed cheerfully three times. Then they let him down
slowly to the surface of the water, and a sailor in the stern chains hung ready to
cut the tackle that held the lead weights and the sphere together. The globe,
which had looked so large on deck, looked the smallest thing conceivable under
the stern of the ship. It rolled a little, and its two dark windows, which floated
uppermost, seemed like eyes turned up in round wonderment at the people who
crowded the rail. A voice wondered how Elstead liked the rolling. "Are you
ready?" sang out the commander. "Ay, ay, sir!" "Then let her go!"
The rope of the tackle tightened against the blade and was cut, and an eddy rolled
over the globe in a grotesquely helpless fashion. Someone waved a handkerchief,
someone else tried an ineffectual cheer, a middy was counting slowly, "Eight,
nine, ten!" Another roll, then a jerk and a splash the thing righted itself.
It seemed to be stationary for a moment, to grow rapidly smaller, and then the
water closed over it, and it became visible, enlarged by refraction and dimmer,
below the surface. Before one could count three it had disappeared. There was a
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flicker of white light far down in the water, that diminished to a speck and
vanished. Then there was nothing but a depth of water going down into
blackness, through which a shark was swimming.
Then suddenly the screw of the cruiser began to rotate, the water was crickled,
the shark disappeared in a wrinkled confusion, and a torrent of foam rushed
across the crystalline clearness that had swallowed up Elstead. "What's the idea?"
said one A.B. to another.
"We're going to lay off about a couple of miles, 'fear he should hit us when he
comes up," said his mate.
The ship steamed slowly to her new position. Aboard her almost everyone who
was unoccupied remained watching the breathing swell into which the sphere had
sunk. For the next half-hour it is doubtful if a word was spoken that did not bear
directly or indirectly on Elstead. The December sun was now high in the sky, and
the heat very considerable.
"He'll be cold enough down there," said Weybridge. "They say that below a
certain depth sea water's always just about freezing."
"Where'll he come up?" asked Steevens. "I've lost my bearings."
"That's the spot," said the commander, who prided himself on his omniscience.
He extended a precise finger south-eastward. "And this, I reckon, is pretty nearly
the moment," he said. "He's been thirty-five minutes."
"How long does it take to reach the bottom of the ocean?" asked Steevens.
"For a depth of five miles, and reckoning--as we did--an acceleration of two feet
per second, both ways, is just about three-quarters of a minute."
"Then he's overdue," said Weybridge.
"Pretty nearly," said the commander. "I suppose it takes a few minutes for that
cord of his to wind in."
"I forgot that," said Weybridge, evidently relieved.
And then began the suspense. A minute slowly dragged itself out, and no sphere
shot out of the water. Another followed, and nothing broke the low oily swell.
The sailors explained to one another that little point about the winding-in of the
cord. The rigging was dotted with expectant faces. "Come up, Elstead!" called
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one hairy-chested salt impatiently, and the others caught it up, and shouted as
though they were waiting for the curtain of a theatre to rise.
The commander glanced irritably at them.
"Of course, if the acceleration's less than two," he said, "he'll be all the longer.
We aren't absolutely certain that was the proper figure. I'm no slavish believer in
calculations."
Steevens agreed concisely. No one on the quarter-deck spoke for a couple of
minutes. Then Steevens' watchcase clicked.
When, twenty-one minutes after the sun reached the zenith, they were still
waiting for the globe to reappear, and not a man aboard had dared to whisper that
hope was dead. It was Weybridge who first gave expression to that realisation.
He spoke while the sound of eight bells still hung in the air. "I always distrusted
that window," he said quite suddenly to Steevens.
"Good God!" said Steevens; "you don't think--?"
"Well!" said Weybridge, and left the rest to his imagination.
"I'm no great believer in calculations myself," said the commander dubiously, "so
that I'm not altogether hopeless yet." And at midnight the gunboat was steaming
slowly in a spiral round the spot where the globe had sunk, and the white beam of
the electric light fled and halted and swept discontentedly onward again over the
waste of phosphorescent waters under the little stars.
"If his window hasn't burst and smashed him," said Weybridge, "then it's a cursed
sight worse, for his clockwork has gone wrong, and he's alive now, five miles
under our feet, down there in the cold and dark, anchored in that little bubble of
his, where never a ray of light has shone or a human being lived, since the waters
were gathered together. He's there without food, feeling hungry and thirsty and
scared, wondering whether he'll starve or stifle. Which will it be? The Myers
apparatus is running out, I suppose. How long do they last?"
"Good heavens!" he exclaimed; "What little things we are! What daring little
devils! Down there, miles and miles of water--all water, and all this empty water
about us and this sky. Gulfs!" He threw his hands out, and as he did so, a little
white streak swept noiselessly up the sky, travelled more slowly, stopped,
became a motionless dot, as though a new star had fallen up into the sky. Then it
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went sliding back again and lost itself amidst the reflections of the stars and the
white haze of the sea's phosphorescence.
At the sight he stopped, arm extended and mouth open. He shut his mouth,
opened it again, and waved his arms with an impatient gesture. Then he turned,
shouted "Elstead ahoy!" to the first watch, and went at a run to Lindley and the
search-light. "I saw him," he said "Starboard there! His light's on, and he's just
shot out of the water. Bring the light round. We ought to see him drifting, when
he lifts on the swell."
But they never picked up the explorer until dawn. Then they almost ran him
down. The crane was swung out and a boat's crew hooked the chain to the sphere.
When they had shipped the sphere, they unscrewed the manhole and peered into
the darkness of the interior (for the electric light chamber was intended to
illuminate the water about the sphere, and was shut off entirely from its general
cavity).
The air was very hot within the cavity, and the indiarubber at the lip of the
manhole was soft. There was no answer to their eager questions and no sound of
movement within. Elstead seemed to be lying motionless, crumpled in the bottom
of the globe. The ship's doctor crawled in and lifted him out to the men outside.
For a moment or so they did not know whether Elstead was alive or dead. His
face, in the yellow light of the ship's lamps, glistened with perspiration. They
carried him down to his own cabin.
He was not dead, they found, but in a state of absolute nervous collapse, and
besides cruelly bruised. For some days he had to lie perfectly still. It was a week
before he could tell his experiences.
Almost his first words were that he was going down again. The sphere would
have to be altered, he said, in order to allow him to throw off the cord if need be,
and that was all. He had, had the most marvellous experience. "You thought I
should find nothing but ooze," he said. "You laughed at my explorations, and I've
discovered a new world!" He told his story in disconnected fragments, and
chiefly from the wrong end, so that it is impossible to re-tell it in his words. But
what follows is the narrative of his experience.
It began atrociously, he said. Before the cord ran out, the thing kept rolling over.
He felt like a frog in a football. He could see nothing but the crane and the sky
overhead, with an occasional glimpse of people on the ships rail. He couldn't tell
a bit which way the thing would roll next. Suddenly he would find his footing
going up, and try to step, and over he went rolling, head over heels, and just
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anyhow, on the padding. Any other shape would have been more comfortable,
but no other shape was to be relied upon under the huge pressure of the
nethermost abyss.
Suddenly the swaying ceased; the globe righted, and when he had picked himself
up, he saw the water all about him greeny-blue, with an attenuated light filtering
down from above, and a shoal of little floating things went rushing up past him,
as it seemed to him, towards the light. And even as he looked, it grew darker and
darker, until the water above was as dark as the midnight sky, albeit of greener
shade, and the water below black. And little transparent things in the water
developed a faint glint of luminosity, and shot past him in faint greenish streaks.
And the feeling of falling! It was just like the start of a lift, he said, only it kept
on. One has to imagine what that means, that keeping on. It was then of all times
that Elstead repented of his adventure. He saw the chances against him in an
altogether new light. He thought of the big cuttle-fish people knew to exist in the
middle waters, the kind of things they find half digested in whales at times, or
floating dead and rotten and half eaten by fish. Suppose one caught hold and
wouldn't let go. And had the clockwork really been sufficiently tested? But
whether he wanted to go on or go back mattered not the slightest now.
In fifty seconds everything was as black as night outside, except where the beam
from his light struck through the waters, and picked out every now and then some
fish or scrap of sinking matter. They flashed by too fast for him to see what they
were. Once he thinks he passed a shark. And then the sphere began to get hot by
friction against the water. They had underestimated this, it seems.
The first thing he noticed was that he was perspiring, and then he heard a hissing
growing louder under his feet, and saw a lot of little bubbles--very little bubbles
they were--rushing upward like a fan through the water outside. Steam! He felt
the window, and it was hot. He turned on the minute glow-lamp that lit his own
cavity, looked at the padded watch by the studs, and saw he had been travelling
now for two minutes. It came into his head that the window would crack through
the conflict of temperatures, for he knew the bottom water is very near freezing.
Then suddenly the floor of the sphere seemed to press against his feet, the rush of
bubbles outside grew slower and slower, and the hissing diminished. The sphere
rolled a little. The window had not cracked, nothing had given, and he knew that
the dangers of sinking, at any rate, were over.
In another minute or so he would be on the floor of the abyss. He thought, he
said, of Steevens and Weybridge and the rest of them five miles overhead, higher
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to him than the highest clouds that ever floated over land are to us, steaming
slowly and staring down and wondering what had happened to him.
He peered out of the window. There were no more bubbles now, and the hissing
had stopped. Outside there was a heavy blackness--as black as black velvet-except where the electric light pierced the empty water and showed the colour of
it--a yellow-green. Then three things like shapes of fire swam into sight,
following each other through the water. Whether they were little and near or big
and far off he could not tell.
Each was outlined in a bluish light almost as bright as the lights of a fishing
smack, a light which seemed to be smoking greatly, and all along the sides of
them were specks of this, like the lighter portholes of a ship. Their
phosphorescence seemed to go out as they came into the radiance of his lamp,
and he saw then that they were little fish of some strange sort, with huge heads,
vast eyes, and dwindling bodies and tails. Their eyes were turned towards him,
and he judged they were following him down. He supposed they were attracted
by his glare.
Presently others of the same sort joined them. As he went on down, he noticed
that the water became of a pallid colour, and that little specks twinkled in his ray
like motes in a sunbeam. This was probably due to the clouds of ooze and mud
that the impact of his leaden sinkers had disturbed.
By the time he was drawn down to the lead weights he was in a dense fog of
white that his electric light failed altogether to pierce for more than a few yards,
and many minutes elapsed before the hanging sheets of sediment subsided to any
extent. Then, lit by his light and by the transient phosphorescence of a distant
shoal of fishes, he was able to see under the huge blackness of the superincumbent water an undulating expanse of greyish-white ooze, broken here and
there by tangled thickets of a growth of sea lilies, waving hungry tentacles in the
air.
Farther away were the graceful, translucent outlines of a group of gigantic
sponges. About this floor there were scattered a number of bristling flattish tufts
of rich purple and black, which he decided must be some sort of sea-urchin, and
small, large-eyed or blind things having a curious resemblance, some to
woodlice, and others to lobsters, crawled sluggishly across the track of the light
and vanished into the obscurity again, leaving furrowed trails behind them.
Then suddenly the hovering swarm of little fishes veered about and came towards
him as a flight of starlings might do. They passed over him like a phosphorescent
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snow, and then he saw behind them some larger creature advancing towards the
sphere.
At first he could see it only dimly, a faintly moving figure remotely suggestive of
a walking man, and then it came into the spray of light that the lamp shot out. As
the glare struck it, it shut its eyes, dazzled. He stared in rigid astonishment.
It was a strange vertebrated animal. Its dark purple head was dimly suggestive of
a chameleon, but it had such a high forehead and such a braincase as no reptile
ever displayed before; the vertical pitch of its face gave it a most extraordinary
resemblance to a human being.
Two large and protruding eyes projected from sockets in chameleon fashion, and
it had a broad reptilian mouth with horny lips beneath its little nostrils. In the
position of the ears were two huge gill-covers, and out of these floated a
branching tree of coralline filaments, almost like the tree-like gills that very
young rays and sharks possess.
But the humanity of the face was not the most extraordinary thing about the
creature. It was a biped; its almost globular body was poised on a tripod of two
frog-like legs and a long thick tail, and its fore limbs, which grotesquely
caricatured the human hand, much as a frog's do, carried a long shaft of bone,
tipped with copper. The colour of the creature was variegated; its head, hands
and legs were purple; but its skin, which hung loosely upon it, even as clothes
might do, was a phosphorescent grey. And it stood there blinded by the light.
At last this unknown creature of the abyss blinked its eyes open, and shading
them with its disengaged hand, opened its mouth and gave vent to a shouting
noise, articulate almost as speech might be, that penetrated even the steel case
and padded jacket of the sphere. How a shouting may be accomplished without
lungs Elstead does not profess to explain. It then moved sideways out of the glare
into the mystery of shadow that bordered it on either side, and Elstead felt rather
than saw that it was coming towards him. Fancying the light had attracted it, he
turned the switch that cut off the current. In another moment something soft
dabbed upon the steel, and the globe swayed.
Then the shouting was repeated, and it seemed to him that a distant echo
answered it. The dabbing recurred, and the whole globe swayed and ground
against the spindle over which the wire was rolled. He stood in the blackness and
peered out into the everlasting night of the abyss. And presently he saw, very
faint and remote, other phosphorescent quasi-human forms hurrying towards
him.
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Hardly knowing what he did, he felt about in his swaying prison for the stud of
the exterior electric light, and came by accident against his own small glow-lamp
in its padded recess. The sphere twisted, and then threw him down; he heard
shouts like shouts of surprise, and when he rose to his feet, he saw two pairs of
stalked eyes peering into the lower window and reflecting his light.
In another moment hands were dabbing vigorously at his steel casing, and there
was a sound, horrible enough in his position, of the metal protection of the
clockwork being vigorously hammered. That indeed sent his heart into his
mouth, for if these strange creatures succeeded in stopping that, his release would
never occur. Scarcely had he thought as much when he felt the sphere sway
violently, and the floor of it press hard against his feet. He turned off the small
glow-lamp that lit the interior, and sent the ray of the large light in the separate
compartment, out into the water. The sea-floor and the man-like creatures had
disappeared, and a couple of fish chasing each other dropped suddenly by the
window.
He thought at once that these strange denizens of the deep sea had broke the rope,
and that he had escaped. He drove up faster and faster, and then stopped with a
jerk that sent him flying against the padded roof of his prison. For half a minute
perhaps, he was too astonished to think.
Then he felt that the sphere was spinning slowly, and rocking, and it seemed to
him that it was also being drawn through the water. By crouching close to the
window, he managed to make his weight effective and roll that part of the sphere
downward, but he could see nothing save the pale ray of his light striking down
ineffectively into the darkness. It occurred to him that he would see more if he
turned the lamp off, and allowed his eyes to grow accustomed to the profound
obscurity.
In this he was wise. After some minutes the velvety blackness became a
translucent blackness, and then, far away, and as faint as zodiacal light of an
English summer evening, he saw shapes moving below. He judged these
creatures had detached his cable, and were towing him along the sea bottom.
And then he saw something faint and remote across the undulations of the
submarine plain, a broad horizon of pale luminosity that extended this way and
that way as far as the range of his little window permitted him to see. To this he
was being towed, as a balloon might be towed by men out of the open country
into a town. He approached it very slowly, and very slowly the dim irradiation
was gathered together into more definite shapes.
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It was nearly five o'clock before he came over this luminous area, and by that
time he could make out an arrangement suggestive of streets and houses grouped
about a vast roofless erection that was grotesquely suggestive of a ruined abbey.
It was spread out like a map below him. The houses were all roofless enclosures
of walls, and their substance being, as he afterwards saw, of phosphorescent
bones, gave the place an appearance as if it were built of drowned moonshine.
Among the inner caves of the place waving trees of crinoid stretched their
tentacles, and tall, slender, glassy sponges shot like shining minarets and lilies of
filmy light out of the general glow of the city. In the open spaces of the place he
could see a stirring movement as of crowds of people, but he was too many
fathoms above them to distinguish the individuals in those crowds.
Then slowly they pulled him down, and as they did so, the details of the place
crept slowly upon his apprehension. He saw that the courses of the cloudy
buildings were marked out with beaded lines of round objects, and then he
perceived that at several points below him, in broad open spaces, were forms like
the encrusted shapes of ships.
Slowly and surely he was drawn down, and the forms below him became
brighter, clearer, more distinct. He was being pulled down, he perceived, towards
the large building in the centre of the town, and he could catch a glimpse ever
and again of the multitudinous forms that were lugging at his cord. He was
astonished to see that the rigging of one of the ships, which formed such a
prominent feature of the place, was crowded with a host of gesticulating figures
regarding him, and then the walls of the great building rose about him silently,
and hid the city from his eyes.
And such walls they were, of water-logged wood, and twisted wire-rope, and iron
spars, and copper, and the bones and skulls of dead men. The skulls ran in zigzag
lines and spirals and fantastic curves over the building; and in and out of their
eye-sockets, and over the whole surface of the place, lurked and played a
multitude of silvery little fishes.
Suddenly his ears were filled with a low shouting and a noise like the violent
blowing of horns, and this gave place to a fantastic chant. Down the sphere sank,
past the huge pointed windows, through which he saw vaguely a great number of
these strange, ghostlike people regarding him, and at last he came to rest, as it
seemed, on a kind of altar that stood in the centre of the place.
And now he was at such a level that he could see these strange people of the
abyss plainly once more. To his astonishment, he perceived that they were
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prostrating themselves before him, all save one, dressed as it seemed in a robe of
placoid scales, and crowned with a luminous diadem, who stood with his
reptilian mouth opening and shutting, as though he led the chanting of the
worshippers.
A curious impulse made Elstead turn on his small glow-lamp again, so that he
became visible to these creatures of the abyss, albeit the glare made them
disappear forthwith into night. At this sudden sight of him, the chanting gave
place to a tumult of exultant shouts; and Elstead, being anxious to watch them,
turned his light off again, and vanished from before their eyes. But for a time he
was too blind to make out what they were doing, and when at last he could
distinguish them, they were kneeling again. And thus they continued worshipping
him, without rest or intermission, for a space of three hours.
Most circumstantial was Elstead's account of this astounding city and its people,
these people of perpetual night, who have never seen sun or moon or stars, green
vegetation, nor any living, air-breathing creatures, who know nothing of fire, nor
any light but the phosphorescent light of living things.
Startling as is his story, it is yet more startling to find that scientific men, of such
eminence as Adams and Jenkins, find nothing incredible in it. They tell me they
see no reason why intelligent, water-breathing, vertebrated creatures, inured to a
low temperature and enormous pressure, and of such a heavy structure, that
neither alive nor dead would they float, might not live upon the bottom of the
deep sea, and quite unsuspected by us, descendants like ourselves of the great
Theriomorpha of the New Red Sandstone age.
We should be known to them however, as strange, meteoric creatures, wont to
fall catastrophically dead out of the mysterious blackness of their watery sky.
And not only we ourselves, but our ships, our metals, our appliances, would
come raining down out of the night. Sometimes sinking things would smite down
and crush them, as if it were the judgment of some unseen power above, and
sometimes would come things of utmost rarity or utility, or shapes of inspiring
suggestion. One can understand, perhaps, something of their behaviour at the
descent of a living man, if one thinks what a barbaric people might do, to whom
an enhaloed, shining creature came suddenly out of the sky.
At one time or another Elstead probably told the officers of the 'Ptarmigan' every
detail of his strange twelve hours in the abyss. That he also intended to write
them down is certain, but he never did, and so unhappily we have to piece
together the discrepant fragments of his story from the reminiscences of
Commander Simmons, Weybridge, Steevens, Lindley, and the others.
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We see the thing darkly in fragmentary glimpses--the huge ghostly building, the
bowing, chanting people, with their dark chameleon-like heads and faintly
luminous clothing, and Elstead, with his light turned on again, vainly trying to
convey to their minds that the cord by which the sphere was held was to be
severed. Minute after minute slipped away, and Elstead, looking at his watch,
was horrified to find that he had oxygen only for four hours more. But the chant
in his honour kept on as remorselessly as if it was the marching song of his
approaching death.
The manner of his release he does not understand, but to judge by the end of cord
that hung from the sphere, it had been cut through by rubbing against the edge of
the altar. Abruptly the sphere rolled over, and he swept up, out of their world, as
an ethereal creature clothed in a vacuum would sweep through our own
atmosphere back to its native ether again. He must have torn out of their sight as
a hydrogen bubble hastens upwards from our air. A strange ascension it must
have seemed to them.
The sphere rushed up with even greater velocity than, when weighted with the
lead sinkers, it had rushed down. It became exceedingly hot. It drove up with the
windows uppermost, and he remembers the torrent of bubbles frothing against
the glass. Every moment he expected this to fly. Then suddenly something like a
huge wheel seemed to be released in his head, the padded compartment began
spinning about him, and he fainted. His next recollection was of his cabin, and of
the doctor's voice.
But that is the substance of the extraordinary story that Elstead related in
fragments to the officers of the 'Ptarmigan'. He promised to write it all down at a
later date. His mind was chiefly occupied with the improvement of his apparatus,
which was effected at Rio.
It remains only to tell that on February 2, 1896, he made his second descent into
the ocean abyss, with the improvements his first experience suggested. What
happened we shall probably never knew. He never returned. The 'Ptarmigan' beat
about over the point of his submersion, seeking him in vain for thirteen days.
Then she returned to Rio, and the news was telegraphed to his friends. So the
matter remains for the present. But it is hardly probable that no further attempt
will be made to verify his strange story of these hitherto unsuspected cities of the
deep sea.
THE APPLE
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"I must get rid of it," said the man in the corner of the carriage, abruptly breaking
the silence.
Mr. Hinchcliff looked up, hearing imperfectly. He had been lost in the rapt
contemplation of the college cap tied by a string to his portmanteau handles--the
outward and visible sign of his newly-gained pedagogic position--in the rapt
appreciation of the college cap and the pleasant anticipations it excited. For Mr.
Hinchcliff had just matriculated at London University, and was going to be junior
assistant at the Holmwood Grammar School--a very enviable position. He stared
across the carriage at his fellow-traveller.
"Why not give it away?" said this person. "Give it away! Why not?"
He was a tall, dark sunburnt man with a pale face. His arms were folded tightly,
and his feet were on the seat in front of him. He was pulling at a lank black
moustache. He stared hard at his toes.
"Why not?" he said.
Mr. Hinchcliff coughed.
The stranger lifted his eyes--they were curious, dark-grey eyes--and stared
blankly at Mr. Hinchcliff for the best part of a minute, perhaps. His expression
grew to interest.
"Yes," he said slowly. "Why not? And end it."
"I don't quite follow you, I'm afraid," said Mr. Hinchcliff, with another cough.
"You don't quite follow me?" said the stranger quite mechanically, his singular
eyes wandering from Mr. Hinchcliff to the bag with its ostentatiously displayed
cap, and back to Mr. Hinchcliff's downy face.
"You're so abrupt, you know," apologised Mr. Hinchcliff.
"Why shouldn't I?" said the stranger, following his thoughts. "You are a
student?" he said, addressing Mr. Hinchcliff.
"I am--by Correspondence--of the London University," said Mr. Hinchcliff, with
irrepressible pride, and feeling nervously at his tie.
"In pursuit of knowledge," said the stranger, and suddenly took his feet off the
seat, put his fist on his knees, and stared at Mr. Hinchcliff as though he had never
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seen a student before. "Yes," he said, and flung out an index finger. Then he rose,
took a bag from the hat-rack, and unlocked it. Quite silently he drew out
something round and wrapped in a quantity of silver-paper, and unfolded this
carefully. He held it out towards Mr. Hinchcliff--a small, very smooth, goldenyellow fruit.
Mr. Hinchcliff's eyes and mouth were open. He did not offer to take this object-if he was intended to take it.
"That," said this fantastic stranger, speaking very slowly, "is the Apple of the
Tree of Knowledge. Look at it--small, and bright, and wonderful--Knowledge-and I am going to give it to you."
Mr. Hinchcliff's mind worked painfully for a minute, and then the sufficient
explanation, "Mad!" flashed across his brain, and illuminated the whole situation.
One humoured madmen. He put his head a little on one side.
"The Apple of the Tree of Knowledge, eigh!" said Mr. Hinchcliff, regarding it
with a finely assumed air of interest, and then looking at the interlocutor. "But
don't you want to eat it yourself? And besides--how did you come by it?"
"It never fades. I have had it now for three months. And it is ever bright and
smooth and ripe and desirable, as you see it." He laid his hand on his knee and
regarded the fruit musingly. Then he began to wrap it again in the papers, as
though he had abandoned his intention of giving it away.
"But how did you come by it?" said Mr. Hinchcliff, who had his argumentative
side. "And how do you know that it is the Fruit of the Tree?"
"I bought this fruit," said the stranger, "three months ago--for a drink of water
and a crust of bread. The man who gave it to me--because I kept the life in him-was an Armenian. Armenia! That wonderful country, the first of all countries,
where the ark of the Flood remains to this day, buried in the glaciers of Mount
Ararat. This man I say, fleeing with others from Kurds who had come upon them,
went up into desolate places among the mountains--places beyond the common
knowledge of men. And fleeing from imminent pursuit, they came to a slope,
high among the mountain-peaks, green with a grass like knife-blades, that cut and
slashed most pitilessly at anyone who went into it. The Kurds were close behind,
and there was nothing for it but to plunge in, and the worst of it was that the
paths they made through it, at the price of their blood, served for the Kurds to
follow. Every one of the fugitives was killed save this Armenian and another. He
heard the screams and cries of his friends, and the swish of the grass about those
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who were pursuing them--it was tall grass rising overhead. And then a shouting
and answers, and when presently he paused, everything was still. He pushed out
again, not understanding, cut and bleeding, until he came out on a steep slope of
rocks below a precipice, and then he saw the grass was all on fire, and the smoke
of it rose like a veil between him and his enemies."
The stranger paused. "Yes?" said Mr. Hinchcliff. "Yes?"
"There he was, all torn and bloody from the knife-blades of the grass, the rocks
blazing under the afternoon sun--the sky molten brass--and the smoke of the fire
driving towards him. He dared not stay there. Death he did not mind, but torture!
Far away beyond the smoke he heard shouts and cries. Women screaming. So he
went clambering up a gorge in the rocks--everywhere were bushes with dry
branches that stuck like thorns among the leaves--until he clambered over the
brow of a ridge that hid him. And then he met his companion, a shepherd, who
had also escaped. And counting cold and famine and thirst as nothing against the
Kurds, they went on into the heights, and among the snow and ice. They
wandered three whole days.
"The third day came the vision. I suppose hungry men often do see visions, but
then there is this fruit." He lifted the wrapped globe in his hand. "And I have
heard it too, from other mountaineers who have known something of the legend.
It was in the evening time, when the stars were increasing, that they came down a
slope of polished rock into a huge dark valley all set about with strange,
contorted trees and in these hung little globes like glow-worm spheres, strange
round yellow lights.
"Suddenly this valley was lit far away, many miles away, far down it, with a
golden flame marching slowly athwart it, that made the stunted trees against it
black as night, and turned the slopes all about them and their figures to the
likeness of fiery gold. And at the vision they, knowing the legends of mountains,
instantly knew that it was Eden they saw, or the sentinel of Eden, and they fell
upon their faces like men struck dead.
"When they dared to look again the valley was dark for a space, and then the
light came again--returning, a burning amber.
"At that the shepherd sprang to his feet, and with a shout began to run down
towards the light, but the other man was too fearful to follow him. He stood
stunned, amazed, and terrified, watching his companion recede towards the
marching glare. And hardly had the shepherd set out when there came a noise
like thunder, the beating of invisible wings hurrying up the valley, and a great
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and terrible fear; and at that the man who gave me the fruit turned--if he might
still escape. And hurrying headlong up the slope again, with that tumult sweeping
after him, he stumbled against one of these stunted bushes, and a ripe fruit came
off it into his hand. This fruit. Forthwith, the wings and thunder rolled all about
him. He fell and fainted, and when he came to his senses, he was back among the
blackened ruins of his own village, and I and the others were attending to the
wounded. A vision? But the golden fruit of the tree was still clutched in his hand.
There were others there who knew the legend, knew what that strange fruit might
be." He paused. "And this is it," he said.
It was a most extraordinary story to be told in a third-class carriage on a Sussex
railway. It was as if the real was a mere veil to the fantastic, and here was the
fantastic poking through. "Is it?" was all Mr. Hinchcliff could say.
"The legend," said the stranger, "tells that those thickets of dwarfed trees growing
about the garden sprang from the apple that Adam carried in his hand when he
and Eve were driven forth. He felt something in his hand, saw the half-eaten
apple, and flung it petulantly aside. And there they grow, in that desolate valley,
girdled round with the everlasting snows, and there the fiery swords keep ward
against the Judgment Day."
"But I thought these things were--" Mr Hinchcliff paused--"fables--parables
rather. Do you mean to tell me that there in Armenia--"
The stranger answered the unfinished question with the fruit in his open hand.
"But you don't know," said Mr. Hinchcliff, "that, that is the fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge. The man may have had--a sort of mirage, say. Suppose--"
"Look at it," said the stranger.
It was certainly a strange-looking globe, not really an apple, Mr. Hinchcliff saw
and a curious glowing golden colour, almost as though light itself was wrought
into its substance. As he looked at it, he began to see more vividly the desolate
valley among the mountains, the guarding swords of fire, the strange antiquities
of the story he had just heard. He rubbed a knuckle into his eye. "But--" said he.
"It has kept like that, smooth and full, three months. Longer than that it is now by
some days. No drying, withering, no decay."
"And you yourself," said Mr. Hinchcliff, "really believe that--"
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"Is the Forbidden Fruit."
There was no mistaking the earnestness of the man's manner and his perfect
sanity. "The Fruit of Knowledge," he said.
"Suppose it was?" said Mr. Hinchcliff, after a pause, still staring at it. "But after
all," said Mr. Hinchcliff, "it's not my kind of knowledge--not the sort of
knowledge. I mean, Adam and Eve have eaten it already."
"We inherit their sins--not their knowledge," said the stranger. "That would make
it clear and bright again. We should see into everything, through everything, into
the deepest meaning of everything--"
"Why don't you eat it then?" said Mr. Hinchcliff, with an inspiration.
"I took it intending to eat it," said the stranger. "Man has fallen. Merely to eat
again could scarcely--"
"Knowledge is power," said Mr. Hinchcliff.
"But is it happiness? I am older than you--more than twice as old. Time after time
I have held this in my hand, and my heart has failed me at the thought of all that
one might know, that terrible lucidity--Suppose suddenly all the world became
pitilessly clear?"
"That, I think, would be a great advantage," said Mr. Hinchcliff, "on the whole."
"Suppose you saw into the hearts and minds of everyone about you, into their
most secret recesses--people you loved, whose love you valued?"
"You'd soon find out the humbugs," said Mr. Hinchcliff, greatly struck by the
idea.
"And worse--to know yourself, bare of your most intimate illusions. To see
yourself in your place. All that your lusts and weaknesses prevented your doing.
No merciful perspective."
"That might be an excellent thing too. 'Know thyself,' you know."
"You are young," said the stranger.
"If you don't care to eat it, and it bothers you, why don't you throw it away?"
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"There again, perhaps, you will not understand me. To me, how could one throw
away a thing like that, glowing, wonderful? Once one has it, one is bound. But,
on the other hand, to give it away! To give it away to someone who thirsted after
knowledge, who found no terror in the thought of that clear perception--"
"Of course," said Mr. Hinchcliff thoughtfully, "it might be sort of poisonous
fruit."
And then his eye caught something motionless, the end of a white board blacklettered outside the carriage window. "--mwood," he saw. He started
convulsively. "Gracious!" said Mr. Hinchcliff. "Holmwood--!" And the practical
present blotted out the mystic realisations that had been stealing upon him.
In another moment he was opening the carriage-door, portmanteau in hand. The
guard was already fluttering his green flag. Mr. Hinchcliff jumped out. "Here!"
said a voice behind him, and he saw the dark eyes of the stranger shining and the
golden fruit, bright and bare, held out of the open carriage-door. He took it
instinctively, the train was already moving.
"No!" shouted the stranger, and made a snatch at it as if to take it back.
"Stand away," cried a country porter, thrusting forward to close the door. The
stranger shouted something Mr. Hinchcliff did not catch, head and arm thrust
excitedly out of the window, and then the shadow of the bridge fell on him, and
in a trice he was hidden. Mr. Hinchcliff stood astonished, staring at the end of the
last waggon receding round the bend, and with the wonderful fruit in his hand.
For the fraction of a minute his mind was confused, and then he became aware
that two or three people on the platform were regarding him with interest. Was he
not the new Grammar School master making his debut? It occurred to him that,
so far as they could tell, the fruit might very well be the naive refreshment of an
orange. He flushed at the thought, and thrust the fruit into his side pocket, where
it bulged undesirably. But there was no help for it, so he went towards them,
awkwardly concealing his sense of awkwardness, to ask the way to the Grammar
School, and the means of getting his portmanteau and the two tin boxes which
lay up the platform thither. Of all the odd and fantastic yarns to tell a fellow!
His luggage could be taken on a truck for sixpence, he found, and he could
precede it on foot. He fancied an ironical note in the voices. He was painfully
aware of his contour.
The curious earnestness of the man in the train, and the glamour of the story he
told, had for a time, diverted the current of Mr. Hinchcliff's thoughts. It drove
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like a mist before his immediate concerns. Fires that went to and fro! But the
preoccupation of his new position, and the impression he was to produce upon
Holmwood generally, and the school people in particular, returned upon him with
reinvigorating power before he left the station and cleared his mental atmosphere.
But it is extraordinary what an inconvenient thing the addition of a soft and rather
brightly-golden fruit, not three inches in diameter, may prove to a sensitive youth
on his best appearance. In the pocket of his black jacket it bulged dreadfully,
spoilt the lines altogether. He passed a little old lady in black, and he felt her eye
drop upon the excrescence at once. He was wearing one glove and carrying the
other, together with his stick, so that to bear the fruit openly was impossible. In
one place, were the road into the town seemed suitably secluded, he took his
encumbrance out of his pocket and tried it in his hat. It was just too large, the hat
wobbled ludicrously, and just as he was taking it out again, a butcher's boy came
driving round the corner.
"Confound it!" said Mr. Hinchcliff.
He would have eaten the thing, and attained omniscience there and then, but it
would seem so silly to go into town sucking a juicy fruit--and it certainly felt
juicy. If one of the boys should come by, it might do him a serious injury with his
discipline so to be seen. And the juice might make his face sticky and get upon
his cuffs--or it might be an acid juice as potent as lemon, and take all the colour
out of his clothes.
Then round a bend in the lane came two pleasant sunlit girlish figures. They were
walking slowly towards the town and chattering--at any moment they might look
round and see a hot-faced young man behind them carrying a kind of
phosphorescent yellow tomato! They would be sure to laugh.
"Hang!" said Mr. Hinchcliff, and with a swift jerk sent the encumbrance flying
over the stone wall of an orchard that there abutted on the road. As it vanished,
he felt a faint twinge of loss that lasted scarcely a moment. He adjusted the stick
and glove in his hand, and walked on, erect and self-conscious, to pass the girls.
But in the darkness of the night Mr. Hinchcliff had a dream, and saw the valley,
and the flaming swords, and the contorted trees, and knew that it really was the
Apple of the Tree of Knowledge that he had thrown regardlessly away. And he
awoke very unhappy.
In the morning his regret had passed, but afterwards it returned and troubled him;
never however when he was happy or busily occupied. At last, one moonlight
night about eleven, when all Holmwood was quiet, his regrets returned with
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redoubled force, and therewith an impulse to adventure. He slipped out of the
house and over the playground wall, went through the silent town to Station
Lane, and climbed into the orchard where he had thrown the fruit. But nothing
was to be found of it there among the dewy grass and the faint intangible globes
of dandelion down.
UNDER THE KNIFE
"What if I die under it?" The thought recurred again and again, as I walked home
from Haddon's. It was a purely personal question. I was spared the deep anxieties
of a married man, and I knew there were few of my intimate friends but would
find my death troublesome chiefly on account of their duty of regret. I was
surprised indeed, and perhaps a little humiliated, as I turned the matter over, to
think how few could possibly exceed the conventional requirement. Things came
before me stripped of glamour, in a clear dry light, during that walk from
Haddon's house over Primrose Hill. There were the friends of my youth: I
perceived now that our affection was a tradition, which we foregathered rather
laboriously to maintain. There were the rivals and helpers of my later career: I
suppose I had been cold-blooded or undemonstrative--one perhaps implies the
other. It may be that even the capacity for friendship is a question of physique.
There had been a time in my own life when I had grieved bitterly enough at the
loss of a friend; but as I walked home that afternoon the emotional side of my
imagination was dormant. I could not pity myself, nor feel sorry for my friends,
nor conceive of them as grieving for me.
I was interested in this deadness of my emotional nature--no doubt a concomitant
of my stagnating physiology; and my thoughts wandered off along the line it
suggested. Once before, in my hot youth, I had suffered a sudden loss of blood,
and had been within an ace of death. I remembered now that my affections as
well as my passions had drained out of me, leaving scarce anything but a tranquil
resignation, a dreg of self-pity. It had been weeks before the old ambitions and
tendernesses, and all the complex moral interplay of a man had reasserted
themselves. It occurred to me that the real meaning of this numbness might be a
gradual slipping away from the pleasure-pain guidance of the animal man. It has
been proven, I take it, as thoroughly as anything can be proven in this world, that
the higher emotions, the moral feelings, even the subtle unselfishness of love, are
evolved from the elemental desires and fears of the simple animal: they are the
harness in which man's mental freedom goes. And it may be that as death
overshadows us, as our possibility of acting diminishes, this complex growth of
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balanced impulse, propensity and aversion, whose interplay inspires our acts,
goes with it. Leaving what?
I was suddenly brought back to reality by an imminent collision with the butcherboy's tray. I found that I was crossing the bridge over the Regent's Park Canal,
which runs parallel with that in the Zoological Gardens. The boy in blue had
been looking over his shoulder at a black barge advancing slowly, towed by a
gaunt white horse. In the Gardens a nurse was leading three happy little children
over the bridge. The trees were bright green; the spring hopefulness was still
unstained by the dusts of summer; the sky in the water was bright and clear, but
broken by long waves, by quivering bands of black, as the barge drove through.
The breeze was stirring; but it did not stir me as the spring breeze used to do.
Was this dulness of feeling in itself an anticipation? It was curious that I could
reason and follow out a network of suggestion as clearly as ever: so at least, it
seemed to me. It was calmness rather than dulness that was coming upon me.
Was there any ground for the relief in the presentiment of death? Did a man near
to death begin instinctively to withdraw himself from the meshes of matter and
sense, even before the cold hand was laid upon his? I felt strangely isolated-isolated without regret--from the life and existence about me. The children
playing in the sun and gathering strength and experience for the business of life,
the park-keeper gossiping with a nursemaid, the nursing mother, the young
couple intent upon each other as they passed me, the trees by the wayside
spreading new pleading leaves to the sunlight, the stir in their branches--I had
been part of it all, but I had nearly done with it now.
Some way down the Broad Walk I perceived that I was tired, and that my feet
were heavy. It was hot that afternoon, and I turned aside and sat down on one of
the green chairs that line the way. In a minute I had dozed into a dream, and the
tide of my thoughts washed up a vision of the resurrection. I was still sitting in
the chair, but I thought myself actually dead, withered, tattered, dried, one eye (I
saw) pecked out by birds. "Awake!" cried a voice; and incontinently the dust of
the path and the mould under the grass became insurgent. I had never before
thought of Regent's Park as a cemetery, but now, through the trees, stretching as
far as eye could see, I beheld a flat plain of writhing graves and heeling
tombstones. There seemed to be some trouble: the rising dead appeared to stifle
as they struggled upward, they bled in their struggles, the red flesh was torn away
from the white bones. "Awake!" cried a voice; but I determined I would not rise
to such horrors. "Awake!" They would not let me alone. "Wake up!" said an
angry voice. A cockney angel! The man who sells the tickets was shaking me,
demanding my penny.
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I paid my penny, pocketed my ticket, yawned, stretched my legs, and feeling now
rather less torpid, got up and walked on towards Langham Place. I speedily lost
myself again in a shifting maze of thoughts about death. Going across
Marylebone Road into that crescent at the end of Langham Place, I had the
narrowest escape from the shaft of a cab, and went on my way with a palpitating
heart and a bruised shoulder. It struck me that it would have been curious if my
meditations on my death on the morrow had led to my death that day.
But I will not weary you with more of my experiences that day and the next. I
knew more and more certainly that I should die under the operation; at times I
think I was inclined to pose to myself. At home I found everything prepared; my
room cleared of needless objects and hung with white sheets; a nurse installed
and already at loggerheads with my housekeeper. They wanted me to go to bed
early, and after a little resistance I obeyed.
In the morning I was very indolent, and though I read my newspapers and the
letters that came by the first post, I did not find them very interesting. There was
a friendly note from Addison, my old school friend, calling my attention to two
discrepancies and a printer's error in my new book, with one from Langridge
venting some vexation over Minton. The rest were business communications. I
breakfasted in bed. The glow of pain at my side seemed more massive. I knew it
was pain, and yet, if you can understand, I did not find it very painful. I had been
awake and hot and thirsty in the night, but in the morning bed felt comfortable. In
the night-time I had lain thinking of things that were past; in the morning I dozed
over the question of immortality. Haddon came, punctual to the minute, with a
neat black bag; and Mowbray soon followed. Their arrival stirred me up a little. I
began to take a more personal interest in the proceedings. Haddon moved the
little octagonal table close to the bedside, and with his broad back to me, began
taking things out of his bag. I heard the light click of steel upon steel. My
imagination, I found, was not altogether stagnant. "Will you hurt me much?" I
said in an off-hand tone.
"Not a bit," Haddon answered over his shoulder. "We shall chloroform you. Your
heart's as sound as a bell." And as he spoke, I had a whiff of the pungent
sweetness of the anaesthetic.
They stretched me out, with a convenient exposure of my side, and, almost
before I realised what was happening, the chloroform was being administered. It
stings the nostrils, and there is a suffocating sensation at first. I knew I should
die--that this was the end of consciousness for me. And suddenly I felt that I was
not prepared for death: I had a vague sense of a duty overlooked--I knew not
what. What was it I had not done? I could think of nothing more to do, nothing
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desirable left in life; and yet I had the strangest disinclination to death. And the
physical sensation was painfully oppressive. Of course the doctors did not know
they were going to kill me. Possibly I struggled. Then I fell motionless, and a
great silence, a monstrous silence, and an impenetrable blackness came upon me.
There must have been an interval of absolute unconsciousness, seconds or
minutes. Then with a chilly, unemotional clearness, I perceived that I was not yet
dead. I was still in my body; but all the multitudinous sensations that come
sweeping from it to make up the background of consciousness had gone, leaving
me free of it all. No, not free of it all; for as yet something still held me to the
poor stark flesh upon the bed--held me, yet not so closely that I did not feel
myself external to it, independent of it, straining away from it. I do not think I
saw, I do not think I heard; but I perceived all that was going on, and it was as if I
both heard and saw. Haddon was bending over me, Mowbray behind me; the
scalpel--it was a large scalpel--was cutting my flesh at the side under the flying
ribs. It was interesting to see myself cut like cheese, without a pang, without even
a qualm. The interest was much of a quality with that one might feel in a game of
chess between strangers. Haddon's face was firm and his hand steady; but I was
surprised to perceive (how I know not) that he was feeling the gravest doubt as to
his own wisdom in the conduct of the operation.
Mowbray's thoughts too, I could see. He was thinking that Haddon's manner
showed too much of the specialist. New suggestions came up like bubbles
through a stream of frothing meditation, and burst one after another in the little
bright spot of his consciousness. He could not help noticing and admiring
Haddon's swift dexterity, in spite of his envious quality and his disposition to
detract. I saw my liver exposed. I was puzzled at my own condition. I did not feel
that I was dead, but I was different in some way from my living self. The grey
depression, that had weighed on me for a year or more and coloured all my
thoughts, was gone. I perceived and thought without any emotional tint at all. I
wondered if everyone perceived things in this way under chloroform, and forgot
it again when he came out of it. It would be inconvenient to look into some
heads, and not forget.
Although I did not think that I was dead, I still perceived quite clearly that I was
soon to die. This brought me back to the consideration of Haddon's proceedings.
I looked into his mind, and saw that he was afraid of cutting a branch of the
portal vein. My attention was distracted from details by the curious changes
going on in his mind. His consciousness was like the quivering little spot of light
which is thrown by the mirror of a galvanometer. His thoughts ran under it like a
stream, some through the focus bright and distinct, some shadowy in the halflight of the edge. Just now the little glow was steady; but the least movement on
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Mowbray's part, the slightest sound from outside, even a faint difference in the
slow movement of the living flesh he was cutting, set the light-spot shivering and
spinning. A new sense-impression came rushing up through the flow of thoughts;
and lo! The light-spot jerked away towards it, swifter than a frightened fish. It
was wonderful to think that upon that unstable, fitful thing depended all the
complex motions of the man; that for the next five minutes, therefore, my life
hung upon its movements. And he was growing more and more nervous in his
work. It was as if a little picture of a cut vein grew brighter, and struggled to oust
from his brain another picture of a cut falling short of the mark. He was afraid:
his dread of cutting too little was battling with his dread of cutting too far.
Then, suddenly, like an escape of water from under a lock-gate, a great uprush of
horrible realisation set all his thoughts swirling, and simultaneously I perceived
that the vein was cut. He started back with a hoarse exclamation, and I saw the
brown-purple blood gather in a swift bead, and run trickling. He was horrified.
He pitched the red-stained scalpel on to the octagonal table; and instantly both
doctors flung themselves upon me, making hasty and ill-conceived efforts to
remedy the disaster. "Ice!" said Mowbray, gasping. But I knew that I was killed,
though my body still clung to me.
I will not describe their belated endeavours to save me, though I perceived every
detail. My perceptions were sharper and swifter than they had ever been in life;
my thoughts rushed through my mind with incredible swiftness, but with perfect
definition. I can only compare their crowded clarity to the effects of a reasonable
dose of opium. In a moment it would all be over, and I should be free. I knew I
was immortal, but what would happen I did not know. Should I drift off
presently, like a puff of smoke from a gun, in some kind of half-material body, an
attenuated version of my material self? Should I find myself suddenly among the
innumerable hosts of the dead, and know the world about me for the
phantasmagoria it had always seemed? Should I drift to some spiritualistic
seance, and there make foolish, incomprehensible attempts to affect a purblind
medium? It was a state of unemotional curiosity, of colourless expectation. And
then I realised a growing stress upon me, a feeling as though some huge human
magnet was drawing me upward out of my body. The stress grew and grew. I
seemed an atom for which monstrous forces were fighting. For one brief, terrible
moment sensation came back to me. That feeling of falling headlong which
comes in nightmares, that feeling a thousand times intensified, that and a black
horror swept across my thoughts in a torrent. Then the two doctors, the naked
body with its cut side, the little room, swept away from under me and vanished,
as a speck of foam vanishes down an eddy.
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I was in mid-air. Far below was the West End of London, receding rapidly--, for I
seemed to be flying swiftly upward--, and as it receded, passing westward like a
panorama. I could see, through the faint haze of smoke, the innumerable roofs
chimney-set, the narrow roadways, stippled with people and conveyances, the
little specks of squares, and the church steeples like thorns sticking out of the
fabric. But it spun away as the earth rotated on its axis, and in a few seconds (as
it seemed) I was over the scattered clumps of town about Ealing, the little
Thames a thread of blue to the south, and the Chiltern Hills and the North Downs
coming up like the rim of a basin, far away and faint with haze. Up I rushed. And
at first I had not the faintest conception what this headlong rush upward could
mean.
Every moment the circle of scenery beneath me grew wider and wider, and the
details of town and field, of hill and valley, got more and more hazy and pale and
indistinct, a luminous grey was mingled more and more with the blue of the hills
and the green of the open meadows; and a little patch of cloud, low and far to the
west, shone ever more dazzlingly white. Above, as the veil of atmosphere
between myself and outer space grew thinner, the sky, which had been a fair
springtime blue at first, grew deeper and richer in colour, passing steadily
through the intervening shades, until presently it was as dark as the blue sky of
midnight, and presently as black as the blackness of a frosty starlight, and at last
as black as no blackness I had ever beheld. And first one star, and then many, and
at last an innumerable host broke out upon the sky: more stars than anyone has
ever seen from the face of the earth. For the blueness of the sky in the light of the
sun and stars sifted and spread abroad blindingly: there is diffused light even in
the darkest skies of winter, and we do not see the stars by day only because of the
dazzling irradiation of the sun. But now I saw things--I know not how; assuredly
with no mortal eyes--and that defect of bedazzlement blinded me no longer. The
sun was incredibly strange and wonderful. The body of it was a disc of blinding
white light: not yellowish, as it seems to those who live upon the earth, but livid
white, all streaked with scarlet streaks and rimmed about with a fringe of
writhing tongues of red fire. And shooting halfway across the heavens from
either side of it and brighter than the Milky Way, were two pinions of silverwhite, making it look more like those winged globes I have seen in Egyptian
sculpture than anything else I can remember upon earth. These I knew for the
solar corona, though I had never seen anything of it but a picture during the days
of my earthly life.
When my attention came back to the earth again, I saw that it had fallen very far
away from me. Field and town were long since indistinguishable, and all the
varied hues of the country were merging into a uniform bright grey, broken only
by the brilliant white of the clouds that lay scattered in flocculent masses over
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Ireland and the west of England. For now I could see the outlines of the north of
France and Ireland, and all this Island of Britain, save where Scotland passed
over the horizon to the north, or where the coast was blurred or obliterated by
cloud. The sea was a dull grey, and darker than the land; and the whole panorama
was rotating slowly towards the east.
All this had happened so swiftly that until I was some thousand miles or so from
the earth I had no thought for myself. But now I perceived I had neither hands
nor feet, neither parts nor organs, and that I felt neither alarm nor pain. All about
me I perceived that the vacancy (for I had already left the air behind) was cold
beyond the imagination of man; but it troubled me not. The sun's rays shot
through the void, powerless to light or heat until they should strike on matter in
their course. I saw things with a serene self-forgetfulness, even as if I were God.
And down below there, rushing away from me--, countless miles in a second--,
where a little dark spot on the grey marked the position of London, two doctors
were struggling to restore life to the poor hacked and outworn shell I had
abandoned. I felt then such release, such serenity as I can compare to no mortal
delight I have ever known.
It was only after I had perceived all these things that the meaning of that
headlong rush of the earth grew into comprehension. Yet it was so simple, so
obvious, that I was amazed at my never anticipating the thing that was happening
to me. I had suddenly been cut adrift from matter: all that was material of me was
there upon earth, whirling away through space, held to the earth by gravitation,
partaking of the earth's inertia, moving in its wreath of epicycles round the sun,
and with the sun and the planets on their vast march through space. But the
immaterial has no inertia, feels nothing of the pull of matter for matter: where it
parts from its garment of flesh, there it remains (so far as space concerns it any
longer) immovable in space. I was not leaving the earth: the earth was leaving
me, and not only the earth but the whole solar system was streaming past. And
about me in space, invisible to me, scattered in the wake of the earth upon its
journey, there must be an innumerable multitude of souls, stripped like myself of
the material, stripped like myself of the passions of the individual and the
generous emotions of the gregarious brute, naked intelligences, things of
newborn wonder and thought, marvelling at the strange release that had suddenly
come on them!
As I receded faster and faster from the strange white sun in the black heavens,
and from the broad and shining earth upon which my being had begun, I seemed
to grow in some incredible manner vast: vast as regards this world I had left, vast
as regards the moments and periods of a human life. Very soon I saw the full
circle of the earth, slightly gibbous, like the moon when she nears her full, but
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very large; and the silvery shape of America was now in the noonday blaze
wherein (as it seemed) little England had been basking but a few minutes ago. At
first the earth was large, and shone in the heavens, filling a great part of them; but
every moment she grew smaller and more distant. As she shrank, the broad moon
in its third quarter crept into view over the rim of her disc. I looked for the
constellations. Only that part of Aries directly behind the sun and the Lion, which
the earth covered, were hidden. I recognised the tortuous, tattered band of the
Milky Way with Vega very bright between sun and earth; and Sirius and Orion
shone splendid against the unfathomable blackness in the opposite quarter of the
heavens. The Pole Star was overhead, and the Great Bear hung over the circle of
the earth. And away beneath and beyond the shining corona of the sun were
strange groupings of stars I had never seen in my life--notably a dagger-shaped
group that I knew for the Southern Cross. All these were no larger than when
they had shone on earth, but the little stars that one scarce sees shone now against
the setting of black vacancy as brightly as the first-magnitudes had done, while
the larger worlds were points of indescribable glory and colour. Aldebaran was a
spot of blood-red fire, and Sirius condensed to one point the light of innumerable
sapphires. And they shone steadily: they did not scintillate, they were calmly
glorious. My impressions had an adamantine hardness and brightness: there was
no blurring softness, no atmosphere, nothing but infinite darkness set with the
myriads of these acute and brilliant points and specks of light. Presently, when I
looked again, the little earth seemed no bigger than the sun, and it dwindled and
turned as I looked, until in a second's space (as it seemed to me), it was halved;
and so it went on swiftly dwindling. Far away in the opposite direction, a little
pinkish pin's head of light, shining steadily, was the planet Mars. I swam
motionless in vacancy, and without a trace of terror or astonishment, watched the
speck of cosmic dust, we call the world fall away from me.
Presently it dawned upon me that my sense of duration had changed; that my
mind was moving not faster but infinitely slower, that between each separate
impression there was a period of many days. The moon spun once round the
earth as I noted this; and I perceived clearly the motion of Mars in his orbit.
Moreover, it appeared as if the time between thought and thought grew steadily
greater, until at last a thousand years was but a moment in my perception.
At first the constellations had shone motionless against the black background of
infinite space; but presently it seemed as though the group of stars about
Hercules and the Scorpion was contracting, while Orion and Aldebaran and their
neighbours were scattering apart. Flashing suddenly out of the darkness there
came a flying multitude of particles of rock, glittering like dust-specks in a
sunbeam, and encompassed in a faintly luminous cloud. They swirled all about
me, and vanished again in a twinkling far behind. And then I saw that a bright
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spot of light, that shone a little to one side of my path, was growing very rapidly
larger, and perceived that it was the planet Saturn rushing towards me. Larger
and larger it grew, swallowing up the heavens behind it, and hiding every
moment a fresh multitude of stars. I perceived its flattened, whirling body, its
disc-like belt, and seven of its little satellites. It grew and grew, till it towered
enormous; and then I plunged amid a streaming multitude of clashing stones and
dancing dust-particles and gas-eddies, and saw for a moment the mighty triple
belt like three concentric arches of moonlight above me, its shadow black on the
boiling tumult below. These things happened in one-tenth of the time it takes to
tell them. The planet went by like a flash of lightning; for a few seconds it blotted
out the sun, and there and then became a mere black, dwindling, winged patch
against the light. The earth, the mother mote of my being, I could no longer see.
So with a stately swiftness, in the profoundest silence, the solar system fell from
me as it had been a garment, until the sun was a mere star amid the multitude of
stars, with its eddy of planet-specks lost in the confused glittering of the remoter
light. I was no longer a denizen of the solar system: I had come to the outer
Universe, I seemed to grasp and comprehend the whole world of matter. Ever
more swiftly the stars closed in about the spot where Antares and Vega had
vanished in a phosphorescent haze, until that part of the sky had the semblance of
a whirling mass of nebulae, and ever before me yawned vaster gaps of vacant
blackness, and the stars shone fewer and fewer. It seemed as if I moved towards a
point between Orion's belt and sword; and the void about that region opened
vaster and vaster every second, an incredible gulf of nothingness into which I
was falling. Faster and ever faster the universe rushed by, a hurry of whirling
motes at last, speeding silently into the void. Stars glowing brighter and brighter,
with their circling planets catching the light in a ghostly fashion as I neared them,
shone out and vanished again into inexistence; faint comets, clusters of
meteorites, winking specks of matter, eddying light-points, whizzed past, some
perhaps a hundred millions of miles or so from me at most, few nearer, travelling
with unimaginable rapidity, shooting constellations, momentary darts of fire,
through that black, enormous night. More than anything else it was like a dusty
draught, sunbeam-lit. Broader and wider and deeper grew the starless space, the
vacant Beyond, into which I was being drawn. At last a quarter of the heavens
was black and blank, and the whole headlong rush of stellar universe closed in
behind me like a veil of light that is gathered together. It drove away from me
like a monstrous jack-o'-lantern driven by the wind. I had come out into the
wilderness of space. Ever the vacant blackness grew broader, until the hosts of
the stars seemed only like a swarm of fiery specks hurrying away from me,
inconceivably remote, and the darkness, the nothingness and emptiness, was
about me on every side. Soon the little universe of matter, the cage of points in
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which I had begun to be, was dwindling, now to a whirling disc of luminous
glittering, and now to one minute disc of hazy light. In a little while it would
shrink to a point, and at last would vanish altogether.
Suddenly feeling came back to me--feeling in the shape of overwhelming terror;
such a dread of those dark vastitudes as no words can describe, a passionate
resurgence of sympathy and social desire. Were there other souls, invisible to me
as I to them, about me in the blackness? Or was I indeed, even as I felt, alone?
Had I passed out of being into something that was neither being nor not-being?
The covering of the body, the covering of matter, had been torn from me, and the
hallucinations of companionship and security. Everything was black and silent. I
had ceased to be. I was nothing. There was nothing, save only that infinitesimal
dot of light that dwindled in the gulf. I strained myself to hear and see, and for a
while there was naught but infinite silence, intolerable darkness, horror, and
despair.
Then I saw that about the spot of light into which the whole world of matter had
shrunk there was a faint glow. And in a band on either side of that the darkness
was not absolute. I watched it for ages, as it seemed to me, and through the long
waiting the haze grew imperceptibly more distinct. And then about the band
appeared an irregular cloud of the faintest, palest brown. I felt a passionate
impatience; but the things grew brighter so slowly that they scarce seemed to
change. What was unfolding itself? What was this strange reddish dawn in the
interminable night of space?
The cloud's shape was grotesque. It seemed to be looped along its lower side into
four projecting masses, and above, it ended in a straight line. What phantom was
it? I felt assured I had seen that figure before; but I could not think what, nor
where, nor when it was. Then the realisation rushed upon me. It was a clenched
Hand. I was alone in space, alone with this huge, shadowy Hand, upon which the
whole Universe of Matter lay like an unconsidered speck of dust. It seemed as
though I watched it through vast periods of time. On the forefinger glittered a
ring; and the universe from which I had come was but a spot of light upon the
ring's curvature. And the thing that the hand gripped had the likeness of a black
rod. Through a long eternity I watched this Hand, with the ring and the rod,
marvelling and fearing and waiting helplessly on what might follow. It seemed as
though nothing could follow: that I should watch for ever, seeing only the Hand
and the thing it held, and understanding nothing of its import. Was the whole
universe but a refracting speck upon some greater Being? Were our worlds but
the atoms of another universe, and those again of another, and so on through an
endless progression? And what was I? Was I indeed immaterial? A vague
persuasion of a body gathering about me came into my suspense. The abysmal
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darkness about the Hand filled with impalpable suggestions, with uncertain,
fluctuating shapes.
Came a sound, like the sound of a tolling bell: faint, as if infinitely far; muffled,
as though heard through thick swathings of darkness: a deep, vibrating
resonance, with vast gulfs of silence between each stroke. And the Hand
appeared to tighten on the rod. And I saw far above the Hand, towards the apex
of the darkness, a circle of dim phosphorescence, a ghostly sphere whence these
sounds came throbbing; and at the last stroke the Hand vanished, for the hour had
come, and I heard a noise of many waters. But the black rod remained as a great
band across the sky. And then a voice, which seemed to run to the uttermost parts
of space, spoke, saying, "There will be no more pain."
At that an almost intolerable gladness and radiance rushed in upon me, and I saw
the circle shining white and bright, and the rod black and shining, and many
things else distinct and clear. And the circle was the face of the clock, and the rod
the rail of my bed. Haddon was standing at the foot, against the rail, with a small
pair of scissors on his fingers; and the hands of my clock on the mantel over his
shoulder were clasped together over the hour of twelve. Mowbray was washing
something in a basin at the octagonal table, and at my side I felt a subdued
feeling that could scarce be spoken of as pain.
The operation had not killed me. And I perceived, suddenly, that the dull
melancholy of half a year was lifted from my mind.
THE SEA RAIDERS
1.
Until the extraordinary affair at Sidmouth, the peculiar species Haploteuthis
ferox was known to science only generically, on the strength of a half-digested
tentacle obtained near the Azores, and a decaying body pecked by birds and
nibbled by fish, found early in 1896 by Mr. Jennings, near Land's End.
In no department of zoological science, indeed are we quite so much in the dark
as with regard to the deep-sea cephalopods. A mere accident, for instance, it was
that led to the Prince of Monaco's discovery of nearly a dozen new forms in the
summer of 1895, a discovery in which the before-mentioned tentacle was
included. It chanced that a cachalot was killed off Terceira by some sperm
whalers, and in its last struggles charged almost to the Prince's yacht, missed it,
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rolled under, and died within twenty yards of his rudder. And in its agony it
threw up a number of large objects, which the Prince, dimly perceiving they were
strange and important, was by a happy expedient, able to secure before they sank.
He set his screws in motion, and kept them circling in the vortices thus created
until a boat could be lowered. And these specimens were whole cephalopods and
fragments of cephalopods, some of gigantic proportions, and almost all of them
unknown to science!
It would seem, indeed, that these large and agile creatures, living in the middle
depths of the sea, must to a large extent, for ever remain unknown to us, since
under water they are too nimble for nets, and it is only by such rare, unlooked-for
accidents that specimens can be obtained. In the case of Haploteuthis ferox, for
instance, we are still altogether ignorant of its habitat, as ignorant as we are of the
breeding-ground of the herring or the sea-ways of the salmon. And zoologists are
altogether at a loss to account for its sudden appearance on our coast. Possibly it
was the stress of a hunger migration that drove it hither out of the deep. But it
will be, perhaps, better to avoid necessarily inconclusive discussion, and to
proceed at once with our narrative.
The first human being to set eyes upon a living Haploteuthis--the first human
being to survive, that is, for there can be little doubt now that the wave of bathing
fatalities and boating accidents that travelled along the coast of Cornwall and
Devon in early May was due to this cause--was a retired tea-dealer of the name
of Fison, who was stopping at a Sidmouth boarding-house. It was in the
afternoon, and he was walking along the cliff path between Sidmouth and
Ladram Bay. The cliffs in this direction are very high, but down the red face of
them in one place a kind of ladder staircase has been made. He was near this
when his attention was attracted by what at first he thought to be a cluster of
birds struggling over a fragment of food that caught the sunlight, and glistened
pinkish-white. The tide was right out, and this object was not only far below him,
but remote across a broad waste of rock reefs covered with dark seaweed and
interspersed with silvery shining tidal pools. And he was, moreover dazzled by
the brightness of the further water.
In a minute, regarding this again, he perceived that his judgment was in fault, for
over this struggle circled a number of birds, jackdaws and gulls for the most part,
the latter gleaming blindingly when the sunlight smote their wings, and they
seemed minute in comparison with it. And his curiosity was, perhaps aroused all
the more strongly because of his first insufficient explanations.
As he had nothing better to do than amuse himself, he decided to make this
object, whatever it was, the goal of his afternoon walk, instead of Ladram Bay,
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conceiving it might perhaps be a great fish of some sort, stranded by some
chance, and flapping about in its distress. And so he hurried down the long steep
ladder, stopping at intervals of thirty feet or so to take breath and scan the
mysterious movement.
At the foot of the cliff he was, of course, nearer his object than he had been; but,
on the other hand, it now came up against the incandescent sky, beneath the sun,
so as to seem dark and indistinct. Whatever was pinkish of it was now hidden by
a skerry of weedy boulders. But he perceived that it was made up of seven
rounded bodies distinct or connected, and that the birds kept up a constant
croaking and screaming, but seemed afraid to approach it too closely.
Mr. Fison, torn by curiosity, began picking his way across the wave-worn rocks,
and finding the wet seaweed that covered them thickly rendered them extremely
slippery, he stopped, removed his shoes and socks, and rolled his trousers above
his knees. His object was, of course, merely to avoid stumbling into the rocky
pools about him, and perhaps he was rather glad, as all men are, of an excuse to
resume, even for a moment, the sensations of his boyhood. At any rate, it is to
this, no doubt, that he owes his life.
He approached his mark with all the assurance which the absolute security of this
country against all forms of animal life gives its inhabitants. The round bodies
moved to and fro, but it was only when he surmounted the skerry of boulders, I
have mentioned, that he realised the horrible nature of the discovery. It came
upon him with some suddenness.
The rounded bodies fell apart as he came into sight over the ridge, and displayed
the pinkish object to be the partially devoured body of a human being, but
whether of a man or woman he was unable to say. And the rounded bodies were
new and ghastly-looking creatures, in shape somewhat resembling an octopus,
with huge and very long and flexible tentacles, coiled copiously on the ground.
The skin had a glistening texture, unpleasant to see, like shiny leather. The
downward bend of the tentacle-surrounded mouth, the curious excrescence at the
bend, the tentacles, and the large intelligent eyes, gave the creatures a grotesque
suggestion of a face. They were the size of a fair-sized swine about the body, and
the tentacles seemed to him to be many feet in length. There were, he thinks,
seven or eight at least of the creatures. Twenty yards beyond them, amid the surf
of the now returning tide, two others were emerging from the sea.
Their bodies lay flatly on the rocks, and their eyes regarded him with evil
interest; but it does not appear that Mr. Fison was afraid, or that he realised that
he was in any danger. Possibly his confidence is to be ascribed to the limpness of
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their attitudes. But he was horrified, of course, and intensely excited and
indignant, at such revolting creatures preying upon human flesh. He thought they
had chanced upon a drowned body. He shouted to them, with the idea of driving
them off, and finding they did not budge, cast about him, picked up a big rounded
lump of rock, and flung it at one.
And then, slowly uncoiling their tentacles, they all began moving towards him-creeping at first deliberately, and making a soft purring sound to each other.
In a moment Mr. Fison realised that he was in danger. He shouted again, threw
both his boots, and started off, with a leap, forthwith. Twenty yards off he
stopped and faced about, judging them slow, and behold! The tentacles of their
leader were already pouring over the rocky ridge on which he had just been
standing!
At that he shouted again, but this time not threatening, but a cry of dismay, and
began jumping, striding, slipping, wading across the uneven expanse between
him and the beach. The tall red cliffs seemed suddenly at a vast distance, and he
saw, as though they were creatures in another world, two minute workmen
engaged in the repair of the ladder-way, and little suspecting the race for life that
was beginning below them. At one time he could hear the creatures splashing in
the pools not a dozen feet behind him, and once he slipped and almost fell.
They chased him to the very foot of the cliffs, and desisted only when he had
been joined by the workmen at the foot of the ladder-way up the cliff. All three
of the men pelted them with stones for a time, and then hurried to the cliff top
and along the path towards Sidmouth, to secure assistance and a boat, and to
rescue the desecrated body from the clutches of these abominable creatures.
2.
And as if he had not already been in sufficient peril that day, Mr. Fison went with
the boat to point out the exact spot of his adventure.
As the tide was down, it required a considerable detour to reach the spot, and
when at last they came off the ladder-way, the mangled body had disappeared.
The water was now running in, submerging first one slab of slimy rock and then
another, and the four men in the boat--the workmen, that is, the boatman, and Mr.
Fison--now turned their attention from the bearings off shore to the water beneath
the keel.
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At first they could see little below them, save a dark jungle of laminaria, with an
occasional darting fish. Their minds were set on adventure, and they expressed
their disappointment freely. But presently they saw one of the monsters
swimming through the water seaward, with a curious rolling motion that
suggested to Mr. Fison the spinning roll of a captive balloon. Almost
immediately after, the waving streamers of laminaria were extraordinarily
perturbed, parted for a moment, and three of these beasts became darkly visible,
struggling for what was probably some fragment of the drowned man. In a
moment the copious olive-green ribbons had poured again over this writhing
group.
At that all four men, greatly excited, began beating the water with oars and
shouting, and immediately they saw a tumultuous movement among the weeds.
They desisted to see more clearly, and as soon as the water was smooth, they
saw, as it seemed to them, the whole sea bottom among the weeds set with eyes.
"Ugly swine!" cried one of the men. "Why, there's dozens!"
And forthwith the things began to rise through the water about them. Mr. Fison
has since described to the writer this startling eruption out of the waving
laminaria meadows. To him it seemed to occupy a considerable time, but it is
probable that really it was an affair of a few seconds only. For a time nothing but
eyes, and then he speaks of tentacles streaming out and parting the weed fronds
this way and that. Then these things, growing larger, until at last the bottom was
hidden by their intercoiling forms, and the tips of tentacles rose darkly here and
there into the air above the swell of the waters.
One came up boldly to the side of the boat, and clinging to this with three of its
sucker-set tentacles, threw four others over the gunwale, as if with an intention
either of oversetting the boat or of clambering into it. Mr. Fison at once caught
up the boathook, and jabbing furiously at the soft tentacles, forced it to desist. He
was struck in the back and almost pitched overboard by the boatman, who was
using his oar to resist a similar attack on the other side of the boat. But the
tentacles on either side at once relaxed their hold, slid out of sight, and splashed
into the water.
"We'd better get out of this," said Mr. Fison, who was trembling violently. He
went to the tiller, while the boatman and one of the workmen seated themselves
and began rowing. The other workman stood up in the fore part of the boat, with
the boathook, ready to strike any more tentacles that might appear. Nothing else
seems to have been said. Mr. Fison had expressed the common feeling beyond
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amendment. In a hushed, scared mood, with faces white and drawn, they set
about escaping from the position into which they had so recklessly blundered.
But the oars had scarcely dropped into the water before dark, tapering, serpentine
ropes had bound them, and were about the rudder; and creeping up the sides of
the boat with a looping motion came the suckers again. The men gripped their
oars and pulled, but it was like trying to move a boat in a floating raft of weeds.
"Help here!" cried the boatman, and Mr. Fison and the second workman rushed
to help lug at the oar.
Then the man with the boathook--his name was Ewan, or Ewen--sprang up with a
curse and began striking downward over the side, as far as he could reach, at the
bank of tentacles that now clustered along the boat's bottom. And, at the same
time, the two rowers stood up to get a better purchase for the recovery of their
oars. The boatman handed his to Mr. Fison, who lugged desperately, and
meanwhile, the boatman opened a big clasp-knife, and leaning over the side of
the boat, began hacking at the spiralling arms upon the oar shaft.
Mr. Fison, staggering with the quivering rocking of the boat, his teeth set, his
breath coming short, and the veins starting on his hands as he pulled at his oar,
suddenly cast his eyes seaward. And there, not fifty yards off, across the long
rollers of the incoming tide, was a large boat standing in towards them, with three
women and a little child in it. A boatman was rowing, and a little man in a pinkribboned straw hat and whites stood in the stern hailing them. For a moment, of
course, Mr. Fison thought of help, and then he thought of the child. He
abandoned his oar forthwith, threw up his arms in a frantic gesture, and screamed
to the party in the boat to keep away "for God's sake!" It says much for the
modesty and courage of Mr. Fison that he does not seem to be aware that there
was any quality of heroism in his action at this juncture. The oar he had
abandoned was at once drawn under, and presently reappeared floating about
twenty yards away.
At the same moment Mr. Fison felt the boat under him lurch violently, and a
hoarse scream, a prolonged cry of terror from Hill, the boatman, caused him to
forget the party of excursionists altogether. He turned, and saw Hill crouching by
the forward rowlock, his face convulsed with terror, and his right arm over the
side and drawn tightly down. He gave now a succession of short, sharp cries,
"Oh! Oh! Oh--! Oh!" Mr. Fison believes that he must have been hacking at the
tentacles below the water-line, and have been grasped by them, but of course, it
is quite impossible to say now certainly what had happened. The boat was
heeling over, so that the gunwale was within ten inches of the water, and both
Ewan and the other labourer were striking down into the water, with oar and
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boathook, on either side of Hill's arm. Mr. Fison instinctively placed himself to
counterpoise them.
Then Hill, who was a burly, powerful man, made a strenuous effort, and rose
almost to a standing position. He lifted his arm, indeed, clean out of the water.
Hanging to it was a complicated tangle of brown ropes, and the eyes of one of the
brutes that had hold of him, glaring straight and resolute, showed momentarily
above the surface. The boat heeled more and more, and the green-brown water
came pouring in a cascade over the side. Then Hill slipped and fell with his ribs
across the side, and his arm and the mass of tentacles about it splashed back into
the water. He rolled over; his boot kicked Mr. Fison's knee as that gentleman
rushed forward to seize him, and in another moment fresh tentacles had whipped
about his waist and neck, and after a brief, convulsive struggle, in which the boat
was nearly capsized, Hill was lugged overboard. The boat righted with a violent
jerk that all but sent Mr. Fison over the other side, and hid the struggle in the
water from his eyes.
He stood staggering to recover his balance for a moment, and as he did so he
became aware that the struggle and the inflowing tide had carried them close
upon the weedy rocks again. Not four yards off a table of rock still rose in
rhythmic movements above the in-wash of the tide. In a moment Mr. Fison
seized the oar from Ewan, gave one vigorous stroke, then dropping it, ran to the
bows and leapt. He felt his feet slide over the rock, and by a frantic effort, leapt
again towards a further mass. He stumbled over this, came to his knees, and rose
again.
"Look out!" cried someone, and a large drab body struck him. He was knocked
flat into a tidal pool by one of the workmen, and as he went down he heard
smothered, choking cries, that he believed at the time came from Hill. Then he
found himself marvelling at the shrillness and variety of Hill's voice. Someone
jumped over him, and a curving rush of foamy water poured over him, and
passed. He scrambled to his feet dripping, and without looking seaward, ran as
fast as his terror would let him shoreward. Before him, over the flat space of
scattered rocks, stumbled the two workmen--one a dozen yards in front of the
other.
He looked over his shoulder at last, and seeing that he was not pursued, faced
about. He was astonished. From the moment of the rising of the cephalopods out
of the water he had been acting too swiftly to fully comprehend his actions. Now
it seemed to him as if he had suddenly jumped out of an evil dream.
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For there were the sky, cloudless and blazing with the afternoon sun, the sea
weltering under its pitiless brightness, the soft creamy foam of the breaking
water, and the low, long, dark ridges of rock. The righted boat floated, rising and
falling gently on the swell about a dozen yards from shore. Hill and the monsters,
all the stress and tumult of that fierce fight for life, had vanished as though they
had never been.
Mr. Fison's heart was beating violently; he was throbbing to the finger-tips, and
his breath came deep.
There was something missing. For some seconds he could not think clearly
enough what this might be. Sun, sky, sea, rocks--what was it? Then he
remembered the boatload of excursionists. It had vanished. He wondered whether
he had imagined it. He turned, and saw the two workmen standing side by side
under the projecting masses of the tall pink cliffs. He hesitated whether he should
make one last attempt to save the man Hill. His physical excitement seemed to
desert him suddenly, and leave him aimless and helpless. He turned shoreward,
stumbling and wading towards his two companions.
He looked back again, and there were now two boats floating, and the one
farthest out at sea pitched clumsily, bottom upward.
3.
So it was Haploteuthis ferox made its appearance upon the Devonshire coast. So
far, this has been its most serious aggression. Mr. Fison's account, taken together
with the wave of boating and bathing casualties to which I have already alluded,
and the absence of fish from the Cornish coasts that year, points clearly to a shoal
of these voracious deep-sea monsters prowling slowly along the sub-tidal
coastline. Hunger migration has, I know, been suggested as the force that drove
them hither; but, for my own part, I prefer to believe the alternative theory of
Hemsley. Hemsley holds that a pack or shoal of these creatures may have
become enamoured of human flesh by the accident of a foundered ship sinking
among them, and have wandered in search of it out of their accustomed zone;
first way-laying and following ships, and so coming to our shores in the wake of
the Atlantic traffic. But to discuss Hemsley's cogent and admirably-stated
arguments would be out of place here.
It would seem that the appetites of the shoal were satisfied by the catch of eleven
people--for, so far as can be ascertained, there were ten people in the second
boat, and certainly these creatures gave no further signs of their presence off
Sidmouth that day. The coast between Seaton and Budleigh Salterton was
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patrolled all that evening and night by four Preventive Service boats, the men in
which were armed with harpoons and cutlasses, and as the evening advanced, a
number of more or less similarly equipped expeditions, organised by private
individuals, joined them. Mr. Fison took no part in any of these expeditions.
About midnight excited hails were heard from a boat about a couple of miles out
at sea to the south-east of Sidmouth, and a lantern was seen waving in a strange
manner to and fro and up and down. The nearer boats at once hurried towards the
alarm. The venturesome occupants of the boat, a seaman, a curate, and two
schoolboys, had actually seen the monsters passing under their boat. The
creatures, it seems, like most deep-sea organisms, were phosphorescent, and they
had been floating, five fathoms deep or so, like creatures of moonshine through
the blackness of the water, their tentacles retracted and as if asleep, rolling over
and over, and moving slowly in a wedge-like formation towards the south-east.
These people told their story in gesticulated fragments, as first one boat drew
alongside and then another. At last there was a little fleet of eight or nine boats
collected together, and from them a tumult, like the chatter of a marketplace, rose
into the stillness of the night. There was little or no disposition to pursue the
shoal, the people had neither weapons nor experience for such a dubious chase,
and presently--even with a certain relief, it may be--the boats turned shoreward.
And now to tell what is perhaps the most astonishing fact in this whole
astonishing raid. We have not the slightest knowledge of the subsequent
movements of the shoal, although the whole south-west coast was now alert for
it. But it may, perhaps, be significant that a cachalot was stranded off Sark on
June 3. Two weeks and three days after this Sidmouth affair, a living
Haploteuthis came ashore on Calais sands. It was alive, because several
witnesses saw its tentacles moving in a convulsive way. But it is probable that it
was dying. A gentleman named Pouchet obtained a rifle and shot it.
That was the last appearance of a living Haploteuthis. No others were seen on the
French coast. On the 15th of June a dead carcass, almost complete, was washed
ashore near Torquay, and a few days later a boat from the Marine Biological
station, engaged in dredging off Plymouth, picked up a rotting specimen, slashed
deeply with a cutlass wound. How the former had come by its death it is
impossible to say. And on the last day of June, Mr. Egbert Caine, an artist,
bathing near Newlyn, threw up his arms, shrieked, and was drawn under. A
friend bathing with him made no attempt to save him, but swam at once for the
shore. This is the last fact to tell of this extraordinary raid from the deeper sea.
Whether it is really the last of these horrible creatures it is, as yet, premature to
say. But it is believed, and certainly it is to be hoped, that they have returned
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now, and returned for good, to the sunless depths of the middle seas, out of which
they have so strangely and so mysteriously arisen.
POLLOCK AND THE PORROH MAN
It was in a swampy village on the lagoon river behind the Turner Peninsula that
Pollock's first encounter with the Porroh man occurred. The women of that
country are famous for their good looks--they are Gallinas with a dash of
European blood that dates from the days of Vasco da Gama and the English
slave-traders, and the Porroh man too, was possibly inspired by a faint Caucasian
taint in his composition. (It's a curious thing to think that some of us may have
distant cousins eating men on Sherboro Island or raiding with the Sofas.) At
anyrate, the Porroh man stabbed the woman to the heart as though he had been a
mere low-class Italian, and very narrowly missed Pollock. But Pollock, using his
revolver to parry the lightning stab which was aimed at his deltoid muscle, sent
the iron dagger flying, and firing, hit the man in the hand.
He fired again and missed, knocking a sudden window out of the wall of the hut.
The Porroh man stooped in the doorway, glancing under his arm at Pollock.
Pollock caught a glimpse of his inverted face in the sunlight, and then the
Englishman was alone, sick and trembling with the excitement of the affair, in
the twilight of the place. It had all happened in less time than it takes to read
about it.
The woman was quite dead, and having ascertained this, Pollock went to the
entrance of the hut and looked out. Things outside were dazzling bright. Half a
dozen of the porters of the expedition were standing up in a group near the green
huts they occupied, and staring towards him, wondering what the shots might
signify. Behind the little group of men was the broad stretch of black fetid mud
by the river, a green carpet of rafts of papyrus and water-grass, and then the
leaden water. The mangroves beyond the stream loomed indistinctly through the
blue haze. There were no signs of excitement in the squat village, whose fence
was just visible above the cane-grass.
Pollock came out of the hut cautiously and walked towards the river, looking
over his shoulder at intervals. But the Porroh man had vanished Pollock clutched
his revolver nervously in his hand.
One of his men came to meet him, and as he came, pointed to the bushes behind
the hut in which the Porroh man had disappeared. Pollock had an irritating
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persuasion of having made an absolute fool of himself; he felt bitter, savage, at
the turn things had taken. At the same time, he would have to tell Waterhouse-the moral, exemplary, cautious Waterhouse--who would inevitably take the
matter seriously. Pollock cursed bitterly at his luck, at Waterhouse, and
especially at the West Coast of Africa. He felt consummately sick of the
expedition. And in the back of his mind all the time was a speculative doubt
where precisely within the visible horizon the Porroh man might be.
It is perhaps rather shocking, but he was not at all upset by the murder that had
just happened. He had seen so much brutality during the last three months, so
many dead women, burnt huts, drying skeletons, up the Kittam River in the wake
of the Sofa cavalry, that his senses were blunted. What disturbed him was the
persuasion that this business was only beginning.
He swore savagely at the black, who ventured to ask a question, and went on into
the tent under the orange-trees where Waterhouse was lying, feeling
exasperatingly like a boy going into the headmaster's study.
Waterhouse was still sleeping off the effects of his last dose of chlorodyne, and
Pollock sat down on a packing-case beside him, and lighting his pipe, waited for
him to awake. About him were scattered the pots and weapons Waterhouse had
collected from the Mendi people, and which he had been repacking for the canoe
voyage to Sulyma.
Presently Waterhouse woke up, and after judicial stretching, decided he was all
right again. Pollock got him some tea. Over the tea, the incidents of the afternoon
were described by Pollock, after some preliminary beating about the bush.
Waterhouse took the matter even more seriously than Pollock had anticipated. He
did not simply disapprove, he scolded, he insulted.
"You're one of those infernal fools who think a black man isn't a human being,"
he said. "I can't be ill a day without you must get into some dirty scrape or other.
This is the third time in a month that you have come crossways-on with a native,
and this time you're in for it with a vengance. Porroh, too! They're down upon
you enough as it is, about that idol you wrote your silly name on. And they're the
most vindictive devils on earth! You make a man ashamed of civilisation. To
think you come of a decent family! If ever I cumber myself up with a vicious,
stupid young lout like you again--"
"Steady on, now," snarled Pollock, in the tone that always exasperated
Waterhouse; "steady on."
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At that Waterhouse became speechless. He jumped to his feet.
"Look here, Pollock," he said, after a struggle to control his breath. "You must go
home. I won't have you any longer. I'm ill enough as it is, through you--"
"Keep your hair on," said Pollock, staring in front of him. "I'm ready enough to
go."
Waterhouse became calmer again. He sat down on the camp-stool. "Very well,"
he said. "I don't want a row, Pollock you know, but it's confoundedly annoying to
have one's plans put out by this kind of thing. I'll come to Sulyma with you, and
see you safe aboard--"
"You needn't," said Pollock. "I can go alone. From here."
"Not far," said Waterhouse. "You don't understand this Porroh business."
"How should I know she belonged to a Porroh man?" said Pollock bitterly.
"Well, she did," said Waterhouse; "and you can't undo the thing. Go alone,
indeed! I wonder what they'd do to you. You don't seem to understand that this
Porroh hokey-pokey rules this country, is its law, religion, constitution, medicine,
magic...They appoint the chiefs. The Inquisition, at its best, couldn't hold a
candle to these chaps. He will probably set Awajale, the chief here, on to us. It's
lucky our porters are Mendis. We shall have to shift this little settlement of ours...
Confound you, Pollock! And, of course, you must go and miss him."
He thought, and his thoughts seemed disagreeable. Presently he stood up and
took his rifle. "I'd keep close for a bit, if I were you," he said, over his shoulder,
as he went out. "I'm going out to see what I can find out about it."
Pollock remained sitting in the tent, meditating. "I was meant for a civilised life,"
he said to himself, regretfully, as he filled his pipe. "The sooner I get back to
London or Paris the better for me."
His eye fell on the sealed case in which Waterhouse had put the featherless
poisoned arrows they had bought in the Mendi country. "I wish I had hit the
beggar somewhere vital," said Pollock viciously.
Waterhouse came back after a long interval. He was not communicative, though
Pollock asked him questions enough. The Porroh man, it seems was a prominent
member of that mystical society. The village was interested, but not threatening.
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No doubt the witch-doctor had gone into the bush. He was a great witch-doctor.
"Of course, he's up to something," said Waterhouse, and became silent.
"But what can he do?" asked Pollock, unheeded.
"I must get you out of this. There's something brewing, or things would not be so
quiet," said Waterhouse, after a gap of silence. Pollock wanted to know what the
brew might be. "Dancing in a circle of skulls", said Waterhouse; "brewing a stink
in a copper pot." Pollock wanted particulars. Waterhouse was vague, Pollock
pressing. At last Waterhouse lost his temper. "How the devil should I know?" he
said to Pollock's twentieth inquiry what the Porroh man would do. "He tried to
kill you off-hand in the hut. Now, I fancy he will try something more elaborate.
But you'll see fast enough. I don't want to help unnerve you. It's probably all
nonsense."
That night, as they were sitting at their fire, Pollock again tried to draw
Waterhouse out on the subject of Porroh methods. "Better get to sleep," said
Waterhouse, when Pollock's bent became apparent; "we start early to-morrow.
You may want all your nerve about you."
"But what line will he take?"
"Can't say. They're versatile people. They know a lot of rum dodges. You'd better
get that copper-devil, Shakespear, to talk."
There was a flash and a heavy bang, out of the darkness behind the huts, and a
clay bullet came whistling close to Pollock's head. This, at least, was crude
enough. The blacks and half-breeds sitting and yarning round their own fire
jumped up, and someone fired into the dark.
"Better go into one of the huts," said Waterhouse quietly, still sitting unmoved.
Pollock stood up by the fire and drew his revolver. Fighting, at least, he was not
afraid of. But a man in the dark is in the best of armour. Realising the wisdom of
Waterhouse's advice, Pollock went into the tent and lay down there.
What little sleep he had was disturbed by dreams, variegated dreams, but chiefly
of the Porroh man's face, upside down, as he went out of the hut, and looked up
under his arm. It was odd that this transitory impression should have stuck so
firmly in Pollock's memory. Moreover, he was troubled by queer pains in his
limbs.
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In the white haze of the early morning, as they were loading the canoes, a barbed
arrow suddenly appeared quivering in the ground close to Pollock's foot. The
boys made a perfunctory effort to clear out the thicket, but it led to no capture.
After these two occurrences, there was a disposition on the part of the expedition
to leave Pollock to himself, and Pollock became, for the first time in his life,
anxious to mingle with blacks. Waterhouse took one canoe, and Pollock, in spite
of a friendly desire to chat with Waterhouse, had to take the other. He was left all
alone in the front part of the canoe, and he had the greatest trouble to make the
men--who did not love him--keep to the middle of the river, a clear hundred
yards or more from either shore. However, he made Shakespear, the Freetown
half-breed, come up to his own end of the canoe and tell him about Porroh, which
Shakespear, failing in his attempts to leave Pollock alone, presently did with
considerable freedom and gusto.
The day passed. The canoe glided swiftly along the ribbon of lagoon water,
between the drift of water-figs, fallen trees, papyrus, and palm-wine palms, and
with the dark mangrove swamp to the left, through which one could hear now
and then the roar of the Atlantic surf. Shakespear told in his soft, blurred English
of how the Porroh could cast spells; how men withered up under their malice;
how they could send dreams and devils; how they tormented and killed the sons
of Ijibu; how they kidnapped a white trader from Sulyma who had maltreated one
of the sect, and how his body looked when it was found. And Pollock after each
narrative cursed under his breath at the want of missionary enterprise that
allowed such things to be, and at the inert British Government that ruled over this
dark heathendom of Sierra Leone. In the evening they came to the Kasi Lake, and
sent a score of crocodiles lumbering off the island on which the expedition
camped for the night.
The next day they reached Sulyma, and smelt the sea breeze, but Pollock had to
put up there for five days before he could get on to Freetown. Waterhouse,
considering him to be comparatively safe here, and within the pale of Freetown
influence, left him and went back with the expedition to Gbemma, and Pollock
became very friendly with Perera, the only resident white trader at Sulyma--so
friendly, indeed, that he went about with him everywhere. Perera was a little
Portuguese Jew, who had lived in England, and he appreciated the Englishman's
friendliness as a great compliment.
For two days nothing happened out of the ordinary; for the most part Pollock and
Perera played Nap--the only game they had in common--and Pollock got into
debt. Then, on the second evening, Pollock had a disagreeable intimation of the
arrival of the Porroh man in Sulyma by getting a flesh-wound in the shoulder
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from a lump of filed iron. It was a long shot, and the missile had nearly spent its
force when it hit him. Still it conveyed its message plainly enough. Pollock sat up
in his hammock, revolver in hand, all that night, and next morning confided, to
some extent, in the Anglo-Portuguese.
Perera took the matter seriously. He knew the local customs pretty thoroughly.
"It is a personal question, you must know. It is revenge. And of course he is
hurried by your leaving de country. None of de natives or half-breeds will
interfere wid him very much--unless you make it wort deir while. If you come
upon him suddenly, you might shoot him. But den he might shoot you.
"Den dere's dis--infernal magic," said Perera. "Of course, I don't believe in it-superstition--but still it's not nice to tink dat wherever you are, dere is a black
man, who spends a moonlight night now and den a-dancing about a fire to send
you bad dreams...Had any bad dreams?"
"Rather," said Pollock. "I keep on seeing the beggar's head upside down grinning
at me and showing all his teeth as he did in the hut, and coming close up to me,
and then going ever so far off, and coming back. It's nothing to be afraid of, but
somehow it simply paralyses me with terror in my sleep. Queer things--dreams. I
know it's a dream all the time, and I can't wake up from it."
"It's probably only fancy," said Perera. "Den my niggers say Porroh men can
send snakes. Seen any snakes lately?"
"Only one. I killed him this morning, on the floor near my hammock. Almost
trod on him as I got up."
"Ah!" said Perera, and then, reassuringly, "Of course it is a--coincidence. Still I
would keep my eyes open. Den dere's pains in de bones."
"I thought they were due to miasma," said Pollock.
"Probably dey are. When did dey begin?"
Then Pollock remembered that he first noticed them the night after the fight in
the hut. "It's my opinion he don't want to kill you," said Perera--"at least not yet.
I've heard deir idea is to scare and worry a man wid deir spells, and narrow
misses, and rheumatic pains, and bad dreams, and all dat, until he's sick of life.
Of course, it's all talk, you know. You mustn't worry about it...But I wonder what
he'll be up to next."
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"I shall have to be up to something first," said Pollock, staring gloomily at the
greasy cards that Perera was putting on the table. "It don't suit my dignity to be
followed about, and shot at, and blighted in this way. I wonder if Porroh hokeypokey upsets your luck at cards."
He looked at Perera suspiciously.
"Very likely it does," said Perera warmly, shuffling. "Dey are wonderful people."
That afternoon Pollock killed two snakes in his hammock, and there was also an
extraordinary increase in the number of red ants that swarmed over the place; and
these annoyances put him in a fit temper to talk over business with a certain
Mendi rough he had interviewed before. The Mendi rough showed Pollock a
little iron dagger, and demonstrated where one struck in the neck, in a way that
made Pollock shiver, and in return for certain considerations Pollock promised
him a double-barrelled gun with an ornamental lock.
In the evening, as Pollock and Perera were playing cards, the Mendi rough came
in through the doorway, carrying something in a blood-soaked piece of native
cloth.
"Not here!" said Pollock very hurriedly. "Not here!"
But he was not quick enough to prevent the man, who was anxious to get to
Pollock's side of the bargain, from opening the cloth and throwing the head of the
Porroh man upon the table. It bounded from there on to the floor, leaving a red
trail on the cards, and rolled into the corner, where it came to rest upside down,
but glaring hard at Pollock.
Perera jumped up as the thing fell among the cards, and began in his excitement
to gabble in Portuguese. The Mendi was bowing, with the red cloth in his hand.
"De gun!" he cried. Pollock stared back at the head in the corner. It bore exactly
the expression it had in his dreams. Something seemed to snap in his own brain
as he looked at it.
Then Perera found his English again.
"You got him killed?" he said. "You did not kill him yourself?"
"Why should I?" said Pollock.
"But he will not be able to take it off now!"
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"Take what off?" said Pollock.
"And all dese cards are spoiled!"
"What do you mean by taking off?" said Pollock.
"You must send me a new pack from Freetown. You can buy dem dere.
"But--'take it off'?"
"It is only superstition. I forgot. De niggers say dat if de witches--he was a witch-But it is rubbish...You must make de Porroh man take it off, or kill him
yourself...It is very silly."
Pollock swore under his breath, still staring hard at the head in the corner.
"I can't stand that glare," he said. Then suddenly he rushed at the thing and
kicked it. It rolled some yards or so, and came to rest in the same position as
before, upside down, and looking at him.
"He is ugly," said the Anglo-Portuguese. "Very ugly. Dey do it on deir faces with
little knives."
Pollock would have kicked the head again, but the Mendi man touched him on
the arm. "De gun?" he said, looking nervously at the head.
"Two--if you will take that beastly thing away," said Pollock.
The Mendi shook his head, and intimated that he only wanted one gun now due
to him, and for which he would be obliged. Pollock found neither cajolery nor
bullying any good with him. Perera had a gun to sell (at a profit of three hundred
per cent), and with that the man presently departed. Then Pollock's eyes, against
his will, were recalled to the thing on the floor.
"It is funny dat his head keeps upside down," said Perera, with an uneasy laugh.
"His brains must be heavy, like de weight in de little images one sees dat keep
always upright wid lead in dem. You will take him wiv you when you go
presently. You might take him now. De cards are all spoilt. Dere is a man sell
dem in Freetown. De room is in a filthy mess as it is. You should have killed him
yourself."
Pollock pulled himself together, and went and picked up the head. He would
hang it up by the lamp-hook in the middle of the ceiling of his room, and dig a
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grave for it at once. He was under the impression that he hung it up by the hair,
but that must have been wrong, for when he returned for it, it was hanging by the
neck upside down.
He buried it before sunset on the north side of the shed he occupied, so that he
should not have to pass the grave after dark when he was returning from Perera's.
He killed two snakes before he went to sleep. In the darkest part of the night he
awoke with a start, and heard a pattering sound and something scraping on the
floor. He sat up noiselessly, and felt under his pillow for his revolver. A
mumbling growl followed, and Pollock fired at the sound. There was a yelp, and
something dark passed for a moment across the hazy blue of the doorway. "A
dog!" said Pollock, lying down again.
In the early dawn he awoke again with a peculiar sense of unrest. The vague pain
in his bones had returned. For some time he lay watching the red ants that were
swarming over the ceiling, and then, as the light grew brighter, he looked over
the edge of his hammock and saw something dark on the floor. He gave such a
violent start that the hammock overset and flung him out.
He found himself lying, perhaps, a yard away from the head of the Porroh man. It
had been disinterred by the dog, and the nose was grievously battered. Ants and
flies swarmed over it. By an odd coincidence, it was still upside down, and with
the same diabolical expression in the inverted eyes.
Pollock sat paralysed, and stared at the horror for some time. Then he got up and
walked round it--giving it a wide berth--and out of the shed. The clear light of the
sunrise, the living stir of vegetation before the breath of the dying land-breeze,
and the empty grave with the marks of the dog's paws, lightened the weight upon
his mind a little.
He told Perera of the business as though it was a jest--a jest to be told with white
lips. "You should not have frighten de dog," said Perera, with poorly simulated
hilarity.
The next two days, until the steamer came, were spent by Pollock in making a
more effectual disposition of his possession. Overcoming his aversion to
handling the thing, he went down to the river mouth and threw it into the seawater, but by some miracle it escaped the crocodiles, and was cast up by the tide
on the mud a little way up the river, to be found by an intelligent Arab half-breed,
and offered for sale to Pollock and Perera as a curiosity, just on the edge of night.
The native hung about in the brief twilight, making lower and lower offers, and at
last, getting scared in some way by the evident dread these wise white men had
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for the thing, went off, and passing Pollock's shed, threw his burden in there for
Pollock to discover in the morning.
At this Pollock got into a kind of frenzy. He would burn the thing. He went out
straightway into the dawn, and had constructed a big pyre of brushwood before
the heat of the day. He was interrupted by the hooter of the little paddle steamer
from Monrovia to Bathurst, which was coming through the gap in the bar.
"Thank Heaven!" said Pollock, with infinite piety, when the meaning of the
sound dawned upon him. With trembling hands he lit his pile of wood hastily,
threw the head upon it, and went away to pack his portmanteau and make his
adieux to Perera.
That afternoon, with a sense of infinite relief, Pollock watched the flat swampy
foreshore of Sulyma grow small in the distance. The gap in the long line of white
surge became narrower and narrower. It seemed to be closing in and cutting him
off from his trouble. The feeling of dread and worry began to slip from him bit
by bit. At Sulyma belief in Porroh malignity and Porroh magic had been in the
air, his sense of Porroh had been vast, pervading, threatening, dreadful. Now
manifestly the domain of Porroh was only a little place, a little black band
between the sea and the blue cloudy Mendi uplands.
"Good-bye, Porroh!" said Pollock. "Good-bye--certainly not au revoir."
The captain of the steamer came and leant over the rail beside him, and wished
him good-evening, and spat at the froth of the wake in token of friendly ease.
"I picked up a rummy curio on the beach this go," said the captain. "It's a thing I
never saw done this side of Indy before."
"What might that be?" said Pollock.
"Pickled 'ed," said the captain.
"What!" said Pollock.
"'Ed--smoked. 'Ed of one of those Porroh chaps, all ornamented with knife-cuts.
Why! What's up? Nothing? I shouldn't have took you for a nervous chap. Green
in the face. By gosh! You're a bad sailor. All right, eh? Lord, how funny you
went...! Well, this 'ed I was telling you of is a bit rum in a way. I've got it, along
with some snakes, in a jar of spirit in my cabin what I keeps for such curios, and
I'm hanged if it don't float upsy down. Hullo!"
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Pollock had given an incoherent cry, and had his hands in his hair. He ran
towards the paddle-boxes with a half-formed idea of jumping into the sea, and
then he realised his position and turned back towards the captain.
"Here!" said the captain. "Jack Philips, just keep him off me! Stand off! No
nearer, mister! What's the matter with you? Are you mad?"
Pollock put his hand to his head. It was no good explaining. "I believe I am pretty
nearly mad at times," he said. "It's a pain I have here. Comes suddenly. You'll
excuse me, I hope."
He was white and in a perspiration. He saw suddenly very clearly all the danger
he ran of having his sanity doubted. He forced himself to restore the captain's
confidence, by answering his sympathetic inquiries, noting his suggestions, even
trying a spoonful of neat brandy in his cheek, and that matter settled, asking a
number of questions about the captain's private trade in curiosities. The captain
described the head in detail. All the while Pollock was struggling to keep under a
preposterous persuasion that the ship was as transparent as glass, and that he
could distinctly see the inverted face looking at him from the cabin beneath his
feet.
Pollock had a worse time almost on the steamer than he had at Sulyma. All day
he had to control himself in spite of his intense perception of the imminent
presence of that horrible head that was overshadowing his mind. At night his old
nightmare returned, until, with a violent effort, he would force himself awake,
rigid with the horror of it, and with the ghost of a hoarse scream in his throat.
He left the actual head behind at Bathurst, where he changed ship for Teneriffe,
but not his dreams nor the dull ache in his bones. At Teneriffe, Pollock
transferred to a Cape liner, but the head followed him. He gambled, he tried
chess, he even read books, but he knew the danger of drink. Yet whenever a
round black shadow, a round black object came into his range, there he looked
for the head, and--saw it. He knew clearly enough that his imagination was
growing traitor to him, and yet at times it seemed the ship he sailed in, his fellowpassengers, the sailors, the wide sea, was all part of a filmy phantasmagoria that
hung, scarcely veiling it, between him and a horrible real world. Then the Porroh
man, thrusting his diabolical face through that curtain, was the one real and
undeniable thing. At that he would get up and touch things, taste something,
gnaw something, burn his hand with a match, or run a needle into himself.
So, struggling grimly and silently with his excited imagination, Pollock reached
England. He landed at Southampton, and went on straight from Waterloo to his
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banker's in Cornhill in a cab. There he transacted some business with the
manager in a private room, and all the while the head hung like an ornament
under the black marble mantel and dripped upon the fender. He could hear the
drops fall, and see the red on the fender.
"A pretty fern," said the manager, following his eyes. "But it makes the fender
rusty."
"Very," said Pollock; "a very pretty fern. And that reminds me. Can you
recommend me a physician for mind troubles? I've got a little--what is it--?
Hallucination."
The head laughed savagely, wildly. Pollock was surprised the manager did not
notice it. But the manager only stared at his face.
With the address of a doctor, Pollock presently emerged in Cornhill. There was
no cab in sight, and so he went on down to the western end of the street, and
essayed the crossing opposite the Mansion House. The crossing is hardly easy
even for the expert Londoner; cabs, vans, carriages, mail-carts, omnibuses go by
in one incessant stream; to anyone fresh from the malarious solitudes of Sierra
Leone it is a boiling, maddening confusion. But when an inverted head suddenly
comes bouncing, like an indiarubber ball, between your legs, leaving distinct
smears of blood every time it touches the ground, you can scarcely hope to avoid
an accident. Pollock lifted his feet convulsively to avoid it, and then kicked at the
thing furiously. Then something hit him violently in the back, and a hot pain ran
up his arm.
He had been hit by the pole of an omnibus, and three of the fingers of his left
hand smashed by the hoof of one of the horses--the very fingers, as it happened,
that he shot from the Porroh man. They pulled him out from between the horse's
legs, and found the address of the physician, in his crushed hand.
For a couple of days Pollock's sensations were full of the sweet, pungent smell of
chloroform, of painful operations that caused him no pain, of lying still and being
given food and drink. Then he had a slight fever, and was very thirsty, and his
old nightmare came back. It was only when it returned that he noticed it had left
him for a day.
"If my skull had been smashed instead of my fingers, it might have gone
altogether," said Pollock, staring thoughtfully at the dark cushion that had taken
on for the time the shape of the head.
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Pollock at the first opportunity told the physician of his mind trouble. He knew
clearly that he must go mad unless something should intervene to save him. He
explained that he had witnessed a decapitation in Dahomey, and was haunted by
one of the heads. Naturally, he did not care to state the actual facts. The physician
looked grave.
Presently he spoke hesitatingly. "As a child, did you get very much religious
training?"
"Very little," said Pollock.
A shade passed over the physician's face. "I don't know if you have heard of the
miraculous cures--it may be, of course, they are not miraculous--at Lourdes."
"Faith-healing will hardly suit me, I am afraid," said Pollock, with his eye on the
dark cushion.
The head distorted its scarred features in an abominable grimace. The physician
went upon a new track. "It's all imagination," he said, speaking with sudden
briskness. "A fair case for faith-healing, anyhow. Your nervous system has run
down, you're in that twilight state of health when the bogles come easiest. The
strong impression was too much for you. I must make you up a little mixture that
will strengthen your nervous system--especially your brain. And you must take
exercise."
"I'm no good for faith-healing," said Pollock.
"And therefore we must restore tone. Go in search of stimulating air--Scotland,
Norway, the Alps--"
"Jericho, if you like," said Pollock--"where Naaman went."
However, so soon as his fingers would let him, Pollock made a gallant attempt to
follow out the doctor's suggestion. It was now November. He tried football, but
to Pollock the game consisted in kicking a furious inverted head about a field. He
was no good at the game. He kicked blindly, with a kind of horror, and when
they put him back into goal, and the ball came swooping down upon him, he
suddenly yelled and got out of its way. The discreditable stories that had driven
him from England to wander in the tropics shut him off from any but men's
society, and now his increasingly strange behaviour made even his man friends
avoid him. The thing was no longer a thing of the eye merely; it gibbered at him,
spoke to him. A horrible fear came upon him that presently, when he took hold of
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the apparition, it would no longer become some mere article of furniture, but
would feel like a real dissevered head. Alone, he would curse at the thing, defy it,
entreat it; once or twice, in spite of his grim self-control, he addressed it in the
presence of others. He felt the growing suspicion in the eyes of the people that
watched him--his landlady, the servant, his man.
One day early in December his cousin Arnold--his next of kin--came to see him
and draw him out, and watch his sunken yellow face with narrow eager eyes.
And it seemed to Pollock that the hat his cousin carried in his hand was no hat at
all, but a Gorgon head that glared at him upside down, and fought with its eyes
against his reason. However, he was still resolute to see the matter out. He got a
bicycle, and, riding over the frosty road from Wandsworth to Kingston, found the
thing rolling along at his side, and leaving a dark trail behind it. He set his teeth
and rode faster. Then suddenly, as he came down the hill towards Richmond
Park, the apparition rolled in front of him and under his wheel, so quickly that he
had no time for thought, and, turning quickly to avoid it, was flung violently
against a heap of stones and broke his left wrist.
The end came on Christmas morning. All night he had been in a fever, the
bandages encircling his wrist like a band of fire, his dreams more vivid and
terrible than ever. In the cold, colourless, uncertain light that came before the
sunrise, he sat up in his bed, and saw the head upon the bracket in the place of the
bronze jar that had stood there overnight.
"I know that is a bronze jar," he said, with a chill doubt at his heart. Presently the
doubt was irresistible. He got out of bed slowly, shivering, and advanced to the
jar with his hand raised. Surely he would see now his imagination had deceived
him, recognise the distinctive sheen of bronze. At last, after an age of hesitation,
his fingers came down on the patterned cheek of the head. He withdrew them
spasmodically. The last stage was reached. His sense of touch had betrayed him.
Trembling, stumbling against the bed, kicking against his shoes with his bare
feet, a dark confusion eddying round him, he groped his way to the dressingtable, took his razor from the drawer, and sat down on the bed with this in his
hand. In the looking-glass he saw his own face, colourless, haggard, full of the
ultimate bitterness of despair.
He beheld in swift succession the incidents in the brief tale of his experience. His
wretched home, his still more wretched schooldays, the years of vicious life he
had led since then, one act of selfish dishonour leading to another; it was all clear
and pitiless now, all its squalid folly, in the cold light of the dawn. He came to
the hut, to the fight with the Porroh man, to the retreat down the river to Sulyma,
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to the Mendi assassin and his red parcel, to his frantic endeavours to destroy the
head, to the growth of his hallucination. It was a hallucination! He knew it was.
A hallucination merely. For a moment he snatched at hope. He looked away from
the glass, and on the bracket, the inverted head grinned and grimaced at
him...With the stiff fingers of his bandaged hand he felt at his neck for the throb
of his arteries. The morning was very cold, the steel blade felt like ice.
THE RED ROOM
"I can assure you," said I, "that it will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me."
And I stood up before the fire with my glass in my hand.
"It is your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm, and glanced at me
askance.
"Eight-and-twenty years," said I, "I have lived, and never a ghost have I seen as
yet."
The old woman sat staring hard into the fire, her pale ayes wide open. "Ay," she
broke in; "and eight-and-twenty years you have lived and never seen the likes of
this house, I reckon. There's a many things to see, when one's still but eight-andtwenty." She swayed her head slowly from side to side. "A many things to see
and sorrow for."
I half suspected the old people were trying to enhance the spiritual terrors of their
house by their droning insistence. I put down my empty glass on the table and
looked about the room, and caught a glimpse of myself, abbreviated and
broadened to an impossible sturdiness, in the queer old mirror at the end of the
room. "Well," I said, "if I see anything tonight, I shall be so much the wiser. For I
come to the business with an open mind."
"It's your own choosing," said the man, with the withered arm, once more.
I heard the sound of a stick and a shambling step on the flags in the passage
outside, and the door creaked on its hinges as a second old man entered, more
bent, more wrinkled, more aged even than the first. He supported himself by a
single crutch, his eyes were covered by a shade, and his lower lip, half averted,
hung pale and pink from his decaying yellow teeth. He made straight for an
armchair on the opposite side of the table, sat down clumsily, and began to
cough. The man with the withered arm gave this new-comer a short glance of
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positive dislike; the old woman took no notice of his arrival, but remained with
her eyes fixed steadily on the fire.
"I said--it's your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm, when the
coughing had ceased for a while.
"It's my own choosing," I answered.
The man with the shade became aware of my presence for the first time, and
threw his head back for a moment and sideways, to see me. I caught a
momentary glimpse of his eyes, small and bright and inflamed. Then he began to
cough and splutter again.
"Why don't you drink?" said the man with the withered arm, pushing the beer
towards him. The man with the shade, poured out a glassful with a shaky arm
that splashed half as much again on the deal table. A monstrous shadow of him
crouched upon the wall and mocked his action as he poured and drank. I must
confess I had scarce expected these grotesque custodians. There is to my mind
something inhuman in senility, something crouching and atavistic; the human
qualities seem to drop from old people insensibly day by day. The three of them
made me feel uncomfortable, with their gaunt silences, their bent carriage, their
evident unfriendliness to me and to one another.
"If," said I, "you will show me to this haunted room of yours, I will make myself
comfortable there."
The old man with the cough jerked his head back so suddenly that it startled me,
and shot another glance of his red eyes at me from under the shade; but no one
answered me. I waited a minute, glancing from one to the other.
"If," I said a little louder, "if you will show me to this haunted room of yours, I
will relieve you from the task of entertaining me."
"There's a candle on the slab outside the door," said the man with the withered
arm, looking at my feet as he addressed me. "But if you go to the red room tonight--"
("This night of all nights!" said the old woman.)
"You go alone."
"Very well," I answered. "And which way do I go?"
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"You go along the passage for a bit," said he, "until you come to a door, and
through that is a spiral staircase, and halfway up that is a landing and another
door covered with baize. Go through that and down the long corridor to the end,
and the red room is on your left up the steps."
"Have I got that right?" I said, and repeated his directions. He corrected me in
one particular.
"And are you really going?" said the man with the shade, looking at me again for
the third time, with that queer, unnatural tilting of the face.
("This night of all nights!" said the old woman.)
"It is what I came for," I said, and moved towards the door. As I did so, the old
man with the shade rose and staggered round the table, so as to be closer to the
others and to the fire. At the door I turned and looked at them, and saw they were
all close together, dark against the firelight, staring at me over their shoulders,
with an intent expression on their ancient faces.
"Good-night," I said, setting the door open.
"It's your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm.
I left the door wide open until the candle was well alight, and then I shut them in
and walked down the chilly, echoing passage.
I must confess that the oddness of these three old pensioners in whose charge her
ladyship had left the castle, and the deep-toned, old-fashioned furniture of the
housekeeper's room in which they foregathered, affected me in spite of my
efforts to keep myself at a matter-of-fact phase. They seemed to belong to
another age, an older age, an age when things spiritual were different from this of
ours, less certain; an age when omens and witches were credible, and ghosts
beyond denying. Their very existence was spectral; the cut of their clothing,
fashions born in dead brains. The ornaments and conveniences of the room about
them were ghostly--the thoughts of vanished men, which still haunted, rather
than participated in the world of to-day. But with an effort I sent such thoughts to
the right-about. The long, draughty subterranean passage was chilly and dusty,
and my candle flared and made the shadows cower and quiver. The echoes rang
up and down the spiral staircase, and a shadow came sweeping up after me, and
one fled before me into the darkness overhead. I came to the landing and stopped
there for a moment, listening to a rustling that I fancied I heard; then, satisfied of
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the absolute silence, I pushed open the baize-covered door and stood in the
corridor.
The effect was scarcely what I expected, for the moonlight, coming in by the
great window on the grand staircase, picked out everything in vivid black shadow
or silvery illumination. Everything was in its place: the house might have been
deserted on the yesterday instead of eighteen months ago. There were candles in
the sockets of the sconces, and whatever dust had gathered on the carpets or upon
the polished flooring was distributed so evenly as to be invisible in the
moonlight. I was about to advance, and stopped abruptly. A bronze group stood
upon the landing, hidden from me by the corner of the wall, but its shadow fell
with marvellous distinctness upon the white panelling, and gave me the
impression of someone crouching to waylay me. I stood rigid for half a minute
perhaps. Then, with my hand in the pocket that held my revolver, I advanced,
only to discover a Ganymede and Eagle glistening in the moonlight. That
incident for at time restored my nerve, and a porcelain Chinaman on a buhl table,
whose head rocked silently as I passed him, scarcely startled me.
The door to the red room and the steps up to it were in a shadowy corner. I
moved my candle from side to side, in order to see clearly the nature of the recess
in which I stood before opening the door. Here it was, thought I, that my
predecessor was found, and the memory of that story gave me a sudden twinge of
apprehension. I glanced over my shoulder at the Ganymede in the moonlight, and
opened the door of the red room rather hastily, with my face half turned to the
pallid silence of the landing.
I entered, closed the door behind me at once, turned the key I found in the lock
within, and stood with the candle held aloft, surveying the scene of my vigil, the
great red room of Lorraine Castle, in which the young duke had died. Or rather,
in which he had begun his dying, for he had opened the door and fallen headlong
down the steps I had just ascended. That had been the end of his vigil, of his
gallant attempt to conquer the ghostly tradition of the place; and never, I thought,
had apoplexy better served the ends of superstition. And there were other and
older stories that clung to the room, back to the half-credible beginning of it all,
the tale of a timid wife and the tragic end that came to her husband's jest of
frightening her. And looking around that large shadowy room, with its shadowy
window bays, its recesses and alcoves, one could well understand the legends
that had sprouted in its black corners, its germinating darkness. My candle was a
little tongue of flame in its vastness, that failed to pierce the opposite end of the
room, and left an ocean of mystery and suggestion beyond its island of light.
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I resolved to make a systematic examination of the place at once, and dispel the
fanciful suggestions of its obscurity before they obtained a hold upon me. After
satisfying myself of the fastening of the door, I began to walk about the room,
peering round each article of furniture, tucking up the valances of the bed, and
opening its curtains wide. I pulled up the blinds and examined the fastenings of
the several windows before closing the shutters, leant forward and looked up the
blackness of the wide chimney, and tapped the dark oak panelling for any secret
opening. There were two big mirrors in the room, each with a pair of sconces
bearing candles, and on the mantelshelf too, were more candles in china
candlesticks. All these I lit one after the other. The fire was laid--, an unexpected
consideration from the old housekeeper--, and I lit it, to keep down any
disposition to shiver, and when it was burning well, I stood round with my back
to it and regarded the room again. I had pulled up a chintz-covered armchair and
a table, to form a kind of barricade before me, and on this lay my revolver ready
to hand. My precise examination had done me good, but I still found the remoter
darkness of the place, and its perfect stillness, too stimulating for the
imagination. The echoing of the stir and crackling of the fire was no sort of
comfort to me. The shadow in the alcove at the end in particular had that
undefinable quality of a presence, that odd suggestion of a lurking, living thing,
that comes so easily in silence and solitude. At last, to reassure myself, I walked
with a candle into it, and satisfied myself that there was nothing tangible there. I
stood that candle upon the floor of the alcove, and left it in that position.
By this time I was in a state of considerable nervous tension, although to my
reason there was no adequate cause for the condition. My mind, however, was
perfectly clear. I postulated quite unreservedly that nothing supernatural could
happen, and to pass the time I began to string some rhymes together, Ingoldsby
fashion, of the original legend of the place. A few I spoke aloud, but the echoes
were not pleasant. For the same reason I also abandoned, after a time, a
conversation with myself upon the impossibility of ghosts and haunting. My
mind reverted to the three old and distorted people downstairs, and I tried to keep
it upon that topic. The sombre reds and blacks of the room troubled me; even
with seven candles the place was merely dim. The one in the alcove flared in a
draught, and the fire-flickering kept the shadows and penumbra perpetually
shifting and stirring. Casting about for a remedy, I recalled the candles I had seen
in the passage, and, with a slight effort, walked out into the moonlight, carrying a
candle and leaving the door open, and presently returned with as many as ten.
These I put in various knick-knacks of china with which the room was sparsely
adorned, lit and placed where the shadows had lain deepest, some on the floor,
some in the window recesses, until at last my seventeen candles were so arranged
that not an inch of the room darkened, but had the direct light of at least one of
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them. It occurred to me that when the ghost came, I could warn him not to trip
over them. The room was now quite brightly illuminated. There was something
very cheery and reassuring in these little streaming flames, and snuffing them
gave me an occupation, and afforded a helpful sense of the passage of time. Even
with that however, the brooding expectation of the vigil weighed heavily upon
me. It was after midnight that the candle in the alcove suddenly went out, and the
black shadow sprang back to its place. I did not see the candle go out; I simply
turned and saw that the darkness was there, as one might start and see the
unexpected presence of a stranger. "By Jove!" said I aloud; "That draught's a
strong one!" and taking the matches from the table, I walked across the room in a
leisurely manner to relight the corner again. My first match would not strike, and
as I succeeded with the second, something seemed to blink on the wall before
me. I turned my head involuntarily, and saw that the two candles on the little
table by the fireplace were extinguished. I rose at once to my feet.
"Odd!" I said. "Did I do that myself in a flash of absent-mindedness?"
I walked back, relit one, and as I did so, I saw the candle in the right sconce of
one of the mirrors wink and go right out, and almost immediately its companion
followed it. There was no mistake about it. The flame vanished, as if the wicks
had been suddenly nipped between a finger and thumb, leaving the wick neither
glowing nor smoking, but black. While I stood gaping, the candle at the foot of
the bed went out, and the shadows seemed to take another step towards me.
"This won't do!" said I, and first one and then another candle on the mantelshelf
followed. "What's up?" I cried, with a queer high note getting into my voice
somehow. At that the candle on the wardrobe went out, and the one I had relit in
the alcove followed.
"Steady on!" I said. "These candles are wanted," speaking with a half-hysterical
facetiousness, and scratching away at a match, all the while, for the mantel
candlesticks. My hands trembled so much that twice I missed the rough paper of
the matchbox. As the mantel emerged from darkness again, two candles in the
remoter end of the window were eclipsed. But with the same match I also relit
the larger mirror candles, and those on the floor near the doorway, so that for the
moment I seemed to gain on the extinctions. But then in a volley there vanished
four lights at once in different corners of the room, and I struck another match in
quivering haste, and stood hesitating whither to take it.
As I stood undecided, an invisible hand seemed to sweep out the two candles on
the table. With a cry of terror, I dashed at the alcove, then into the corner, and
then into the window, relighting three, as two more vanished by the fireplace;
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then, perceiving a better way, I dropped the matches on the iron-bound deed-box
in the corner, and caught up the bedroom candlestick. With this I avoided the
delay of striking matches; but for all that the steady process of extinction went
on, and the shadows I feared and fought against returned, and crept in upon me,
first a step gained on this side of me and then on that. It was like a ragged stormcloud sweeping out of the stars. Now and then one returned for a minute, and was
lost again. I was now almost frantic with the horror of the coming darkness, and
my self-possession deserted me. I leaped panting and dishevelled from candle to
candle in a vain struggle against that remorseless advance.
I bruised myself on the thigh against the table, I sent a chair headlong, I stumbled
and fell and whisked the cloth from the table in my fall. My candle rolled away
from me, and I snatched another as I rose. Abruptly this was blown out, as I
swung it off the table, by the wind of my sudden movement, and immediately the
two remaining candles followed. But there was light still in the room, a red light
that stayed off the shadows from me. The fire! Of course I could still thrust my
candle between the bars and relight it!
I turned to where the flames were still dancing between the glowing coals, and
splashing red reflections upon the furniture, made two steps towards the grate,
and incontinently the flames dwindled and vanished, the glow vanished, the
reflections rushed together and vanished, and as I thrust the candle between the
bars darkness closed upon me like the shutting of an eye, wrapped about me in a
stifling embrace, sealed my vision, and crushed the last vestiges of reason from
my brain. The candle fell from my hand. I flung out my arms in a vain effort to
thrust that ponderous blackness away from me, and, lifting up my voice,
screamed with all my might--once, twice, thrice. Then I think I must have
staggered to my feet. I know I thought suddenly of the moonlit corridor and, with
my head bowed and my arms over my face, made a run for the door.
But I had forgotten the exact position of the door, and struck myself heavily
against the corner of the bed. I staggered back, turned, and was either struck or
struck myself against some other bulky furniture. I have a vague memory of
battering myself thus, to and fro in the darkness, of a cramped struggle, and of
my own wild crying as I darted to and fro, of a heavy blow at last upon my
forehead, a horrible sensation of falling that lasted an age, of my last frantic
effort to keep my footing, and then I remember no more.
I opened my eyes in daylight. My head was roughly bandaged, and the man with
the withered arm was watching my face. I looked about me, trying to remember
what had happened, and for a space I could not recollect. I turned to the corner,
and saw the old woman, no longer abstracted, pouring out some drops of
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medicine from a little blue phial into a glass. "Where am I?" I asked; "I seem to
remember you, and yet I cannot remember who you are."
They told me then, and I heard of the haunted red room as one who hears a tale.
"We found you at dawn," said he, "and there was blood on your forehead and
lips."
It was very slowly I recovered my memory of my experience. "You believe
now," said the old man, "that the room is haunted?" He spoke no longer as one
who greets an intruder, but as one who grieves for a broken friend.
"Yes," said I; "the room is haunted."
"And you have seen it. And we, who have lived here all our lives, have never set
eyes upon it. Because we have never dared...Tell us, is it truly the old earl who--"
"No," said I; "it is not."
"I told you so," said the old lady, with the glass in her hand. "It is his poor young
countess who was frightened--"
"It is not," I said. "There is neither ghost of earl nor ghost of countess in that
room, there is no ghost there at all; but worse, far worse--"
"Well?" they said.
"The worst of all the things that haunt poor mortal man," said I; "and that is, in
all its nakedness--Fear! Fear that will not have light nor sound, that will not bear
with reason, that deafens and darkens and overwhelms. It followed me through
the corridor, it fought against me in the room--"
I stopped abruptly. There was an interval of silence. My hand went up to my
bandages.
Then the man with the shade sighed and spoke. "That is it," said he. "I knew that
was it. A power of darkness. To put such a curse upon a woman! It lurks there
always. You can feel it even in the daytime, even of a bright summer's day, in the
hangings, in the curtains, keeping behind you however you face about. In the
dusk it creeps along the corridor and follows you, so that you dare not turn. There
is Fear in that room of hers--black Fear, and there will be--so long as this house
of sin endures."
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THE CONE
The night was hot and overcast, the sky red, rimmed with the lingering sunset of
mid-summer. They sat at the open window, trying to fancy the air was fresher
there. The trees and shrubs of the garden stood stiff and dark; beyond in the
roadway a gas-lamp burnt, bright orange against the hazy blue of the evening.
Farther were the three lights of the railway signal against the lowering sky. The
man and woman spoke to one another in low tones.
"He does not suspect?" said the man, a little nervously.
"Not he." She said peevishly, as though that too irritated her. "He thinks of
nothing but the works and the prices of fuel. He has no imagination, no poetry."
"None of these men of iron have," he said sententiously. "They have no hearts."
"He has not," she said. She turned her discontented face towards the window.
The distant sound of a roaring and rushing drew nearer and grew in volume; the
house quivered; one heard the metallic rattle of the tender. As the train passed,
there was a glare of light above the cutting and a driving tumult of smoke; one,
two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight black oblongs--eight trucks--passed across
the dim grey of the embankment, and were suddenly extinguished one by one in
the throat of the tunnel, which with the last, seemed to swallow down train,
smoke, and sound in one abrupt gulp.
"This country was all fresh and beautiful once," he said; "and now--it is Gehenna.
Down that way--nothing but pot-banks and chimneys belching fire and dust into
the face of heaven...But what does it matter? An end comes, an end to all this
cruelty...To-morrow." He spoke the last word in a whisper.
"To-morrow," she said, speaking in a whisper too, and still staring out of the
window.
"Dear!" he said, putting his hand on hers.
She turned with a start, and their eyes searched one another's. Hers softened to
his gaze. "My dear one!" she said, and then: "It seems so strange--that you should
have come into my life like this--to open--" She paused.
"To open?" he said.
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"All this wonderful world--" she hesitated, and spoke still more softly--"this
world of love to me."
Then suddenly the door clicked and closed. They turned their heads, and he
started violently back. In the shadow of the room stood a great shadowy figure-silent. They saw the face dimly in the half-light, with unexpressive dark patches
under the penthouse brows. Every muscle in Raut's body suddenly became tense.
When could the door have opened? What had he heard? Had he heard all? What
had he seen? A tumult of questions.
The new-comer's voice came at last, after a pause that seemed interminable.
"Well?" he said.
"I was afraid I had missed you, Horrocks," said the man at the window, gripping
the window-ledge with his hand. His voice was unsteady.
The clumsy figure of Horrocks came forward out of the shadow. He made no
answer to Raut's remark. For a moment he stood above them.
The woman's heart was cold within her. "I told Mr. Raut it was just possible you
might come back," she said, in a voice that never quivered.
Horrocks, still silent, sat down abruptly in the chair by her little work-table. His
big hands were clenched; one saw now the fire of his eyes under the shadow of
his brows. He was trying to get his breath. His eyes went from the woman he had
trusted to the friend he had trusted, and then back to the woman.
By this time and for the moment all three half understood one another. Yet none
dared say a word to ease the pent-up things that choked them.
It was the husband's voice that broke the silence at last.
"You wanted to see me?" he said to Raut.
Raut started as he spoke. "I came to see you," he said, resolved to lie to the last.
"Yes," said Horrocks.
"You promised," said Raut, "to show me some fine effects of moonlight and
smoke."
"I promised to show you some fine effects of moonlight and smoke," repeated
Horrocks in a colourless voice.
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"And I thought I might catch you to-night before you went down to the works,"
proceeded Raut, "and come with you."
There was another pause. Did the man mean to take the thing coolly? Did he after
all know? How long had he been in the room? Yet even at the moment when they
heard the door, their attitudes...Horrocks glanced at the profile of the woman,
shadowy pallid in the half-light. Then he glanced at Raut, and seemed to recover
himself suddenly. "Of course," he said, "I promised to show you the works under
their proper dramatic conditions. It's odd how I could have forgotten."
"If I am troubling you--" began Raut.
Horrocks started again. A new light had suddenly come into the sultry gloom of
his eyes. "Not in the least," he said.
"Have you been telling Mr. Raut of all these contrasts of flame and shadow you
think so splendid?" said the woman, turning now to her husband for the first
time, her confidence creeping back again, her voice just one half-note too high.
"That dreadful theory of yours that machinery is beautiful, and everything else in
the world ugly. I thought he would not spare you, Mr. Raut. It's his great theory,
his one discovery in art."
"I am slow to make discoveries," said Horrocks grimly, damping her suddenly.
"But what I discover..." He stopped.
"Well?" she said.
"Nothing;" and suddenly he rose to his feet.
"I promised to show you the works," he said to Raut, and put his big, clumsy
hand on his friend's shoulder. "And you are ready to go?"
"Quite," said Raut, and stood up also.
There was another pause. Each of them peered through the indistinctness of the
dusk at the other two. Horrocks' hand still rested on Raut's shoulder. Raut half
fancied still that the incident was trivial after all. But Mrs. Horrocks knew her
husband better, knew that grim quiet in his voice, and the confusion in her mind
took a vague shape of physical evil. "Very well," said Horrocks, and dropping his
hand, turned towards the door.
"My hat?" Raut looked round in the half-light.
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"That's my work-basket," said Mrs. Horrocks, with a gust of hysterical laughter.
Their hands came together on the back of the chair. "Here it is!" he said. She had
an impulse to warn him in an undertone, but she could not frame a word. "Don't
go!" and "Beware of him!" struggled in her mind, and the swift moment passed.
"Got it?" said Horrocks, standing with the door half open.
Raut stepped towards him. "Better say good-bye to Mrs. Horrocks," said the
ironmaster, even more grimly quiet in his tone than before.
Raut started and turned. "Good-evening, Mrs. Horrocks," he said, and their hands
touched.
Horrocks held the door open with a ceremonial politeness unusual in him towards
men. Raut went out, and then, after a wordless look at her, her husband followed.
She stood motionless while Raut's light footfall and her husband's heavy tread,
like bass and treble, passed down the passage together. The front door slammed
heavily. She went to the window, moving slowly, and stood watching--leaning
forward. The two men appeared for a moment at the gateway in the road, passed
under the street-lamp, and were hidden by the black masses of the shrubbery. The
lamplight fell for a moment on their faces, showing only unmeaning pale patches,
telling nothing of what she still feared, and doubted, and craved vainly to know.
Then she sank down into a crouching attitude in the big armchair, her eyes wide
open and staring out at the red lights from the furnaces that flickered in the sky.
An hour after she was still there, her attitude scarcely changed.
The oppressive stillness of the evening weighed heavily upon Raut. They went
side by side down the road in silence, and in silence turned into the cinder-made
by-way that presently opened out the prospect of the valley.
A blue haze, half dust, half mist, touched the long valley with mystery. Beyond
were Hanley and Etruria, grey and dark masses, outlined thinly by the rare
golden dots of the street-lamps, and here and there a gaslit window, or the yellow
glare of some late-working factory or crowded public-house. Out of the masses,
clear and slender against the evening sky, rose a multitude of tall chimneys,
many of them reeking, a few smokeless during a season of "play." Here and there
a pallid patch and ghostly stunted beehive shapes showed the position of a potbank, or a wheel, black and sharp against the hot lower sky, marked some
colliery where they raise the iridescent coal of the place. Nearer at hand was the
broad stretch of railway, and half invisible trains shunted--a steady puffing and
rumbling, with every run a ringing concussion and a rhythmic series of impacts,
and a passage of intermittent puffs of white steam across the further view. And to
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the left, between the railway and the dark mass of the low hill beyond,
dominating the whole view, colossal, inky-black, and crowned with smoke and
fitful flames, stood the great cylinders of the Jeddah Company Blast Furnaces,
the central edifices of the big ironworks of which Horrocks was the manager.
They stood heavy and threatening, full of an incessant turmoil of flames and
seething molten iron, and about the feet of them rattled the rolling-mills, and the
steam-hammer beat heavily and splashed the white iron sparks hither and thither.
Even as they looked, a truckful of fuel was shot into one of the giants, and the red
flames gleamed out, and a confusion of smoke and black dust came boiling
upwards towards the sky.
"Certainly you get some fine effects of colour with your furnaces," said Raut,
breaking a silence that had become apprehensive.
Horrocks grunted. He stood with his hands in his pockets, frowning down at the
dim steaming railway and the busy ironworks beyond, frowning as if he were
thinking out some knotty problem.
Raut glanced at him and away again. "At present your moonlight effect is hardly
ripe," he continued, looking upward. "The moon is still smothered by the vestiges
of daylight."
Horrocks stared at him with the expression of a man who has suddenly
awakened. "Vestiges of daylight...? Of course, of course." He too looked up at
the moon, pale still in the midsummer sky. "Come along," he said suddenly, and
gripping Raut's arm in his hand, made a move towards the path that dropped from
them to the railway.
Raut hung back. Their eyes met and saw a thousand things in a moment that their
eyes came near to say. Horrocks' hand tightened and then relaxed. He let go, and
before Raut was aware of it, they were arm in arm, and walking, one unwillingly
enough, down the path.
"You see the fine effect of the railway signals towards Burslem," said Horrocks,
suddenly breaking into loquacity, striding fast, and tightening the grip of his
elbow the while. "Little green lights and red and white lights, all against the haze.
You have an eye for effect, Raut. It's a fine effect. And look at those furnaces of
mine, how they rise upon us as we come down the hill. That to the right is my
pet--seventy feet of him. I packed him myself, and he's boiled away cheerfully
with iron in his guts for five long years. I've a particular fancy for him. That line
of red there--a lovely bit of warm orange you'd call it, Raut--that's the puddlers'
furnaces, and there, in the hot light, three black figures--did you see the white
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splash of the steam-hammer then--? That's the rolling mills. Come along! Clang,
clatter, how it goes rattling across the floor! Sheet tin, Raut--, amazing stuff.
Glass mirrors are not in it when that stuff comes from the mill. And squelch--!
There goes the hammer again. Come along!"
He had to stop talking to catch at his breath. His arm twisted into Raut's with
benumbing tightness. He had come striding down the black path towards the
railway as though he was possessed.
Raut had not spoken a word, had simply hung back against Horrocks' pull with
all his strength.
"I say," he said now, laughing nervously, but with an undernote of snarl in his
voice, "why on earth are you nipping my arm off, Horrocks, and dragging me
along like this?"
At length Horrocks released him. His manner changed again. "Nipping your arm
off?" he said. "Sorry. But it's you taught me the trick of walking in that friendly
way."
"You haven't learnt the refinements of it yet then," said Raut, laughing artificially
again. "By Jove! I'm black and blue," Horrocks offered no apology. They stood
now near the bottom of the hill, close to the fence that bordered the railway. The
ironworks had grown larger and spread out with their approach. They looked up
to the blast furnaces now instead of down; the further view of Etruria and Hanley
had dropped out of sight with their descent. Before them, by the stile rose a
notice-board, bearing still dimly visible, the words, "Beware Of The Trains," half
hidden by splashes of coaly mud.
"Fine effects," said Horrocks, waving his arm. "Here comes a train. The puffs of
smoke, the orange glare, the round eye of light in front of it, the melodious rattle.
Fine effects! But these furnaces of mine used to be finer, before we shoved cones
in their throats, and saved the gas."
"How?" said Raut. "Cones?"
"Cones, my man, cones. I'll show you one nearer. The flames used to flare out of
the open throats, great--what is it--? Pillars of cloud by day, red and black smoke,
and pillars of fire by night. Now we run it off in pipes, and burn it to heat the
blast, and the top is shut by a cone. You'll be interested in that cone."
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"But every now and then," said Raut, "you get a burst of fire and smoke up
there."
"The cone's not fixed, it's hung by a chain from a lever, and balanced by an
equipoise. You shall see it nearer. Else of course, there'd be no way of getting
fuel into the thing. Every now and then the cone dips, and out comes the flare."
"I see," said Raut. He looked over his shoulder. "The moon gets brighter," he
said.
"Come along," said Horrocks abruptly, gripping his shoulder again, and moving
him suddenly towards the railway crossing. And then came one of those swift
incidents, vivid, but so rapid that they leave one doubtful and reeling. Halfway
across, Horrocks' hand suddenly clenched upon him like a vice, and swung him
backward and through a half-turn, so that he looked up the line. And there a
chain of lamp-lit carriage-windows telescoped swiftly as it came towards them,
and the red and yellow lights of an engine grew larger and larger, rushing down
upon them. As he grasped what this meant, he turned his face to Horrocks, and
pushed with all his strength against the arm that held him back between the rails.
The struggle did not last a moment. Just as certain as it was that Horrocks held
him there, so certain was it that he had been violently lugged out of danger.
"Out of the way," said Horrocks, with a gasp, as the train came rattling by, and
they stood panting by the gate into the ironworks.
"I did not see it coming," said Raut, still even in spite of his own apprehensions,
trying to keep up an appearance of ordinary intercourse.
Horrocks answered with a grunt. "The cone," he said, and then, as one who
recovers himself, "I thought you did not hear."
"I didn't," said Raut.
"I wouldn't have had you run over then, for the world," said Horrocks.
"For a moment I lost my nerve," said Raut.
Horrocks stood for half a minute, then turned abruptly towards the ironworks
again. "See how fine these great mounds of mine, these clinker-heaps, look in the
night! That truck yonder, up above there! Up it goes, and out-tilts the slag. See
the palpitating red stuff go sliding down the slope. As we get nearer, the heap
rises up and cuts the blast furnaces. See the quiver up above the big one. Not that
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way! This way, between the heaps. That goes to the puddling furnaces, but I want
to show you the canal first." He came and took Raut by the elbow, and so they
went along side by side. Raut answered Horrocks vaguely. What, he asked
himself, had really happened on the line? Was he deluding himself with his own
fancies, or had Horrocks actually held him back in the way of the train? Had he
just been within an ace of being murdered?
Suppose this slouching, scowling monster did know anything? For a minute or
two then Raut was really afraid for his life, but the mood passed as he reasoned
with himself. After all, Horrocks might have heard nothing. At any rate, he had
pulled him out of the way in time. His odd manner might be due to the mere
vague jealousy he had shown once before. He was talking now of the ash-heaps
and the canal. "Eigh?" said Horrocks.
"What?" said Raut. "Rather! The haze in the moonlight. Fine!"
"Our canal," said Horrocks, stopping suddenly. "Our canal by moonlight and
firelight is an immense effect. You've never seen it? Fancy that! You've spent too
many of your evenings philandering up in Newcastle there. I tell you, for real
florid effects--But you shall see. Boiling water..."
As they came out of the labyrinth of clinker-heaps and mounds of coal and ore,
the noises of the rolling-mill sprang upon them suddenly, loud, near, and distinct.
Three shadowy workmen went by and touched their caps to Horrocks. Their
faces were vague in the darkness. Raut felt a futile impulse to address them, and
before he could frame his words, they passed into the shadows. Horrocks pointed
to the canal close before them now: a weird-looking place it seemed, in the
blood-red reflections of the furnaces. The hot water that cooled the tuyeres came
into it, some fifty yards up--a tumultuous, almost boiling affluent, and the steam
rose up from the water in silent white wisps and streaks, wrapping damply about
them, an incessant succession of ghosts coming up from the black and red eddies,
a white uprising that made the head swim. The shining black tower of the larger
blast-furnace rose overhead out of the mist, and its tumultuous riot filled their
ears. Raut kept away from the edge of the water, and watched Horrocks.
"Here it is red," said Horrocks, "blood-red vapour as red and hot as sin; but
yonder there, where the moonlight falls on it, and it drives across the clinkerheaps, it is as white as death."
Raut turned his head for a moment, and then came back hastily to his watch on
Horrocks. "Come along to the rolling-mills," said Horrocks. The threatening hold
was not so evident that time, and Raut felt a little reassured. But all the same,
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what on earth did Horrocks mean about "white as death" and "red as sin"?
Coincidence, perhaps?
They went and stood behind the puddlers for a little while, and then through the
rolling-mills, where amidst an incessant din the deliberate steam-hammer beat
the juice out of the succulent iron, and black, half-naked Titans rushed the plastic
bars, like hot sealing-wax, between the wheels. "Come on," said Horrocks in
Raut's ear, and they went and peeped through the little glass hole behind the
tuyeres, and saw the tumbled fire writhing in the pit of the blast-furnace. It left
one eye blinded for a while. Then, with green and blue patches dancing across
the dark, they went to the lift by which the trucks of ore and fuel and lime were
raised to the top of the big cylinder.
And out upon the narrow rail that overhung the furnace, Raut's doubts came upon
him again. Was it wise to be here? If Horrocks did know--everything! Do what
he would, he could not resist a violent trembling. Right under foot was a sheer
depth of seventy feet. It was a dangerous place. They pushed by a truck of fuel to
get to the railing that crowned the place. The reek of the furnace, a sulphurous
vapour streaked with pungent bitterness, seemed to make the distant hillside of
Hanley quiver. The moon was riding out now from among a drift of clouds,
halfway up the sky above the undulating wooded outlines of Newcastle. The
steaming canal ran away from below them under an indistinct bridge, and
vanished into the dim haze of the flat fields towards Burslem.
"That's the cone I've been telling you of," shouted Horrocks; "and, below that,
sixty feet of fire and molten metal, with the air of the blast frothing through it
like gas in soda-water."
Raut gripped the hand-rail tightly, and stared down at the cone. The heat was
intense. The boiling of the iron and the tumult of the blast made a thunderous
accompaniment to Horrocks' voice. But the thing had to be gone through now.
Perhaps, after all...
"In the middle," bawled Horrocks, "temperature near a thousand degrees. If YOU
were dropped into it...flash into flame like a pinch of gunpowder in a candle. Put
your hand out and feel the heat of his breath. Why, even up here I've seen the
rain-water boiling off the trucks. And that cone there. It's a damned sight too hot
for roasting cakes. The top side of it's three hundred degrees."
"Three hundred degrees!" said Raut.
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"Three hundred centigrade, mind!" said Horrocks. "It will boil the blood out of
you in no time."
"Eigh?" said Raut, and turned.
"Boil the blood out of you in...No, you don't!"
"Let me go!" screamed Raut. "Let go my arm!"
With one hand he clutched at the hand-rail, then with both. For a moment the two
men stood swaying. Then suddenly, with a violent jerk, Horrocks had twisted
him from his hold. He clutched at Horrocks and missed, his foot went back into
empty air; in mid-air he twisted himself, and then cheek and shoulder and knee
struck the hot cone together.
He clutched the chain by which the cone hung, and the thing sank an
infinitesimal amount as he struck it. A circle of glowing red appeared about him,
and a tongue of flame, released from the chaos within, flickered up towards him.
An intense pain assailed him at the knees, and he could smell the singeing of his
hands. He raised himself to his feet, and tried to climb up the chain, and then
something struck his head. Black and shining with the moonlight, the throat of
the furnace rose about him.
Horrocks, he saw, stood above him by one of the trucks of fuel on the rail. The
gesticulating figure was bright and white in the moonlight, and shouting, "Fizzle,
you fool! Fizzle, you hunter of women! You hot-blooded hound! Boil! Boil!
Boil!"
Suddenly he caught up a handful of coal out of the truck, and flung it
deliberately, lump after lump, at Raut.
"Horrocks!" cried Raut. "Horrocks!"
He clung crying to the chain, pulling himself up from the burning of the cone.
Each missile Horrocks flung hit him. His clothes charred and glowed, and as he
struggled the cone dropped, and a rush of hot suffocating gas whooped out and
burned round him in a swift breath of flame.
His human likeness departed from him. When the momentary red had passed,
Horrocks saw a charred, blackened figure, its head streaked with blood, still
clutching and fumbling with the chain, and writhing in agony--a cindery animal,
an inhuman, monstrous creature that began a sobbing intermittent shriek.
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Abruptly, at the sight, the ironmaster's anger passed. A deadly sickness came
upon him. The heavy odour of burning flesh came drifting up to his nostrils. His
sanity returned to him.
"God have mercy upon me!" he cried. "O God! What have I done?"
He knew the thing below him, save that it still moved and felt, was already a
dead man--that the blood of the poor wretch must be boiling in his veins. An
intense realisation of that agony came to his mind, and overcame every other
feeling. For a moment he stood irresolute, and then, turning to the truck, he
hastily tilted its contents upon the struggling thing that had once been a man. The
mass fell with a thud, and went radiating over the cone. With the thud the shriek
ended, and a boiling confusion of smoke, dust, and flame came rushing up
towards him. As it passed, he saw the cone clear again.
Then he staggered back, and stood trembling, clinging to the rail with both hands.
His lips moved, but no words came to them.
Down below was the sound of voices and running steps. The clangour of rolling
in the shed ceased abruptly.
THE PURPLE PILEUS
Mr. Coombes was sick of life. He walked away from his unhappy home, and sick
not only of his own existence but of everybody else's, turned aside down
Gaswork Lane to avoid the town, and, crossing the wooden bridge that goes over
the canal to Starling's Cottages, was presently alone in the damp pine woods and
out of sight and sound of human habitation. He would stand it no longer. He
repeated aloud with blasphemies unusual to him that he would stand it no longer.
He was a pale-faced little man, with dark eyes and a fine and very black
moustache. He had a very stiff, upright collar slightly frayed, that gave him an
illusory double chin, and his overcoat (albeit shabby) was trimmed with
astrachan. His gloves were a bright brown with black stripes over the knuckles,
and split at the finger ends. His appearance, his wife had said once in the dear,
dead days beyond recall--, before he married her, that is--, was military. But now
she called him--It seems a dreadful thing to tell of between husband and wife, but
she called him "a little grub." It wasn't the only thing she had called him, either.
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The row had arisen about that beastly Jennie again. Jennie was his wife's friend,
and by no invitation of Mr. Coombes, she came in every blessed Sunday to
dinner, and made a shindy all the afternoon. She was a big, noisy girl, with a taste
for loud colours and a strident laugh; and this Sunday she had outdone all her
previous intrusions by bringing in a fellow with her, a chap as showy as herself.
And Mr. Coombes, in a starchy, clean collar and his Sunday frock-coat, had sat
dumb and wrathful at his own table, while his wife and her guests talked
foolishly and undesirably, and laughed aloud. Well, he stood that, and after
dinner (which, "as usual," was late), what must Miss Jennie do but go to the
piano and play banjo tunes, for all the world as if it were a week-day! Flesh and
blood could not endure such goings on. They would hear next door, they would
hear in the road, it was a public announcement of their disrepute. He had to
speak.
He had felt himself go pale, and a kind of rigour had affected his respiration as he
delivered himself. He had been sitting on one of the chairs by the window--the
new guest had taken possession of the armchair. He turned his head. "Sun Day!"
he said over the collar, in the voice of one who warns. "Sun Day!" What people
call a "nasty" tone, it was.
Jennie had kept on playing, but his wife, who was looking through some music
that was piled on the top of the piano, had stared at him. "What's wrong now?"
she said; "Can't people enjoy themselves?"
"I don't mind rational 'njoyment, at all," said little Coombes, "but I ain't a-going
to have week-day tunes playing on a Sunday in this house."
"What's wrong with my playing now?" said Jennie, stopping and twirling round
on the music-stool with a monstrous rustle of flounces.
Coombes saw it was going to be a row, and opened too vigorously, as is common
with your timid, nervous men all the world over. "Steady on with that musicstool!" said he; "It ain't made for 'eavy-weights."
"Never you mind about weights," said Jennie, incensed. "What was you saying
behind my back about my playing?"
"Surely you don't 'old with not having a bit of music on a Sunday, Mr.
Coombes?" said the new guest, leaning back in the armchair, blowing a cloud of
cigarette smoke and smiling in a kind of pitying way. And simultaneously his
wife said something to Jennie about "Never mind 'im. You go on, Jinny."
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"I do," said Mr. Coombes, addressing the new guest.
"May I arst why?" said the new guest, evidently enjoying both his cigarette and
the prospect of an argument. He was, by the bye, a lank young man, very
stylishly dressed in bright drab, with a white cravat and a pearl and silver pin. It
had been better taste to come in a black coat, Mr. Coombes thought.
"Because," began Mr. Coombes, "it don't suit me. I'm a business man. I 'ave to
study my connection. Rational 'njoyment--"
"His connection!" said Mrs. Coombes scornfully. "That's what he's always asaying. We got to do this, and we got to do that--"
"If you don't mean to study my connection," said Mr. Coombes, "what did you
marry me for?"
"I wonder," said Jennie, and turned back to the piano.
"I never saw such a man as you," said Mrs. Coombes.
"You've altered all round since we were married. Before--"
Then Jennie began at the tum, tum, tum again.
"Look here!" said Mr. Coombes, driven at last to revolt, standing up and raising
his voice. "I tell you I won't have that." The frock-coat heaved with his
indignation.
"No vi'lence, now," said the long young man in drab, sitting up.
"Who the juice are you?" said Mr. Coombes fiercely.
Whereupon they all began talking at once. The new guest said he was Jennie's
"intended," and meant to protect her, and Mr. Coombes said he was welcome to
do so anywhere but in his (Mr. Coombes') house; and Mrs. Coombes said he
ought to be ashamed of insulting his guests, and (as I have already mentioned)
that he was getting a regular little grub; and the end was, that Mr. Coombes
ordered his visitors out of the house, and they wouldn't go, and so he said he
would go himself. With his face burning and tears of excitement in his eyes, he
went into the passage, and as he struggled with his overcoat--his frock-coat
sleeves got concertinaed up his arm--and gave a brush at his silk hat, Jennie
began again at the piano, and strummed him insultingly out of the house. Tum,
tum, tum. He slammed the shop door so that the house quivered. That briefly,
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was the immediate making of his mood. You will perhaps begin to understand his
disgust with existence.
As he walked along the muddy path under the firs--, it was late October, and the
ditches and heaps of fir needles were gorgeous with clumps of fungi--, he
recapitulated the melancholy history of his marriage. It was brief and
commonplace enough. He now perceived with sufficient clearness that his wife
had married him out of a natural curiosity and in order to escape from her
worrying, laborious, and uncertain life in the workroom; and, like the majority of
her class, she was far too stupid to realise that it was her duty to co-operate with
him in his business. She was greedy of enjoyment, loquacious, and sociallyminded, and evidently disappointed to find the restraints of poverty still hanging
about her. His worries exasperated her, and the slightest attempt to control her
proceedings resulted in a charge of "grumbling." Why couldn't he be nice--as he
used to be? And Coombes was such a harmless little man too, nourished mentally
on Self-Help, and with a meagre ambition of self-denial and competition, that
was to end in a "sufficiency." Then Jennie came in as a female Mephistopheles, a
gabbling chronicle of "fellers," and was always wanting his wife to go to theatres,
and "all that." And in addition were aunts of his wife, and cousins (male and
female) to eat up capital, insult him personally, upset business arrangements,
annoy good customers, and generally blight his life. It was not the first occasion
by many that Mr. Coombes had fled his home in wrath and indignation, and
something like fear, vowing furiously and even aloud that he wouldn't stand it,
and so frothing away his energy along the line of least resistance. But never
before had he been quite so sick of life as on this particular Sunday afternoon.
The Sunday dinner may have had its share in his despair--and the greyness of the
sky. Perhaps too, he was beginning to realise his unendurable frustration as a
business man as the consequence of his marriage. Presently bankruptcy, and after
that--Perhaps she might have reason to repent when it was too late. And destiny,
as I have already intimated, had planted the path through the wood with evilsmelling fungi, thickly and variously planted it, not only on the right side, but on
the left.
A small shopman is in such a melancholy position, if his wife turns out a disloyal
partner. His capital is all tied up in his business, and to leave her means to join
the unemployed in some strange part of the earth. The luxuries of divorce are
beyond him altogether. So that the good old tradition of marriage for better or
worse holds inexorably for him, and things work up to tragic culminations.
Bricklayers kick their wives to death, and dukes betray theirs; but it is among the
small clerks and shopkeepers nowadays that it comes most often to a cutting of
throats. Under the circumstances it is not so very remarkable--and you must take
it as charitably as you can--that the mind of Mr. Coombes ran for a while on
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some such glorious close to his disappointed hopes, and that he thought of razors,
pistols, bread-knives, and touching letters to the coroner denouncing his enemies
by name, and praying piously for forgiveness. After a time his fierceness gave
way to melancholia. He had been married in this very overcoat, in his first and
only frock-coat that was buttoned up beneath it. He began to recall their courting
along this very walk, his years of penurious saving to get capital, and the bright
hopefulness of his marrying days. For it all to work out like this! Was there no
sympathetic ruler anywhere in the world? He reverted to death as a topic.
He thought of the canal he had just crossed, and doubted whether he shouldn't
stand with his head out, even in the middle, and it was while drowning, was in
his mind that the purple pileus caught his eye. He looked at it mechanically for a
moment, and stopped and stooped towards it to pick it up, under the impression
that it was some such small leather object as a purse. Then he saw that it was the
purple top of a fungus, a peculiarly poisonous-looking purple: slimy, shiny, and
emitting a sour odour. He hesitated with his hand an inch or so from it, and the
thought of poison crossed his mind. With that he picked the thing, and stood up
again with it in his hand.
The odour was certainly strong--acrid, but by no means disgusting. He broke off
a piece, and the fresh surface was a creamy white, that changed like magic in the
space of ten seconds to a yellowish-green colour. It was even an inviting-looking
change. He broke off two other pieces to see it repeated. They were wonderful
things these fungi, thought Mr. Coombes, and all of them the deadliest poisons,
as his father had often told him. Deadly poisons!
There is no time like the present for a rash resolve. Why not here and now?
Thought Mr. Coombes. He tasted a little piece, a very little piece indeed--a mere
crumb. It was so pungent that he almost spat it out again, then merely hot and
full-flavoured. A kind of German mustard with a touch of horse-radish and--well,
mushroom. He swallowed it in the excitement of the moment. Did he like it or
did he not? His mind was curiously careless. He would try another bit. It really
wasn't bad--it was good. He forgot his troubles in the interest of the immediate
moment. Playing with death it was. He took another bite, and then deliberately
finished a mouthful. A curious, tingling sensation began in his finger-tips and
toes. His pulse began to move faster. The blood in his ears sounded like a millrace. "Try bi' more," said Mr. Coombes. He turned and looked about him, and
found his feet unsteady. He saw, and struggled towards, a little patch of purple a
dozen yards away. "Jol' goo' stuff," said Mr. Coombes. "E--lomore ye'." He
pitched forward and fell on his face, his hands outstretched towards the cluster of
pilei. But he did not eat any more of them. He forgot forthwith.
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He rolled over and sat up with a look of astonishment on his face. His carefully
brushed silk hat had rolled away towards the ditch. He pressed his hand to his
brow. Something had happened, but he could not rightly determine what it was.
Anyhow, he was no longer dull--he felt bright, cheerful. And his throat was afire.
He laughed in the sudden gaiety of his heart. Had he been dull? He did not know;
but at any rate he would be dull no longer. He got up and stood unsteadily,
regarding the universe with an agreeable smile. He began to remember. He could
not remember very well, because of a steam roundabout that was beginning in his
head. And he knew he had been disagreeable at home, just because they wanted
to be happy. They were quite right; life should be as gay as possible. He would
go home and make it up, and reassure them. And why not take some of this
delightful toadstool with him, for them to eat? A hatful, no less. Some of those
red ones with white spots as well, and a few yellow. He had been a dull dog, an
enemy to merriment; he would make up for it. It would be gay to turn his coatsleeves inside out, and stick some yellow gorse into his waistcoat pockets. Then
home--singing--for a jolly evening.
After the departure of Mr. Coombes, Jennie discontinued playing, and turned
round on the music-stool again. "What a fuss about nothing!" said Jennie.
"You see, Mr. Clarence, what I've got to put up with," said Mrs. Coombes.
"He is a bit hasty," said Mr. Clarence judicially.
"He ain't got the slightest sense of our position," said Mrs. Coombes; "that's what
I complain of. He cares for nothing but his old shop; and if I have a bit of
company, or buy anything to keep myself decent, or get any little thing I want out
of the housekeeping money, there's disagreeables. 'Economy' he says; 'struggle
for life,' and all that. He lies awake of nights about it, worrying how he can screw
me out of a shilling. He wanted us to eat Dorset butter once. If once I was to give
in to him--there!"
"Of course," said Jennie.
"If a man values a woman," said Mr. Clarence, lounging back in the armchair,
"he must be prepared to make sacrifices for her. For my own part," said Mr.
Clarence, with his eye on Jennie, "I shouldn't think of marrying till I was in a
position to do the thing in style. It's downright selfishness. A man ought to go
through the rough-and-tumble by himself, and not drag her--"
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"I don't agree altogether with that," said Jennie. "I don't see why a man shouldn't
have a woman's help, provided he doesn't treat her meanly, you know. It's
meanness--"
"You wouldn't believe," said Mrs. Coombes. "But I was a fool to 'ave 'im. I might
'ave known. If it 'adn't been for my father, we shouldn't 'ave 'ad not a carriage to
our wedding."
"Lord! He didn't stick out at that?" said Mr. Clarence, quite shocked.
"Said he wanted the money for his stock, or some such rubbish. Why, he
wouldn't have a woman in to help me once a week if it wasn't for my standing out
plucky. And the fusses he makes about money--comes to me well, pretty near
crying, with sheets of paper and figgers. 'If only we can tide over this year,' he
says, 'the business is bound to go.' 'If only we can tide over this year,' I says; 'then
it'll be, if only we can tide over next year. I know you,' I says. 'And you don't
catch me screwing myself lean and ugly. Why didn't you marry a slavey?' I says,
'if you wanted one--instead of a respectable girl,' I says."
So Mrs. Coombes. But we will not follow this unedifying conversation further.
Suffice it that Mr. Coombes was very satisfactorily disposed of, and they had a
snug little time round the fire. Then Mrs. Coombes went to get the tea, and Jennie
sat coquettishly on the arm of Mr. Clarence's chair until the tea-things clattered
outside. "What was that I heard?" asked Mrs. Coombes playfully, as she entered,
and there was badinage about kissing. They were just sitting down to the little
circular table when the first intimation of Mr. Coombes' return was heard.
This was a fumbling at the latch of the front door.
"'Ere's my lord," said Mrs. Coombes. "Went out like a lion and comes back like a
lamb, I'll lay."
Something fell over in the shop: a chair, it sounded like. Then there was a sound
as of some complicated step exercise in the passage. Then the door opened and
Coombes appeared. But it was Coombes transfigured. The immaculate collar had
been torn carelessly from his throat. His carefully-brushed silk hat, half-full of a
crush of fungi, was under one arm; his coat was inside out, and his waistcoat
adorned with bunches of yellow-blossomed furze. These little eccentricities of
Sunday costume however, were quite overshadowed by the change in his face; it
was livid white, his eyes were unnaturally large and bright, and his pale blue lips
were drawn back in a cheerless grin. "Merry!" he said. He had stopped dancing to
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open the door. "Rational 'njoyment. Dance." He made three fantastic steps into
the room, and stood bowing.
"Jim!" shrieked Mrs. Coombes, and Mr. Clarence sat petrified, with a dropping
lower jaw.
"Tea," said Mr. Coombes. "Jol' thing, tea. Tose-stools, too. Brosher."
"He's drunk," said Jennie in a weak voice. Never before had she seen this intense
pallor in a drunken man, or such shining, dilated eyes.
Mr. Coombes held out a handful of scarlet agaric to Mr. Clarence. "Jo' stuff,"
said he; "ta' some."
At that moment he was genial. Then at the sight of their startled faces he
changed, with the swift transition of insanity, into overbearing fury. And it
seemed as if he had suddenly recalled the quarrel of his departure. In such a huge
voice as Mrs. Coombes had never heard before, he shouted, "My house. I'm
master 'ere. Eat what I give yer!" He bawled this, as it seemed, without an effort,
without a violent gesture, standing there as motionless as one who whispers,
holding out a handful of fungus.
Clarence approved himself a coward. He could not meet the mad fury in
Coombes' eyes; he rose to his feet, pushing back his chair, and turned, stooping.
At that Coombes rushed at him. Jennie saw her opportunity and, with the ghost of
a shriek, made for the door.
Mrs. Coombes followed her. Clarence tried to dodge. Over went the tea-table
with a smash as Coombes clutched him by the collar and tried to thrust the
fungus into his mouth. Clarence was content to leave his collar behind him, and
shot out into the passage with red patches of fly agaric still adherent to his face.
"Shut 'im in!" cried Mrs. Coombes, and would have closed the door, but her
supports deserted her; Jennie saw the shop door open, and vanished thereby,
locking it behind her, while Clarence went on hastily into the kitchen. Mr.
Coombes came heavily against the door, and Mrs. Coombes, finding the key was
inside, fled upstairs and locked herself in the spare bedroom.
So the new convert to joie de vivre emerged upon the passage, his decorations a
little scattered, but that respectable hatful of fungi still under his arm. He
hesitated at the three ways, and decided on the kitchen. Whereupon Clarence,
who was fumbling with the key, gave up the attempt to imprison his host, and
fled into the scullery, only to be captured before he could open the door into the
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yard. Mr. Clarence is singularly reticent of the details of what occurred. It seems
that Mr. Coombes' transitory irritation had vanished again, and he was once more
a genial playfellow. And as there were knives and meat choppers about, Clarence
very generously resolved to humour him and so avoid anything tragic. It is
beyond dispute that Mr. Coombes played with Mr. Clarence to his heart's
content; they could not have been more playful and familiar if they had known
each other for years. He insisted gaily on Clarence trying the fungi and, after a
friendly tussle, was smitten with remorse at the mess he was making of his
guest's face. It also appears that Clarence was dragged under the sink and his face
scrubbed with the blacking brush--, he being still resolved to humour the lunatic
at any cost--, and that finally, in a somewhat dishevelled, chipped, and
discoloured condition, he was assisted to his coat and shown out by the back
door, the shopway being barred by Jennie. Mr. Coombes' wandering thoughts
then turned to Jennie. Jennie had been unable to unfasten the shop door, but she
shot the bolts against Mr. Coombes' latchkey, and remained in possession of the
shop for the rest of the evening.
It would appear that Mr. Coombes then returned to the kitchen, still in pursuit of
gaiety, and, albeit a strict Good Templar, drank (or spilt down the front of the
first and only frock-coat) no less than five bottles of the stout Mrs. Coombes
insisted upon having for her health's sake. He made cheerful noises by breaking
off the necks of the bottles with several of his wife's wedding-present dinnerplates, and during the earlier part of this great drunk he sang divers merry
ballads. He cut his finger rather badly with one of the bottles--, the only
bloodshed in this story--, and what with that, and the systematic convulsion of his
inexperienced physiology by the liquorish brand of Mrs. Coombes' stout, it may
be the evil of the fungus poison was somehow allayed. But we prefer to draw a
veil over the concluding incidents of this Sunday afternoon. They ended in the
coal cellar, in a deep and healing sleep.
An interval of five years elapsed. Again it was a Sunday afternoon in October,
and again Mr. Coombes walked through the pine wood beyond the canal. He was
still the same dark-eyed, black-moustached little man that he was at the outset of
the story, but his double chin was now scarcely so illusory as it had been. His
overcoat was new, with a velvet lapel, and a stylish collar with turn-down
corners, free of any coarse starchiness, had replaced the original all-round article.
His hat was glossy, his gloves newish--though one finger had split and been
carefully mended. And a casual observer would have noticed about him a certain
rectitude of bearing, a certain erectness of head that marks the man who thinks
well of himself. He was a master now, with three assistants. Beside him walked a
larger sunburnt parody of himself, his brother Tom, just back from Australia.
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They were recapitulating their early struggles, and Mr. Coombes had just been
making a financial statement.
"It's a very nice little business, Jim," said brother Tom. "In these days of
competition you're jolly lucky to have worked it up so. And you're jolly lucky
too, to have a wife who's willing to help like yours does."
"Between ourselves," said Mr. Coombes, "it wasn't always so. It wasn't always
like this. To begin with, the missus was a bit giddy. Girls are funny creatures."
"Dear me!
"Yes. You'd hardly think it, but she was downright extravagant, and always
having slaps at me. I was a bit too easy and loving, and all that, and she thought
the whole blessed show was run for her. Turned the 'ouse into a regular
caravansery, always having her relations and girls from business in, and their
chaps. Comic songs a' Sunday, it was getting to, and driving trade away. And she
was making eyes at the chaps, too! I tell you Tom, the place wasn't my own."
"Shouldn't 'a' thought it."
"It was so. Well--I reasoned with her. I said, 'I ain't a duke, to keep a wife like a
pet animal. I married you for 'elp and company.' I said, 'You got to 'elp and pull
the business through.' She wouldn't 'ear of it. 'Very well,' I says; 'I'm a mild man
till I'm roused,' I says, 'and it's getting to that.' But she wouldn't 'ear of no
warnings."
"Well?"
"It's the way with women. She didn't think I 'ad it in me to be roused. Women of
her sort (between ourselves, Tom) don't respect a man until they're a bit afraid of
him. So I just broke out to show her. In comes a girl named Jennie, that used to
work with her, and her chap. We 'ad a bit of a row, and I came out 'ere--it was
just such another day as this--and I thought it all out. Then I went back and
pitched into them."
"You did?"
"I did. I was mad, I can tell you. I wasn't going to 'it 'er if I could 'elp it, so I went
back and licked into this chap, just to show 'er what I could do. 'E was a big chap,
too. Well, I chucked him, and smashed things about, and gave 'er a scaring, and
she ran up and locked 'erself into the spare room."
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"Well?"
"That's all. I says to 'er the next morning, 'Now you know,' I says, 'what I'm like
when I'm roused.' And I didn't have to say anything more."
"And you've been happy ever after, eh?"
"So to speak. There's nothing like putting your foot down with them. If it 'adn't
been for that afternoon I should 'a' been tramping the roads now, and she'd 'a'
been grumbling at me, and all her family grumbling for bringing her to poverty--I
know their little ways. But we're all right now. And it's a very decent little
business, as you say."
They proceeded on their way meditatively. "Women are funny creatures," said
Brother Tom. "They want a firm hand," says Coombes.
"What a lot of these funguses there are about here!" remarked Brother Tom
presently. "I can't see what use they are in the world."
Mr. Coombes looked. "I dessay they're sent for some wise purpose," said Mr.
Coombes.
And that was as much thanks as the purple pileus ever got for maddening this
absurd little man to the pitch of decisive action, and so altering the whole course
of his life.
THE JILTING OF JANE
As I sit writing in my study, I can hear our Jane bumping her way downstairs
with a brush and dustpan. She used to, in the old days, sing hymn tunes, or the
British national song, for the time being, to these instruments, but latterly she has
been silent and even careful over her work. Time was when I prayed with fervour
for such silence, and my wife with sighs for such care, but now they have come,
we are not so glad as we might have anticipated we should be. Indeed, I would
rejoice secretly, though it may be unmanly weakness to admit it, even to hear
Jane sing "Daisy," or, by the fracture of any plate but one of Euphemia's best
green ones, to learn that the period of brooding has come to an end.
Yet how we longed to hear the last of Jane's young man before we heard the last
of him! Jane was always very free with her conversation to my wife, and
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discoursed admirably in the kitchen on a variety of topics--so well, indeed, that I
sometimes left my study door open--our house is a small one--to partake of it.
But after William came, it was always William, nothing but William; William
this and William that; and when we thought William was worked out and
exhausted altogether, then William all over again. The engagement lasted
altogether three years; yet how she got introduced to William, and so became
thus saturated with him, was always a secret. For my part, I believe it was at the
street corner where the Reverend Barnabas Baux used to hold an open-air service
after evensong on Sundays. Young Cupids were wont to flit like moths round the
paraffin flare of that centre of High Church hymn-singing. I fancy she stood
singing hymns there, out of memory and her imagination, instead of coming
home to get supper, and William came up beside her and said, "Hello!" "Hello
yourself!" she said; and etiquette being satisfied, they proceeded to converse.
As Euphemia has a reprehensible way of letting her servants talk to her, she soon
heard of him. "He is such a respectable young man, ma'am," said Jane, "you don't
know." Ignoring the slur cast on her acquaintance, my wife inquired further about
this William.
"He is second porter at Maynard's, the draper's," said Jane, "and gets eighteen
shillings--nearly a pound--a week, m'm; and when the head porter leaves he will
be head porter. His relatives are quite superior people, m'm. Not labouring people
at all. His father was a greengrosher, m'm, and had a chumor, and he was
bankrup' twice. And one of his sisters is in a Home for the Dying. It will be a
very good match for me, m'm," said Jane, "me being an orphan girl."
"Then you are engaged to him?" asked my wife.
"Not engaged, ma'am; but he is saving money to buy a ring--hammyfist."
"Well, Jane, when you are properly engaged to him you may ask him round here
on Sunday afternoons, and have tea with him in the kitchen;" for my Euphemia
has a motherly conception of her duty towards her maid-servants. And presently
the amethystine ring was being worn about the house, even with ostentation, and
Jane developed a new way of bringing in the joint so that this gage was evident.
The elder Miss Maitland was aggrieved by it, and told my wife that servants
ought not to wear rings. But my wife looked it up in Enquire Within and Mrs.
Motherly's Book of Household Management, and found no prohibition. So Jane
remained with this happiness added to her love.
The treasure of Jane's heart appeared to me to be what respectable people call a
very deserving young man. "William, ma'am," said Jane one day suddenly, with
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ill-concealed complacency, as she counted out the beer bottles, "William, ma'am,
is a teetotaller. Yes, m'm; and he don't smoke. Smoking, ma'am," said Jane, as
one who reads the heart, "do make such a dust about. Beside the waste of money.
And the smell. However, I suppose it's necessary to some."
Possibly it dawned on Jane that she was reflecting a little severely upon
Euphemia's comparative ill-fortune, and she added kindly, "I'm sure the master is
a hangel when his pipe's alight. Compared to other times."
William was at first a rather shabby young man of the ready-made black coat
school of costume. He had watery gray eyes, and a complexion appropriate to the
brother of one in a Home for the Dying. Euphemia did not fancy him very much,
even at the beginning. His eminent respectability was vouched for by an alpaca
umbrella, from which he never allowed himself to be parted.
"He goes to chapel," said Jane. "His papa, ma'am--"
"His what, Jane?"
"His papa, ma'am, was Church: but Mr. Maynard is a Plymouth Brother, and
William thinks it Policy, ma'am, to go there too. Mr. Maynard comes and talks to
him quite friendly when they ain't busy, about using up all the ends of string, and
about his soul. He takes a lot of notice, do Mr. Maynard, of William, and the way
he saves string and his soul, ma'am."
Presently we heard that the head porter at Maynard's had left, and that William
was head porter at twenty-three shillings a week. "He is really kind of over the
man who drives the van," said Jane, "and him married, with three children." And
she promised in the pride of her heart to make interest for us with William to
favour us so that we might get our parcels of drapery from Maynard's with
exceptional promptitude.
After this promotion a rapidly increasing prosperity came upon Jane's young
man. One day we learned that Mr. Maynard had given William a book. "Smiles'
Elp Yourself, it's called," said Jane; "but it ain't comic. It tells you how to get on
in the world, and some what William read to me was lovely, ma'am."
Euphemia told me of this, laughing, and then she became suddenly grave. "Do
you know, dear," she said, "Jane said one thing I did not like. She had been quiet
for a minute, and then she suddenly remarked, 'William is a lot above me, ma'am,
ain't he?'"
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"I don't see anything in that," I said, though later my eyes were to be opened.
One Sunday afternoon about that time I was sitting at my writing-desk--possibly
I was reading a good book--when a something went by the window. I heard a
startled exclamation behind me, and saw Euphemia with her hands clasped
together and her eyes dilated. "George," she said in an awe-stricken whisper, "did
you see?"
Then we both spoke to one another at the same moment, slowly and solemnly:
"A silk hat! Yellow gloves! A new umbrella!"
"It may be my fancy, dear," said Euphemia; "but his tie was very like yours. I
believe Jane keeps him in ties. She told me a little while ago, in a way that
implied volumes about the rest of your costume, 'The master do wear pretty ties,
ma'am.' And he echoes all your novelties."
The young couple passed our window again on their way to their customary
walk. They were arm in arm. Jane looked exquisitely proud, happy, and
uncomfortable, with new white cotton gloves, and William, in the silk hat,
singularly genteel!
That was the culmination of Jane's happiness. When she returned, "Mr. Maynard
has been talking to William, ma'am," she said, "and he is to serve customers, just
like the young shop gentlemen, during the next sale. And if he gets on, he is to be
made an assistant, ma'am, at the first opportunity. He has got to be as
gentlemanly as he can, ma'am; and if he ain't, ma'am, he says it won't be for want
of trying. Mr. Maynard has took a great fancy to him."
"He is getting on, Jane," said my wife.
"Yes, ma'am," said Jane thoughtfully; "he is getting on."
And she sighed.
That next Sunday as I drank my tea I interrogated my wife. "How is this Sunday
different from all other Sundays, little woman? What has happened? Have you
altered the curtains, or rearranged the furniture, or where is the indefinable
difference of it? Are you wearing your hair in a new way without warning me? I
clearly perceive a change in my environment, and I cannot for the life of me say
what it is."
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Then my wife answered in her most tragic voice, "George," she said, "that--that
William has not come near the place to-day! And Jane is crying her heart out
upstairs."
There followed a period of silence. Jane, as I have said, stopped singing about the
house, and began to care for our brittle possessions, which struck my wife as
being a very sad sign indeed. The next Sunday, and the next, Jane asked to go
out, "To walk with William," and my wife, who never attempts to extort
confidences, gave her permission, and asked no questions. On each occasion Jane
came back looking flushed and very determined. At last one day she became
communicative.
"William is being led away," she remarked abruptly, with a catching of the
breath, apropos of tablecloths. "Yes, ma'am. She is a milliner, and she can play
on the piano."
"I thought," said my wife, "that you went out with him on Sunday."
"Not out with him, m'm--after him. I walked along by the side of them, and told
her he was engaged to me."
"Dear me, Jane, did you? What did they do?"
"Took no more notice of me than if I was dirt. So I told her she should suffer for
it."
"It could not have been a very agreeable walk, Jane."
"Not for no parties, ma'am."
"I wish," said Jane, "I could play the piano, ma'am. But anyhow, I don't mean to
let her get him away from me. She's older than him, and her hair ain't gold to the
roots, ma'am."
It was on the August Bank Holiday that the crisis came. We do not clearly know
the details of the fray, but only such fragments as poor Jane let fall. She came
home dusty, excited, and with her heart hot within her.
The milliner's mother, the milliner, and William had made a party to the Art
Museum at South Kensington, I think. Anyhow, Jane had calmly but firmly
accosted them somewhere in the streets, and asserted her right to what, in spite of
the consensus of literature, she held to be her inalienable property. She did, I
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think, go so far as to lay hands on him. They dealt with her in a crushingly
superior way. They "called a cab." There was a "scene," William being pulled
away into the four-wheeler by his future wife and mother-in-law from the
reluctant hands of our discarded Jane. There were threats of giving her "in
charge."
"My poor Jane!" said my wife, mincing veal as though she was mincing William.
"It's a shame of them. I would think no more of him. He is not worthy of you."
"No, m'm," said Jane. "He is weak.
"But it's that woman has done it," said Jane. She was never known to bring
herself to pronounce "that woman's" name or to admit her girlishness. "I can't
think what minds some women must have--to try and get a girl's young man
away from her. But there, it only hurts to talk about it," said Jane.
Thereafter our house rested from William. But there was something in the
manner of Jane's scrubbing the front doorstep or sweeping out the rooms, a
certain viciousness, that persuaded me that the story had not yet ended.
"Please, m'm, may I go and see a wedding to-morrow?" said Jane one day.
My wife knew by instinct whose wedding. "Do you think it is wise, Jane?" she
said.
"I would like to see the last of him," said Jane.
"My dear," said my wife, fluttering into my room about twenty minutes after Jane
had started, "Jane has been to the boot-hole and taken all the left-off boots and
shoes, and gone off to the wedding with them in a bag. Surely she cannot mean-"
"Jane," I said, "is developing character. Let us hope for the best."
Jane came back with a pale, hard face. All the boots seemed to be still in her bag,
at which my wife heaved a premature sigh of relief. We heard her go upstairs and
replace the boots with considerable emphasis.
"Quite a crowd at the wedding, ma'am," she said presently, in a purely
conversational style, sitting in our little kitchen, and scrubbing the potatoes; "and
such a lovely day for them." She proceeded to numerous other details, clearly
avoiding some cardinal incident.
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"It was all extremely respectable and nice, ma'am; but her father didn't wear a
black coat, and looked quite out of place, ma'am. Mr. Piddingquirk--"
"Who?"
"Mr. Piddingquirk--William that was, ma'am--had white gloves, and a coat like a
clergyman, and a lovely chrysanthemum. He looked so nice, ma'am. And there
was red carpet down, just like for gentlefolks. And they say he gave the clerk
four shillings, ma'am. It was a real kerridge they had--not a fly. When they came
out of church there was rice-throwing, and her two little sisters dropping dead
flowers. And someone threw a slipper, and then I threw a boot--"
"Threw a boot, Jane!"
"Yes, ma'am. Aimed at her. But it hit him. Yes, ma'am, hard. Gev him a black
eye, I should think. I only threw that one. I hadn't the heart to try again. All the
little boys cheered when it hit him."
After an interval--"I am sorry the boot hit him."
Another pause. The potatoes were being scrubbed violently. "He always was a bit
above me, you know, ma'am. And he was led away."
The potatoes were more than finished. Jane rose sharply with a sigh, and rapped
the basin down on the table.
"I don't care," she said. "I don't care a rap. He will find out his mistake yet. It
serves me right. I was stuck up about him. I ought not to have looked so high.
And I am glad things are as things are."
My wife was in the kitchen, seeing to the cookery. After the confession of the
boot-throwing, she must have watched poor Jane fuming with a certain dismay in
those brown eyes of hers. But I imagine they softened again very quickly, and
then Jane's must have met them.
"Oh, ma'am," said Jane, with an astonishing change of note, "think of all that
might have been! Oh, ma'am, I could have been so happy! I ought to have
known, but I didn't know...You're very kind to let me talk to you, ma'am...for it's
hard on me, ma'am...it's har-r-r-r-d--"
And I gather that Euphemia so far forgot herself as to let Jane sob out some of
the fullness of her heart on a sympathetic shoulder. My Euphemia, thank Heaven,
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has never properly grasped the importance of "keeping up her position." And
since that fit of weeping, much of the accent of bitterness has gone out of Jane's
scrubbing and brush-work.
Indeed, something passed the other day with the butcher-boy--but that scarcely
belongs to this story. However, Jane is young still, and time and change are at
work with her. We all have our sorrows, but I do not believe very much in the
existence of sorrows that never heal.
IN THE MODERN VEIN: AN UNSYMPATHETIC
LOVE STORY
Of course the cultivated reader has heard of Aubrey Vair. He has published on
three separate occasions, volumes of delicate verses--, some indeed, border on
indelicacy--, and his column, "Of Things Literary" in the Climax, is well known.
His Byronic visage and an interview have appeared in the Perfect Lady. It was
Aubrey Vair, I believe, who demonstrated that the humour of Dickens was worse
than his sentiment, and who detected "a subtle bourgeois flavour" in
Shakespeare. However, it is not generally known that Aubrey Vair has had erotic
experiences as well as erotic inspirations. He adopted Goethe some little time
since as his literary prototype, and that may have had something to do with his
temporary lapse from sexual integrity.
For it is one of the commonest things that undermine literary men, giving us
landslips and picturesque effects along the otherwise even cliff of their
respectable life, ranking next to avarice, and certainly above drink, this instability
called genius, or more fully, the consciousness of genius, such as Aubrey Vair
possessed. Since Shelley set the fashion, your man of gifts has been assured that
his duty to himself and his duty to his wife are incompatible, and his renunciation
of the Philistine has been marked by such infidelity as his means and courage
warranted. Most virtue is lack of imagination. At any rate, a minor genius
without his affections twisted into an inextricable muddle, and who did not
occasionally shed sonnets over his troubles, I have never met.
Even Aubrey Vair did this, weeping the sonnets overnight into his blotting-book,
and pretending to write literary causerie when his wife came down in her bath
slippers to see what kept him up. She did not understand him, of course. He did
this before the other woman appeared, so ingrained is conjugal treachery in the
talented mind. Indeed, he wrote more sonnets before the other woman came than
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after that event, because thereafter he spent much of his leisure in cutting down
the old productions, retrimming them, and generally altering this ready-made
clothing of his passion to suit her particular height and complexion.
Aubrey Vair lived in a little red villa with a lawn at the back and a view of the
Downs behind Reigate. He lived upon discreet investment eked out by literary
work. His wife handsome, sweet, and gentle, and--such is the tender humility of
good married women--she found her life's happiness in seeing that little Aubrey
Vair had well cooked variety for dinner, and that their house was the neatest and
brightest of all the houses they entered. Aubrey Vair enjoyed the dinners, and
was proud of the house, yet nevertheless he mourned because his genius
dwindled. Moreover, he grew plump, and corpulence threatened him.
We learn in suffering what we teach in song, and Aubrey Vair knew certainly
that his soul could give no creditable crops unless his affections were harrowed.
And how to harrow them was the trouble, for Reigate is a moral neighbourhood.
So Aubrey Vair's romantic longings blew loose for a time, much as a seedling
creeper might, planted in the midst of a flower-bed. But at last, in the fulness of
time, the other woman came to the embrace of Aubrey Vair's yearning hearttendrils, and his romantic episode proceeded as is here faithfully written down.
The other woman was really a girl, and Aubrey Vair met her first at a tennis party
at Redhill. Aubrey Vair did not play tennis after the accident to Miss Morton's
eye, and because latterly it made him pant and get warmer and moister than even
a poet should be; and this young lady had only recently arrived in England, and
could not play. So they gravitated into the two vacant basket chairs beside Mrs.
Bayne's deaf aunt, in front of the hollyhocks, and were presently talking at their
ease together.
The other woman's name was unpropitious--, Miss Smith--, but you would never
have suspected it from her face and costume. Her parentage was promising, she
was an orphan, her mother was a Hindoo, and her father an Indian civil servant;
and Aubrey Vair--himself a happy mixture of Kelt and Teuton, as indeed, all
literary men have to be nowadays--naturally believed in the literary consequences
of a mixture of races. She was dressed in white. She had finely moulded pale
features, great depth of expression, and a cloud of delicately frise black hair over
her dark eyes, and she looked at Aubrey Vair with a look half curious and half
shy, that contrasted admirably with the stereotyped frankness of your common
Reigate girl.
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"This is a splendid lawn--the best in Redhill," said Aubrey Vair in the course of
the conversation; "and I like it all the better because the daisies are spared." He
indicated the daisies with a graceful sweep of his rather elegant hand.
"They are sweet little flowers," said the lady in white, "and I have always
associated them with England, chiefly perhaps, through a picture I saw 'over
there' when I was very little, of children making daisy chains. I promised myself
that pleasure when I came home. But, alas! I feel now rather too large for such
delights."
"I do not see why we should not be able to enjoy these simple pleasures as we
grow older--why our growth should have in it so much forgetting. For my own
part--"
"Has your wife got Jane's recipe for stuffing trout?" asked Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt
abruptly.
"I really don't know," said Aubrey Vair.
"That's all right," said Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt. "It ought to please even you."
"Anything will please me," said Aubrey Vair; "I care very little--"
"Oh, it's a lovely dish," said Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt, and relapsed into
contemplation.
"I was saying," said Aubrey Vair, "that I think I still find my keenest pleasures in
childish pastimes. I have a little nephew that I see a great deal of, and when we
fly kites together, I am sure it would be hard to tell which of us is the happier. By
the bye, you should get at your daisy chains in that way. Beguile some little girl."
"But I did. I took that Morton mite for a walk in the meadows, and timidly
broached the subject. And she reproached me suggesting 'frivolous pursuits.' It
was a horrible disappointment."
"The governess here," said Aubrey Vair, "is robbing that child of its youth in a
terrible way. What will a life be that has no childhood at the beginning?
"Some human beings are never young," he continued, "and they never grow up.
They lead absolutely colourless lives. They are--they are etiolated. They never
love, and never feel the loss of it. They are--for the moment I can think of no
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better image--they are human flower-pots, in which no soul has been planted. But
a human soul properly growing must begin in a fresh childishness."
"Yes," said the dark lady thoughtfully, "a careless childhood, running wild
almost. That should be the beginning."
"Then we pass through the wonder and diffidence of youth."
"To strength and action," said the dark lady. Her dreamy eyes were fixed on the
Downs, and her fingers tightened on her knees as she spoke. "Ah, it is a grand
thing to live--as a man does--self-reliant and free."
"And so at last," said Aubrey Vair, "come to the culmination and crown of life."
He paused and glanced hastily at her. Then he dropped his voice almost to a
whisper--"And the culmination of life is love."
Their eyes met for a moment, but she looked away at once. Aubrey Vair felt a
peculiar thrill and a catching in his breath, but his emotions were too complex for
analysis. He had a certain sense of surprise also, at the way his conversation had
developed.
Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt suddenly dug him in the chest with her ear-trumpet, and
someone at tennis bawled, "Love all!"
"Did I tell you Jane's girls have had scarlet fever?" asked Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt.
"No," said Aubrey Vair.
"Yes; and they are peeling now," said Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt, shutting her lips
tightly, and nodding in a slow, significant manner at both of them.
There was a pause. All three seemed lost in thought, too deep for words.
"Love," began Aubrey Vair presently, in a severely philosophical tone, leaning
back in his chair, holding his hands like a praying saint's in front of him, and
staring at the toe of his shoe--, "love is, I believe, the one true and real thing in
life. It rises above reason, interest, or explanation. Yet I never read of an age
when it was so much forgotten as it is now. Never was love expected to run so
much in appointed channels, never was it so despised, checked, ordered, and
obstructed. Policeman say, 'This way, Eros!' As a result, we relieve our emotional
possibilities in the hunt for gold and notoriety. And after all, with the best fortune
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in these, we only hold up the glided images of our success, and are weary slaves,
with unsatisfied hearts, in the pageant of life."
Aubrey Vair sighed, and there was a pause. The girl looked at him out of the
mysterious darkness of her eyes. She had read many books, but Aubrey Vair was
her first literary man, and she took this kind of thing for genius--as girls have
done before.
"We are," continued Aubrey Vair, conscious of a favourable impression--, "we
are like fireworks, mere dead, inert things until the appointed spark comes; and
then--if it is not damp--the dormant soul blazes forth in all its warmth and beauty.
That is living. I sometimes think, do you know, that we should be happier if we
could die soon after that golden time, like the Ephemerides. There is a decay sets
in."
"Eigh?" said Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt startlingly. "I didn't hear you."
"I was on the point of remarking," shouted Aubrey Vair, wheeling the array of
his thoughts--, "I was on the point of remarking that few people in Redhill could
match Mrs. Morton's fine broad green."
"Others have noticed it." Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt shouted back. "It is since she has
had in her new false teeth."
This interruption dislocated the conversation a little. However-"I must thank you, Mr. Vair," said the dark girl, when they parted that afternoon,
"for having given me very much to think about."
And from her manner, Aubrey Vair perceived clearly he had not wasted his time.
It would require a subtler pen than mine to tell how from that day a passion for
Miss Smith grew like Jonah's gourd in the heart of Aubrey Vair. He became
pensive, and in the prolonged absence of Miss Smith, irritable. Mrs. Aubrey Vair
felt the change in him, and put it down to vitriolic Saturday Reviewer.
Indisputably the Saturday does at times go a little far. He re-read Elective
Affinities, and lent it to Miss Smith. Incredible as it may appear to members of
the Areopagus Club, where we know Aubrey Vair, he did also beyond all
question inspire a sort of passion in that sombre-eyed, rather clever, and really
very beautiful girl.
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He talked to her a lot about love and destiny, and all that bric-a-brac of the minor
poet. And they talked together about his genius. He elaborately, though
discreetly, sought her society, and presented and read to her the milder of his
unpublished sonnets. We consider his Byronic features pasty, but the feminine
mind has its own laws. I suppose, also where a girl is not a fool, a literary man
has an enormous advantage over anyone but a preacher, in the show he can make
of his heart's wares.
At last a day in that summer came when he met her alone, possibly by chance, in
a quiet lane towards Horley. There were ample hedges on either side, rich with
honeysuckle, vetch, and mullein.
They conversed intimately of his poetic ambitions, and then he read her those
verses of his subsequently published in 'Hobson's Magazine': "Tenderly ever,
since I have met thee." He had written these the day before; and though I think
the sentiment is uncommonly trite, there is a redeeming note of sincerity about
the lines not conspicuous in all Aubrey Vair's poetry.
He read rather well, and a swell of genuine emotion crept into his voice as he
read, with one white hand thrown out to point the rhythm of the lines. "Ever, my
sweet, for thee," he concluded, looking up into her face.
Before he looked up, he had been thinking chiefly of his poem and its effect.
Straightway he forgot it. Her arms hung limply before her, and her hands were
clasped together. Her eyes were very tender.
"Your verses go to the heart," she said softly.
Her mobile features were capable of wonderful shades of expression. He
suddenly forgot his wife and his position as a minor poet as he looked at her. It is
possible that his classical features may themselves have undergone a certain
transfiguration. For one brief moment--and it was always to linger in his
memory--destiny lifted him out of his vain little self to a nobler level of
simplicity. The copy of "Tenderly ever" fluttered from his hand. Considerations
vanished. Only one thing seemed of importance.
"I love you," he said abruptly.
An expression of fear came into her eyes. The grip of her hands upon one another
tightened convulsively. She became very pale.
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Then she moved her lips as if to speak, bringing her face slightly nearer to his.
There was nothing in the world at that moment for either of them but one
another. They were both trembling exceedingly. In a whisper she said, "You love
me?"
Aubrey Vair stood quivering and speechless, looking into her eyes. He never
seen such a light as he saw there before. He was in a wild tumult of emotion. He
was dreadfully scared at what he had done. He could not say another word. He
nodded.
"And this has come to me?" she said presently, in the same awe-stricken whisper,
and then, "Oh, my love, my love!"
And thereupon Aubrey Vair had her clasped to himself, her cheek upon his
shoulder and his lips to hers.
Thus it was that Aubrey Vair came by the cardinal memory of his life. To this
day it recurs in his works.
A little boy clambering in the hedge some way down the lane saw this group with
surprise, and then with scorn and contempt. Reckoning nothing of his destiny, he
turned away feeling that he at least could never come to the unspeakable
unmanliness of hugging girls. Unhappily for Reigate scandal, his shame for his
sex was altogether too deep for words.
An hour after, Aubrey Vair returned home in a hushed mood. There were muffins
after his own heart for his tea--Mrs. Aubrey Vair had had hers. And there were
chrysanthemums, chiefly white ones--, flowers he loved--, set out in the china
bowl he was wont to praise. And his wife came behind him to kiss him as he sat
eating.
"De lill Jummuns," she remarked, kissing him under the ear.
Then it came into the mind of Aubrey Vair with startling clearness, while his ear
was being kissed, and with his mouth full of muffin, that life is a singularly
complex thing.
The summer passed at last into the harvest-time, and the leaves began falling. It
was evening, the warm sunset light still touched the Downs, but up the valley a
blue haze was creeping. One or two lamps in Reigate were already alight.
388
About halfway up the slanting road that scales the Downs, there is a wooden seat
where one may obtain a fine view of the red villas scattered below, and of the
succession of blue hills beyond. Here the girl with the shadowy face was sitting.
She had a book on her knees, but it lay neglected. She was leaning forward, her
chin resting upon her hand, She was looking across the valley into the darkening
sky, with troubled eyes.
Aubrey Vair appeared through the hazel-bushes, and sat down beside her. He
held half a dozen dead leaves in his hand.
She did not alter her attitude. "Well?" she said.
"Is it to be flight?" he asked.
Aubrey Vair was rather pale. He had been having bad nights latterly, with dreams
of the Continental Express, Mrs. Aubrey Vair possibly even in pursuit--, he
always fancied her making the tragedy, ridiculous by tearfully bringing
additional pairs of socks, and any such trifles he had forgotten, with her--, all
Reigate and Redhill in commotion. He had never eloped before, and he had
visions of difficulties with hotel proprietors. Mrs. Aubrey Vair might telegraph
ahead. Even he had, had a prophetic vision of a headline in a halfpenny evening
newspaper: "Young Lady abducts a Minor Poet." So there was a quaver in his
voice as he asked, "Is it to be flight?"
"As you will," she answered, still not looking at him.
"I want you to consider particularly how this will affect you. A man," said
Aubrey Vair, slowly, and staring hard at the leaves in his hand, "even gains a
certain eclat in these affairs. But to a woman it is ruin--social, moral."
"This is not love," said the girl in white.
"Ah, my dearest! Think of yourself."
"Stupid!" she said, under her breath.
"You spoke?"
"Nothing."
"But cannot we go on, meeting one another, loving one another, without any
great scandal or misery? Could we not--"
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"That," interrupted Miss Smith, "would be unspeakably horrible."
"This is a dreadful conversation to me. Life is so intricate, such a web of subtle
strands binds us this way and that. I cannot tell what is right. You must consider-"
"A man would break such strands."
"There is no manliness," said Aubrey Vair, with a sudden glow of moral
exaltation, "in doing wrong. My love--"
"We could at least die together, dearest," she said.
"Good Lord!" said Aubrey Vair. "I mean--consider my wife."
"You have not considered her hitherto."
"There is a flavour--of cowardice, of desertion, about suicide," said Aubrey Vair.
"Frankly, I have the English prejudice, and do not like any kind of running
away."
Miss Smith smiled very faintly. "I see clearly now what I did not see. My love
and yours are very different things."
"Possibly it is a sexual difference," said Aubrey Vair; and then, feeling the
remark inadequate, he relapsed into silence.
They sat for some time without a word. The two lights in Reigate below
multiplied to a score of bright points, and above, one star had become visible.
She began laughing, an almost noiseless, hysterical laugh that jarred
unaccountably upon Aubrey Vair.
Presently she stood up. "They will wonder where I am," she said. "I think I must
be going."
He followed her to the road. "Then this is the end?" he said, with a curious
mixture of relief and poignant regret.
"Yes, this is the end," she answered, and turned away.
There straightway dropped into the soul of Aubrey Vair a sense of infinite loss. It
was an altogether new sensation. She was perhaps twenty yards away, when he
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groaned aloud with the weight of it, and suddenly began running after her with
his arms extended.
"Annie," he cried--, "Annie! I have been talking rot. Annie, now I know I love
you! I cannot spare you. This must not be. I did not understand."
The weight was horrible.
"Oh, stop, Annie!" he cried, with a breaking voice, and there were tears on his
face.
She turned upon him suddenly, and his arms fell by his side. His expression
changed at the sight of her pale face.
"You do not understand," she said. "I have said good-bye."
She looked at him; he was evidently greatly distressed, a little out of breath, and
he had just stopped blubbering. His contemptible quality reached the pathetic.
She came up close to him, and taking his damp Byronic visage between her
hands, she kissed him again and again. "Good-bye, little man that I loved," she
said; "and good-bye to this folly of love."
Then, with something that may have been a laugh or a sob--, she herself, when
she came to write it all in her novel, did not know which--, she turned and hurried
away again, and went out of the path that Aubrey Vair must pursue, at the crossroads.
Aubrey Vair stood, where she had kissed him, with a mind as inactive as his
body, until her white dress had disappeared. Then he gave an involuntary sigh, a
large exhaustive expiration, and so awoke himself, and began walking, pensively
dragging his feet through the dead leaves, home. Emotions are terrible things.
"Do you like the potatoes, dear?" asked Mrs. Aubrey Vair at dinner. "I cooked
them myself."
Aubrey Vair descended slowly from cloudy, impalpable meditations to the level
of fried potatoes. "These potatoes--" he remarked, after a pause during which he
was struggling with recollection. "Yes. These potatoes have exactly the tints of
the dead leaves of the hazel."
"What a fanciful poet it is!" said Mrs. Aubrey Vair. "Taste them. They are very
nice potatoes indeed."
391
A CATASTROPHE
The little shop was not paying. The realisation came insensibly. Winslow was not
the man for definite addition and subtraction and sudden discovery. He became
aware of the truth in his mind gradually, as though it had always been there. A lot
of facts had converged and led him there. There was that line of cretonnes--four
half-pieces--untouched, save for half a yard sold to cover a stool. There were
those shirting at 4 3/4d.--Bandersnatch, in the Broadway, was selling them at 2
3/4d.--under cost, in fact. (Surely Bandersnatch might let a man live!) Those
servants' caps, a selling line, needed replenishing, and that brought back the
memory of Winslow's sole wholesale dealers, Helter, Skelter, and Grab. Why!
How about their account?
Winslow stood with a big green box on the counter before him when he thought
of it. His pale grey eyes grew a little rounder; his pale, straggling moustache
twitched. He had been drifting along, day after day. He went round to the
ramshackle cash-desk in the corner--it was Winslow's weakness to sell his goods
over the counter, give his customers a duplicate bill, and then dodge into the desk
to receive the money, as though he doubted his own honesty. His lank forefinger,
with the prominent joints, ran down the bright little calendar ("Clack's Cottons
last for All Time"). "One--two--three; three weeks an' a day!" said Winslow,
staring. "March! Only three weeks and a day. It can't be."
"Tea dear," said Mrs. Winslow, opening the door with the glass window and the
white blind that communicated with the parlour.
"One minute," said Winslow, and began unlocking the desk.
An irritable old gentleman, very hot and red about the face, and in a heavy furlined coat, came in noisily. Mrs. Winslow vanished.
"Ugh!" said the old gentleman. "Pocket-handkerchief."
"Yes, sir," said Winslow. "About what price--"
"Ugh!" said the old gentleman. "Poggit-handkerchief, quig!"
Winslow began to feel flustered. He produced two boxes.
"These sir--" began Winslow.
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"Sheed tin!" said the old gentleman, clutching the stiffness of the linen. "Wad to
blow my nose--not haggit about."
"A cotton one, p'raps, sir?" said Winslow.
"How much?" said the old gentleman over the handkerchief.
"Sevenpence, sir. There's nothing more I can show you? No ties, braces--?"
"Damn!" said the old gentleman, fumbling in his ticket-pocket, and finally
producing half a crown. Winslow looked round for his metallic duplicate-book
which he kept in various fixtures, according to circumstances, and then he caught
the old gentleman's eye. He went straight to the desk at once and got the change,
with an entire disregard of routine of the shop.
Winslow was always more or less excited by a customer. But the open desk
reminded him of his trouble. It did not come back to him all at once. He heard a
finger-nail softly tapping on the glass, and looking up saw Minnie's eyes over the
blind. It seemed like retreat opening. He shut and locked the desk, and went into
the back room to tea.
But he was preoccupied. Three weeks and a day! He took unusually large bites of
his bread and butter, and stared hard at the little pot of jam. He answered
Minnie's conversational advances distractedly. The shadow of Helter, Skelter,
and Grab lay upon the tea-table. He was struggling with this new idea of failure,
the tangible realisation that was taking shape and substance, condensing, as it
were, out of the misty uneasiness of many days. At present it was simply one
concrete fact; there were thirty-nine pounds left in the bank, and that day three
weeks Messrs. Helter, Skelter, and Grab, those enterprising outfitters of young
men, would demand their eighty pounds.
After tea there was a customer or so--small purchases: some muslin and
buckram, dress-protectors, tape, and a pair of Lisle hose. Then, knowing that
Black Care was lurking in the dusky corners of the shop, he lit the three lamps
early and set to, refolding his cotton prints, the most vigorous and least
meditative proceeding of which he could think. He could see Minnie's shadow in
the other room as she moved about the table. She was busy turning an old dress.
He had a walk after supper, looked in at the Y.M.C.A., but found no one to talk
to, and finally went to bed. Minnie was already there. And there too, waiting for
him, nudging him gently, until about midnight he was hopelessly awake, sat
Black Care.
393
He had, had one or two nights lately in that company, but this was much worse.
First came Messrs. Helter, Skelter, and Garb, and their demand for eighty
pounds--an enormous sum when your original capital was only a hundred and
seventy. They camped, as it were, before him, sat down and beleaguered him. He
clutched feebly at the circumambient darkness for expedients. Suppose he had a
sale, sold things for almost anything? He tried to imagine a sale miraculously
successful in some unexpected manner, and mildly profitable, in spite of
reductions below cost. Then Bandersnatch Limited, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107
Broadway, joined the siege, a long caterpillar of frontage, a battery of shop
fronts, wherein things were sold at a farthing above cost. How could he fight
such an establishment? Besides, what had he to sell? He began to review his
resources. What taking line was there to bait the sale? Then straightway came
those pieces of cretonne, yellow and black, with a bluish-green flower; those
discredited skirtings, prints without buoyancy, skirmishing haberdashery, some
despairful four-button gloves by an inferior maker--a hopeless crew. And that
was his force against Bandersnatch, Helter, Skelter, and Grab, and the pitiless
world behind them. Whatever had made him think a mortal would buy such
things? Why had he bought this and neglected that? He suddenly realised the
intensity of his hatred for Helter, Skelter, and Grab's salesman. Then he drove
towards an agony of self-reproach. He had spent too much on that cash-desk.
What real need was there of a desk? He saw his vanity of that desk in a lurid
glow of self-discovery. And the lamps? Five pounds! Then suddenly, with what
was almost physical pain, he remembered the rent.
He groaned and turned over. And there, dim in the darkness, was the hummock
of Mrs. Winslow's shoulder. That set him off in another direction. He became
acutely sensible of Minnie's want of feeling. Here he was, worried to death about
business, and she sleeping like a little child. He regretted having married, with
that infinite bitterness that only comes to the human heart in the small hours of
the morning. That hummock of white seemed absolutely without helpfulness, a
burden, a responsibility. What fools men were to marry! Minnie's inert repose
irritated his so much that he was almost provoked to wake her up and tell her that
they were "Ruined." She would have to go back to her uncle; her uncle had
always been against him: and as for his own future, Winslow was exceedingly
uncertain. A shop assistant who has once set up for himself finds the utmost
difficulty in getting into a situation again. He began to figure himself "cribhunting" once more, going from this wholesale house to that, writing
innumerable letters. How he hated writing letters! "Sir--, Referring to your
advertisement in the Christian World." He beheld an infinite vista of discomfort
and disappointment, ending--in a gulf.
394
He dressed, yawning, and went down to open the shop. He felt tired before the
day began. As he carried the shutters in, he kept asking himself what good he
was doing. The end was inevitable, whether he bothered or not. The clear
daylight smote into the place, and showed how old and rough and splintered was
the floor, how shabby the second-hand counter, how hopeless the whole
enterprise. He had been dreaming these past six months of a bright shop, of a
happy couple, of a modest but comely profit flowing in. He had suddenly
awakened from his dream. The braid that bound his decent black coat--it was a
trifle loose--caught against the catch of the shop door, and was torn away. This
suddenly turned his wretchedness to wrath. He stood quivering for a moment,
then with a spiteful clutch, tore the braid looser, and went in to Minnie.
"Here," he said, with infinite reproach; "look here! You might look after a chap a
bit."
"I didn't see it torn," said Minnie.
"You never do," said Winslow, with gross injustice, "until things are too late."
Minnie looked suddenly at his face. "I'll sew it now, Sid, if you like."
"Let's have breakfast first," said Winslow, "and do things at their proper time."
He was preoccupied at breakfast, and Minnie watched him anxiously. His only
remark was to declare his egg a bad one. It wasn't; it was flavoury--, being one of
those at fifteen a shilling--, but quite nice. He pushed it away from him, and then,
having eaten a slice of bread and butter, admitted himself in the wrong by
resuming the egg.
"Sid," said Minnie, as he stood up to go into the shop again, "you're not well."
"I'm well enough." He looked at her as though he hated her.
"Then there's something else the matter. You aren't angry with me, Sid, are you,
about that braid? Do tell me what's the matter. You were just like this at tea
yesterday, and at supper-time. It wasn't the braid then."
"And I'm likely to be."
She looked interrogation. "Oh, what is the matter?" she said.
It was too good a chance to miss, and he brought the evil news out with dramatic
force. "Matter?" he said. "I done my best, and here we are. That's the matter! If I
395
can't pay Helter, Skelter, and Grab eighty pounds, this day three weeks--" Pause.
"We shall be sold up! Sold up! That's the matter, Min! Sold Up!"
"Oh, Sid!" began Minnie.
He slammed the door. For the moment he felt relieved of at least half his misery.
He began dusting boxes that did not require dusting, and then reblocked a
cretonne already faultlessly blocked. He was in a state of grim wretchedness; a
martyr under the harrow of fate. At anyrate, it should not be said he failed for
want of industry. And how he had planned and contrived and worked! All to this
end! He felt horrible doubts. Providence and Bandersnatch--surely they were
incompatible! Perhaps he was being "tried"? That sent him off upon a new tack, a
very comforting one. The martyr pose, the gold-in-the-furnace attitude, lasted all
the morning.
At dinner--"potato pie--" he looked up suddenly, and saw Minnie's face regarding
him. Pale she looked, and a little red about the eyes. Something caught him
suddenly with a queer effect upon his throat. All his thoughts seemed to wheel
round into quite a new direction.
He pushed back his plate and stared at her blankly. Then he got up, went round
the table to her--she staring at him. He dropped on his knees beside her without a
word. "Oh, Minnie!" he said, and suddenly she knew it was peace, and put her
arms about him, as he began to sob and weep.
He cried like a little boy, slobbering on her shoulder that he was a knave to have
married her and brought her to this, that he hadn't the wits to be trusted with a
penny, that it was all his fault; that he "had hoped so--" ending in a howl. And
she, crying gently herself, patting his shoulders, said "Ssh!" softly to his noisy
weeping, and so soothed the outbreak. Then suddenly the crazy bell upon the
shop door began, and Winslow had to jump to his feet, and be a man again.
After that scene they "talked it over" at tea, at supper, in bed, at every possible
interval in between, solemnly--quite inconclusively--with set faces and eyes for
the most part staring in front of them--and yet with a certain mutual comfort.
"What to do I don't know," was Winslow's main proposition. Minnie tried to take
a cheerful view of service--with a probable baby. But she found she needed all
her courage. And her uncle would help her again, perhaps just at the critical time.
It didn't do for folks to be too proud. Besides, "something might happen," a
favourite formula with her.
396
One hopeful line was to anticipate a sudden afflux of customers. "Perhaps," said
Minnie, "you might get together fifty. They know you well enough to trust you a
bit." They debated that point. Once the possibility of Helter, Skelter, and Grab
giving credit was admitted, it was pleasant to begin sweating the acceptable
minimum. For some half-hour over tea the second day after Winslow's
discoveries they were quite cheerful again, laughing even at their terrific fears.
Even twenty pounds to go on with might be considered enough. Then in some
mysterious way the pleasant prospect of Messrs. Helter, Skelter, and Grab
tempering the wind to the shorn retailer vanished--vanished absolutely, and
Winslow found himself again in the pit of despair.
He began looking about at the furniture, and wondering idly what it would fetch.
The chiffonier was good, anyhow, and there were Minnie's old plates that her
mother used to have. Then he began to think of desperate expedients for putting
off the evil day. He had heard somewhere of Bills of Sale--there was to his ears
something comfortingly substantial in the phrase. Then, why not "Go to the
Money-Lenders"?
One cheering thing happened on Thursday afternoon a little girl came in with a
pattern of "print," and he was able to match it. He had not been able to match
anything out of his meagre stock before. He went in and told Minnie. The
incident is mentioned lest the reader should imagine it was uniform despair with
him.
The next morning, and the next, after the discovery, Winslow opened shop late.
When one has been awake most of the night, and has no hope, what is the good
of getting up punctually? But as he went into the dark shop on Friday he saw
something lying on the floor, something lit by the bright light that came under the
ill-fitting door--a black oblong. He stooped and picked up an envelope with a
deep mourning edge. It was addressed to his wife. Clearly a death in her family-perhaps her uncle. He knew the man too well to have expectations. And they
would have to get mourning and go to the funeral. The brutal cruelty of people
dying! He saw it all in a flash--he always visualised his thoughts. Black trousers
to get, black crape, black gloves--none in stock--the railway fares, the shop
closed for the day.
"I'm afraid there's bad news, Minnie," he said.
She was kneeling before the fireplace, blowing the fire. She had her housemaid's
gloves on and the old country sun-bonnet she wore of a morning, to keep the dust
out of her hair. She turned, saw the envelope, gave a gasp, and pressed two
bloodless lips together.
397
"I'm afraid it's uncle," she said, holding the letter and staring with eyes wide open
into Winslow's face. "It's a strange hand!"
"The postmark's Hull," said Winslow.
"The postmark's Hull."
Minnie opened the letter slowly, drew it out, hesitated, turned it over, saw the
signature. "It's Mr. Speight!"
"What does he say?" said Winslow.
Minnie began to read. "Oh!" she screamed. She dropped the letter, collapsed into
a crouching heap, her hands covering her eyes. Winslow snatched at it. "A most
terrible accident has occurred," he read; "Melchior's chimney fell down yesterday
evening right on the top of your uncle's house, and every living soul was killed-your uncle, your cousin Mary, Will and Ned, and the girl--every one of them, and
smashed--you would hardly know them. I'm writing to you to break the news
before you see it in the papers--" The letter fluttered from Winslow's fingers. He
put out his hand against the mantel to steady himself.
All of them dead! Then he saw, as in a vision, a row of seven cottages, each let at
seven shillings a week, a timber yard, two villas, and the ruins--still marketable-of the avuncular residence. He tried to feel a sense of loss and could not. They
were sure to have been left to Minnie's aunt. All dead! 7x7x52÷20 began
insensibly to work itself out in his mind, but discipline was ever weak in his
mental arithmetic; figures kept moving from one line to another, like children
playing at Widdy, Widdy Way. Was it two hundred pounds about--or one
hundred pounds? Presently he picked up the letter again, and finished reading it.
"You being the next of kin," said Mr. Speight.
"How awful!" said Minnie in horror-struck whisper, and looking up at last.
Winslow stared back at her, shaking his head solemnly. There were a thousand
things running through his mind, but none that, even to his dull sense, seemed
appropriate as a remark. "It was the Lord's will," he said at last.
"It seems so very, very terrible," said Minnie; "auntie, dear auntie--Ted--poor,
dear uncle--"
"It was the Lord's will, Minnie," said Winslow, with infinite feeling. A long
silence.
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"Yes," said Minnie, very slowly, staring thoughtfully at the crackling black paper
in the grate. The fire had gone out. "Yes, perhaps it was the Lord's will."
They looked gravely at one another. Each would have been terribly shocked at
any mention of the property by the other. She turned to the dark fireplace and
began tearing up an old newspaper slowly. Whatever our losses may be, the
world's work still waits for us. Winslow gave a deep sigh and walked in a hushed
manner towards the front door. As he opened it, a flood of sunlight came
streaming into the dark shadows of the closed shop. Bandersnatch, Helter,
Skelter, and Grab, had vanished out of his mind like the mists before the rising
sun.
Presently he was carrying in the shutters, and in the briskest way, the fire in the
kitchen was crackling exhilaratingly, with a little saucepan walloping above it,
for Minnie was boiling two eggs--, one for herself this morning, as well as one
for him--, and Minnie herself was audible, laying breakfast with the great eclat.
The blow was a sudden and terrible one--but it behoves us to face such things
bravely in this sad, unaccountable world. It was quite midday before either of
them mentioned the cottages.
THE LOST INHERITANCE
"My uncle," said the man with the glass eye, "was what you might call a hemisemi-demi millionaire. He was worth about a hundred and twenty thousand.
Quite. And he left me all his money."
I glanced at the shiny sleeve of his coat, and my eye travelled up to the frayed
collar.
"Every penny," said the man with the glass eye, and I caught the active pupil
looking at me with a touch of offence.
"I've never had any windfalls like that," I said, trying to speak enviously and
propitiate him.
"Even a legacy isn't always a blessing," he remarked with a sigh, and with an air
of philosophical resignation he put the red nose and the wiry moustache into his
tankard for a space.
"Perhaps not," I said.
399
"He was an author, you see, and he wrote a lot of books."
"Indeed!"
"That was the trouble of it all." He stared at me with the available eye to see if I
grasped his statement, then averted his face a little and produced a toothpick.
"You see," he said, smacking his lips after a pause, "it was like this. He was my
uncle--my maternal uncle. And he had--what shall I call it--? A weakness for
writing, edifying literature. Weakness is hardly the word--downright mania is
nearer the mark. He's been librarian in a Polytechnic, and as soon as the money
came to him he began to indulge his ambition. It's a simply extraordinary and
incomprehensible thing to me. Here was a man of thirty-seven suddenly dropped
into a perfect pile of gold, and he didn't go--not a day's bust on it. One would
think a chap would go and get himself dressed a bit decent--say a couple of
dozen pair of trousers at a West End tailor's; but he never did. You'd hardly
believe it, but when he died he hadn't even a gold watch. It seems wrong for
people like that to have money. All he did was just to take a house, and order in
pretty nearly five tons of books and ink and paper, and set to writing, edifying
literature as hard as ever he could write. I can't understand it! But he did. The
money came to him, curiously enough, through a maternal uncle of his,
unexpected like, when he was seven-and-thirty. My mother, it happened, was his
only relation in the wide, wide world, except some second cousins of his. And I
was her only son. You follow all that? The second cousins had one only son too,
but they brought him to see the old man too soon. He was rather a spoilt
youngster, was this son of theirs, and directly he set eyes on my uncle, he began
bawling out as hard as he could. 'Take 'im away--er,' he says, 'take 'im away,' and
so did for himself entirely. It was pretty straight sailing, you'd think, for me, eh?
And my mother, being a sensible, careful woman, settled the business in her own
mind long before he did.
"He was a curious little chap, was my uncle, as I remember him. I don't wonder
at the kid being scared. Hair just like these Japanese dolls they sell, black and
straight and stiff all round the brim and none in the middle, and below, a whitish
kind of face and rather large dark grey eyes moving about behind his spectacles.
He used to attach a great deal of importance to dress, and always wore a flapping
overcoat and a big-brimmed felt hat of a most extraordinary size. He looked a
rummy little beggar, I can tell you. Indoors it was, as a rule, a dirty red flannel
dressing-gown and a black skull-cap he had. That black skull-cap made him look
like the portraits of all kinds of celebrated people. He was always moving about
from house to house, was my uncle, with his chair which had belonged to Savage
Landor, and his two writing-tables, one of Carlyle's and the other of Shelley's, so
400
the dealer told him, and the completest portable reference library in England, he
said he had--and he lugged the whole caravan, now to a house at Down, near
Darwin's old place, then to Reigate, near Meredith, then off to Haslemere, then
back to Chelsea for a bit, and then up to Hampstead. He knew there was
something wrong with his stuff, but he never knew there was anything wrong
with his brains. It was always the air, or the water, or the altitude, or some
tommy-rot like that. 'So much depends on environment,' he used to say, and stare
at you hard, as if he half suspected you were hiding a grin at him somewhere
under your face. 'So much depends on environment to a sensitive mind like
mine.'
"What was his name? You wouldn't know it if I told you. He wrote nothing that
anyone has ever read--nothing. No one could read it. He wanted to be a great
teacher, he said, and he didn't know what he wanted to teach any more than a
child. So he just blethered at large about Truth and Righteousness, and the Spirit
of History, and all that. Book after book he wrote and published at his own
expense. He wasn't quite right in his head, you know really; and to hear him go
on at the critics--not because they slated him, mind you--he liked that--but
because they didn't take any notice of him at all. 'What do the nations want?' he
would ask, holding out his brown old claw. 'Why, teaching--guidance! They are
scattered upon the hills like sheep without a shepherd. There is War and Rumours
of War, the unlaid Spirit of Discord abroad in the land, Nihilism, Vivisection,
Vaccination, Drunkenness, Penury, Want, Socialistic Error, Selfish Capital! Do
you see the clouds, Ted--?' My name, you know--'Do you see the clouds lowering
over the land? and behind it all--the Mongol waits!' He was always very great on
Mongols, and the Spectre of Socialism, and suchlike things.
"Then out would come his finger at me, and with his eyes all afire and his skullcap askew, he would whisper: 'And here am I. What did I want? Nations to teach.
Nations! I say it with all modesty, Ted, I could. I would guide them; nay! But I
will guide them to a safe haven, to the land of Righteousness, flowing with milk
and honey.'
"That's how he used to go on. Ramble, rave about the nations, and righteousness,
and that kind of thing. Kind of mincemeat of Bible and blethers. From fourteen
up to three-and-twenty, when I might have been improving my mind, my mother
used to wash me and brush my hair (at least in the earlier years of it), with a nice
parting down the middle, and take me, once or twice a week, to hear this old
lunatic jabber about things he had read of in the morning papers, trying to do it as
much like Carlyle as he could, and I used to sit according to instructions, and
look intelligent and nice, and pretend to be taking it all in. Afterwards I used to
go of my own free will, out of a regard for the legacy. I was the only person that
401
used to go see him. He wrote, I believe, to every man who made the slightest stir
in the world, sending him a copy or so of his books, and inviting him to come
and talk about the nations to him; but half of them didn't answer, and none ever
came. And when the girl let you in--she was an artful bit of goods, that girl--there
were heaps of letters on the hall-seat waiting to go off, addressed to Prince
Bismarck, the President of the United States, and such-like people. And one went
up the staircase and along the cobwebby passage--, the housekeeper drank like
fury, and his passages were always cobwebby--, and found him at last, with
books turned down all over the room, and heaps of torn paper on the floor, and
telegrams and newspapers littered about, and empty coffee-cups and half-eaten
bits of toast on the desk and the mantel. You'd see his back humped up, and his
hair would be sticking out quite straight between the collar of that dressing-gown
thing and the edge of his skull-cap.
"'A moment!' he would say. 'A moment!' over his shoulder. 'The mot juste, you
know, Ted, le mot juste. Righteous thought righteously expressed--Aah--!
Concatenation. And now, Ted,' he'd say, spinning round in his study chair, 'how's
Young England?' That was his silly name for me.
"Well, that was my uncle, and that was how he talked--to me, at any rate. With
others about he seemed a bit shy. And he not only talked to me, but he gave me
his books, books of six hundred pages or so, with cock-eyed headings, 'The
Shrieking Sisterhood,' 'The Behemoth of Bigotry,' 'Crucibles and Cullenders,' and
so on. All very strong, and none of them original. The very last time, but one that
I saw him, he gave me a book. He was feeling ill even then, and his hand shook
and he was despondent. I noticed it because I was naturally on the look-out for
those little symptoms. 'My last book, Ted,' he said. 'My last book, my boy; my
last word to the deaf and hardened nations;' and I'm hanged if a tear didn't go
rolling down his yellow old cheek. He was regular crying because it was so
nearly over, and he hadn't only written about fifty-three books of rubbish. 'I've
sometimes thought, Ted--' he said, and stopped.
"'Perhaps I've been a bit hasty and angry with this stiff-necked generation. A little
more sweetness, perhaps, and a little less blinding light. I've sometimes thought-I might have swayed them. But I've done my best, Ted.'
"And then, with a burst, for the first and last time in his life he owned himself a
failure. It showed he was really ill. He seemed to think for a minute, and then he
spoke quietly and low, as sane and sober as I am now. 'I've been a fool, Ted,' he
said. 'I've been flapping nonsense all my life. Only He who readeth the heart
knows whether this is anything more than vanity. Ted, I don't. But He knows, He
knows, and if I have done foolishly and vainly, in my heart--in my heart--'
402
"Just like that he spoke, repeating himself, and he stopped quite short and handed
the book to me, trembling. Then the old shine came back into his eye. I
remember it all fairly well, because I repeated it and acted it to my old mother
when I got home, to cheer her up a bit. 'Take this book and read it,' he said. 'It's
my last word, my very last word. I've left all my property to you, Ted, and may
you use it better than I have done.' And then he fell a-coughing.
"I remember that quite well even now, and how I went home cock-a-hoop, and
how he was in bed the next time I called. The housekeeper was downstairs drunk,
and I fooled about--as a young man will--with the girl in the passage before I
went to him. He was sinking fast. But even then his vanity clung to him.
"'Have you read it?' he whispered.
"'Sat, up all night reading it,' I said in his ear to cheer him. 'It's the last,' said I,
and then, with a memory of some poetry or other in my head, 'but it's the bravest
and best.'
"He smiled a little and tried to squeeze my hand as a woman might do, and left
off squeezing in the middle, and lay still. 'The bravest and the best,' said I again,
seeing it pleased him. But he didn't answer. I heard the girl giggle outside the
door, for occasionally we'd had just a bit of innocent laughter, you know, at his
ways. I looked at his face, and his eyes were closed, and it was just as if
somebody had punched in his nose on either side. But he was still smiling. It's
queer to think of--he lay dead, lay dead there, an utter failure, with the smile of
success on his face.
"That was the end of my uncle. You can imagine me and my mother saw that he
had a decent funeral. Then, of course, came the hunt for the will. We began
decent and respectful at first, and before the day was out we were ripping chairs,
and smashing bureau panels, and sounding walls. Every hour we expected those
others to come in. We asked the housekeeper, and found she'd actually witnessed
a will--on an ordinary half-sheet of notepaper it was written, and very short, she
said--not a month ago. The other witness was the gardener, and he bore her out
word for word. But I'm hanged if there was that or any other will to be found.
The way my mother talked must have made him turn in his grave. At last a
lawyer at Reigate sprang one on us that had been made years ago during some
temporary quarrel with my mother. I'm blest if that wasn't the only will to be
discovered anywhere, and it left every penny he possessed to that 'Take 'im away'
youngster of his second cousin's--a chap who'd never had to stand his talking, not
for one afternoon of his life."
403
The man with the glass eye stopped.
"I thought you said--" I began.
"Half a minute," said the man with the glass eye. "I had to wait for the end of the
story till this very morning, and I was a blessed sight more interested than you
are. You just wait a bit too. They executed the will, and the other chap inherited,
and directly he was one-and-twenty he began to blew it. How he did blew it, to
be sure! He bet, he drank, he got in the papers for this and that. I tell you, it
makes me wiggle to think of the times he had. He blewed every ha'penny of it
before he was thirty, and the last I heard of him was--Holloway! Three years ago.
"Well, I naturally fell on hard times, because as you see, the only trade I knew
was legacy-cadging. All my plans were waiting over to begin, so to speak, when
the old chap died. I've had my ups and downs since then. Just now it's a period of
depression. I tell you frankly, I'm on the look-out for help. I was hunting round
my room to find something to raise a bit on for immediate necessities, and the
sight of all those presentation volumes--no one will buy them, not to wrap butter
in, even--well, they annoyed me. I promised him not to part with them, and I
never kept a promise easier. I let out at them with my boot, and sent them
shooting across the room. One lifted at the kick, and spun through the air. And
out of it flapped--You guess?
"It was the will. He'd given it to me himself in that very last volume of all."
He folded his arms on the table, and looked sadly with the active eye at his empty
tankard. He shook his head slowly, and said softly, "I'd never opened the book,
much more cut a page!" Then he looked up, with a bitter laugh, for sympathy.
"Fancy hiding it there! Eigh? Of all places."
He began to fish absently for a dead fly with a finger. "It just shows you the
vanity of authors," he said, looking up at me. "It wasn't no trick of his. He'd
meant perfectly fair. He'd really thought I was really going home to read that
blessed book of his through. But it shows you, don't it--?" his eye went down to
the tankard again--, "It shows you too, how we poor human beings fail to
understand one another."
But there was no misunderstanding the eloquent thirst of his eye. He accepted
with ill-feigned surprise. He said, in the usual subtle formula, that he didn't mind
if he did.
404
THE SAD STORY OF A DRAMATIC CRITIC
I was--you shall hear immediately why I am not now--Egbert Craddock
Cummins. The name remains. I am still (Heaven help me!) Dramatic Critic to the
'Fiery Cross'. What I shall be in a little while I do not know. I write in great
trouble and confusion of mind. I will do what I can to make myself clear in the
face of terrible difficulties. You must bear with me a little. When a man is rapidly
losing his own identity, he naturally finds a difficulty in expressing himself. I
will make it perfectly plain in a minute, when once I get my grip upon the story.
Let me see--where am I? I wish I knew. Ah, I have it! Dead self! Egbert
Craddock Cummins!
In the past I should have disliked writing anything quite so full of "I" as this story
must be. It is full of "I's" before and behind, like the beast in Revelation--the one
with a head like a calf, I am afraid. But my tastes have changed since I became a
Dramatic Critic and studied the masters--G.R.S., G.B.S., G.A.S., and others.
Everything has changed since then. At least the story is about myself--so that
there is some excuse for me. And it is really not egotism, because as I say, since
those days my identity has undergone an entire alteration.
That past...! I was--in those days--rather a nice fellow, rather shy--taste for grey
in my clothes, weedy little moustache, face "interesting," slight stutter which I
had caught in early life from a schoolfellow. Engaged to a very nice girl, named
Delia. Fairly new, she was--cigarettes--liked me because I was human and
original. Considered I was like Lamb--on the strength of the stutter, I believe.
Father, an eminent authority on postage stamps. She read a great deal in the
British Museum. (A perfect pairing ground for literary people, that British
Museum--you should read George Egerton and Justin Huntly M'Carthy and
Gissing and the rest of them.) We loved in our intellectual way, and shared the
brightest hopes. (All gone now.) And her father liked me because I seemed
honestly eager to hear about stamps. She had no mother. Indeed, I had the
happiest prospects a young man could have. I never went to theatres in those
days. My Aunt Charlotte before she died had told me not to.
Then Barnaby, the editor of the 'Fiery Cross', made me--in spite of my spasmodic
efforts to escape--Dramatic Critic. He is a fine, healthy man, Barnaby, with an
enormous head of frizzy black hair and a convincing manner, and he caught me
on the staircase going to see Wembly. He had been dining, and was more than
usually buoyant. "Hullo, Cummins!" he said. "The very man I want!" He caught
me by the shoulder or collar or something, ran me up the little passage, and flung
me over the waste-paper basket into the armchair in his office. "Pray be seated,"
405
he said, as he did so. Then he ran across the room and came back with some pink
and yellow tickets and pushed them into my hand. "Opera Comique," he said,
"Thursday; Friday, the Surrey; Saturday, the Frivolity. That's all, I think."
"But--" I began.
"Glad you're free," he said, snatching some proofs off the desk and beginning to
read.
"I don't quite understand," I said.
"Eigh?" he said, at the top of his voice, as though he thought I had gone, and was
startled at my remark.
"Do you want me to criticise these plays?"
"Do something with 'em...Did you think it was a treat?"
"But I can't."
"Did you call me a fool?"
"Well, I've never been to a theatre in my life."
"Virgin soil."
"But I don't know anything about it, you know."
"That's just it. New view. No habits. No cliches in stock. Ours is a live paper, not
a bag of tricks. None of your clockwork professional journalism in this office.
And I can rely on your integrity--"
"But I've conscientious scruples--"
He caught me up suddenly and put me outside his door. "Go and talk to Wembly
about that," he said. "He'll explain."
As I stood perplexed, he opened the door again, said, "I forgot this," thrust a
fourth ticket into my hand (it was for that night--in twenty minutes' time) and
slammed the door upon me. His expression was quite calm, but I caught his eye.
I hate arguments. I decided that I would take his hint and become (to my own
destruction) a Dramatic Critic. I walked slowly down the passage to Wembly.
406
That Barnaby has a remarkably persuasive way. He has made few suggestions
during our very pleasant intercourse of four years that he has not ultimately won
me round to adopting. It may be, of course, that I am of a yielding disposition;
certainly I am too apt to take my colour from my circumstances. It is, indeed, to
my unfortunate susceptibility to vivid impressions that all my misfortunes are
due. I have already alluded to the slight stammer I had acquired from a
schoolfellow in my youth. However, this is a digression...I went home in a cab to
dress.
I will not trouble the reader with my thoughts about the first-night audience,
strange assembly as it is--, those I reserve for my Memoirs, nor the humiliating
story of how I got lost during the entr'acte in a lot of red plush passages, and saw
the third act from the gallery. The only point upon which I wish to lay stress was
the remarkable effect of the acting upon me. You must remember I had lived a
quite and retired life, and had never been to the theatre before, and that I am
extremely sensitive to vivid impressions. At the risk of repetition I must insist
upon these points.
The first effect was a profound amazement, not untinctured by alarm. The
phenomenal unnaturalness of acting is a thing discounted in the minds of most
people by early visits to the theatre. They get used to the fantastic gestures, the
flamboyant emotions, the weird mouthings, melodious snortings, agonising
yelps, lip-gnawings, glaring horrors, and other emotional symbolism of the stage.
It becomes at least a mere deaf-and-dumb language to them, which they read
intelligently pari passu with the hearing of the dialogue. But all this was new to
me. The thing was called a modern comedy, the people were supposed to be
English and were dressed like fashionable Americans of the current epoch, and I
fell into the natural error of supposing that the actors were trying to represent
human beings. I looked round on my first-night audience with a kind of wonder,
discovered--as all new Dramatic Critics do--that it rested with me to reform the
Drama, and after a supper choked with emotion, went off to the office to write a
column, piebald with "new paragraphs" (as all my stuff is--it fills out so) and
purple with indignation. Barnaby was delighted.
But I could not sleep that night. I dreamt of actors--actors glaring, actors smiting
their chests, actors flinging out a handful of extended fingers, actors smiling
bitterly, laughing despairingly, falling hopelessly, dying idiotically. I got up at
eleven with a slight headache, read my notice in the 'Fiery Cross', breakfasted,
and went back to my room to shave. (It's my habit to do so.) Then an odd thing
happened. I could not find my razor. Suddenly it occurred to me that I had not
unpacked it the day before.
407
"Ah!" said I, in front of the looking-glass. Then "Hullo!"
Quite involuntarily, when I had thought of my portmanteau, I had flung up the
left arm (fingers fully extended) and clutched at my diaphragm with my right
hand. I am an acutely self-conscious man at all times. The gesture struck me as
absolutely novel for me. I repeated it, for my own satisfaction. "Odd!" Then
(rather puzzled) I turned to my portmanteau.
After shaving, my mind reverted to the acting I had seen, and I entertained
myself before the cheval glass with some imitations of Jafferay's more
exaggerated gestures. "Really, one might think it a disease." I said--, "StageWalkitis!" (There's many a truth spoken in jest.) Then, if I remember rightly, I
went off to see Wembly, and afterwards lunched at the British Museum with
Delia. We actually spoke about our prospects, in the light of my new
appointment.
But that appointment was the beginning of my downfall. From that day I
necessarily became a persistent theatre-goer, and almost insensibly I began to
change. The next thing I noticed after the gesture about the razor, was to catch
myself bowing ineffably when I met Delia, and stooping in an old-fashioned,
courtly way over her hand. Directly I caught myself, I straightened myself up and
became very uncomfortable. I remember she looked at me curiously. Then, in the
office, I found myself doing "nervous business," fingers on teeth, when Barnaby
asked me a question I could not very well answer. Then, in some trifling
difference with Delia, I clasped my hand to my brow. And I pranced through my
social transactions at times singularly like an actor! I tried not to--no one could
be more keenly alive to the arrant absurdity of the histrionic bearing. And I did!
It began to dawn on me what it all meant. The acting, I saw, was too much for
my delicately-strung nervous system. I have always, I know, been too amenable
to the suggestions of my circumstances. Night after night of concentrated
attention to the conventional attitudes and intonation of the English stage was
gradually affecting my speech and carriage. I was giving way to the infection of
sympathetic imitation. Night after night my plastic nervous system took the print
of some new amazing gesture, some new emotional exaggeration--and retained it.
A kind of theatrical veneer threatened to plate over and obliterate my private
individuality altogether. I saw myself in a kind of vision. Sitting by myself one
night, my new self seemed to me to glide, posing and gesticulating, across the
room. He clutched his throat, he opened his fingers, he opened his legs in
walking like a high-class marionette. He went from attitude to attitude. He might
have been clockwork. Directly after this I made an ineffectual attempt to resign
my theatrical work. But Barnaby persisted in talking about the Polywhiddle
408
Divorce all the time I was with him, and I could get no opportunity of saying
what I wished.
And then Delia's manner began to change towards me. The ease of our
intercourse vanished. I felt she was learning to dislike me. I grinned, and capered,
and scowled, and posed at her in a thousand ways, and knew--with what a
voiceless agony--! That I did it all the time. I tried to resign again, and Barnaby
talked about "X" and "Z" and "Y" in the New Review, and gave me a strong
cigar to smoke, and so routed me. And then I walked up the Assyrian Gallery in
the manner of Irving to meet Delia, and so precipitated the crisis.
"Ah--! Dear!" I said, with more sprightliness and emotion in my voice than had
ever been in all my life before I became (to my own undoing) a Dramatic Critic.
She held out her hand rather coldly, scrutinising my face as she did so. I
prepared, with a new-won grace, to walk by her side.
"Egbert," she said, standing still, and thought. Then she looked at me.
I said nothing. I felt what was coming. I tried to be the old Egbert Craddock
Cummins of shambling gait and stammering sincerity, whom she loved, but I felt
even as I did so that I was a new thing, a thing of surging emotions and
mysterious fixity--like no human being that ever lived, except upon the stage.
"Egbert," she said, "you are not yourself."
"Ah!" Involuntarily I clutched my diaphragm and averted my head (as is the way
with them).
"There!" she said.
"What do you mean?" I said, whispering in vocal italics--you know how they do
it--turning on her, perplexity on face, right hand down, left on brow. I knew quite
well what she meant. I knew quite well the dramatic unreality of my behaviour.
But I struggled against it in vain. "What do you mean?" I said, and in a kind of
hoarse whisper, "I don't understand!"
She really looked as though she disliked me. "What do you keep on posing for?"
she said. "I don't like it. You didn't used to."
"Didn't used to!" I said slowly, repeating this twice. I glared up and down the
gallery, with short, sharp glances. "We are alone," I said swiftly. "Listen!" I
poked my forefinger towards her, and glared at her. "I'm under a curse."
409
I saw her hands tighten upon her sunshade. "You are under some bad influence or
other," said Delia. "You should give it up. I never knew anyone change as you
have done."
"Delia!" I said, lapsing into the pathetic. "Pity me. Augh! Delia! Pit--y me!"
She eyed me critically. "Why you keep playing the fool like this I don't know,"
she said. "Anyhow, I really cannot go about with a man who behaves as you do.
You made us both ridiculous on Wednesday. Frankly, I dislike you, as you are
now. I met you here to tell you so--as it's about the only place where we can be
sure of being alone together--"
"Delia!" said I, with intensity, knuckles of clenched hands white. "You don't
mean--"
"I do," said Delia. "A woman's lot is sad enough at the best of times. But with
you--"
I clapped my hand on my brow.
"So, good-bye," said Delia, without emotion.
"Oh, Delia!" I said. "Not this?"
"Good-bye, Mr. Cummins," she said.
By a violent effort I controlled myself and touched her hand. I tried to say some
word of explanation to her. She looked into my working face and winced. "I must
do it," she said hopelessly. Then she turned from me and began walking rapidly
down the gallery.
Heavens! How the human agony cried within me! I loved Delia. But nothing
found expression--I was already too deeply crusted with my acquired self.
"Good-baye!" I said at last, watching her retreating figure. How I hated myself
for doing it! After she had vanished, I repeated in a dreamy way, "Good-baye!"
looking hopelessly round me. Then, with a kind of heart-broken cry, I shook my
clenched fists in the air, staggered to the pedestal of a winged figure, buried my
face in my arms, and made my shoulders heave. Something within me said
"Ass!" as I did so. (I had the greatest difficulty in persuading the Museum
policeman, who was attracted by my cry of agony, that I was not intoxicated, but
merely suffering from a transient indisposition.)
410
But even this great sorrow has not availed to save me from my fate. I see it,
everyone sees it; I grow more "theatrical" every day. And no one could be more
painfully aware of the pungent silliness of theatrical ways. The quite, nervous,
but pleasing, E.C. Cummins vanishes. I cannot save him. I am driven like a dead
leaf before the winds of March. My tailor even enters into the spirit of my
disorder. He has a peculiar sense of what is fitting. I tried to get a dull grey suit
from him this spring, and he foisted a brilliant blue upon me, and I see he has put
braid down the sides of my new dress trousers. My hairdresser insists upon
giving me a "wave."
I am beginning to associate with actors. I detest them, but it is only in their
company that I feel I am not glaringly conspicuous. Their talk infects me. I notice
a growing tendency to dramatic brevity, to dashes and pauses in my style, to a
punctuation of bows and attitudes. Barnaby has remarked it too. I offended
Wembly by calling him "Dear Boy" yesterday. I dread the end, but cannot escape
from it.
The fact is, I am being obliterated. Living a grey, retired life all my youth, I came
to the theatre a delicate sketch of a man, a thing of tints and faint lines. Their
gorgeous colouring has effaced me altogether. People forget how much mode of
expression, method of movement, are a matter of contagion. I have heard of
stage-struck people before, and thought it a figure of speech. I spoke of it
jestingly, as a disease. It is no jest. It is a disease. And I have got it bad! Deep
down within me I protest against the wrong done to my personality-unavailingly. For three hours or more a week I have to go and concentrate my
attention on some fresh play, and the suggestions of the drama strengthen their
awful hold upon me. My manners grow so flamboyant, my passions so
professional, that I doubt, as I said at the outset, whether it is really myself that
behaves in such a manner. I feel merely the core of this dramatic casing, that
grows thicker and presses upon me--me and mine. I feel like King John's abbot in
his cope of lead.
I doubt, indeed, whether I should not abandon the struggle altogether--leave this
sad world of ordinary life for which I am so ill-fitted, abandon the name of
Cummins for some professional pseudonym, complete my self-effacement, and-a thing of tricks and tatters, of posing and pretence--go upon the stage. It seems
my only resort--"to hold mirror up to Nature." For in the ordinary life, I will
confess, no one now seems to regard me as both sane and sober. Only upon the
stage, I feel convinced, will people take me seriously. That will be the end of it. I
know that will be the end of it. And yet...I will frankly confess...all that marks off
your actor from your common man...I detest. I am still largely of my Aunt
Charlotte's opinion, that playacting is unworthy of a pure-minded man's attention,
411
much more participation. Even now I would resign my dramatic criticism and try
a rest. Only I can't get hold of Barnaby. Letters of resignation he never notices.
He says it is against the etiquette of journalism to write to your Editor. And when
I go to see him, he gives me another big cigar and some strong whisky and soda,
and then something always turns up to prevent my explanation.
A SLIP UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
Outside the laboratory windows was a watery-grey fog, and within a close
warmth and the yellow light of the green-shaded gas lamps that stood two to each
table down its narrow length. On each table stood a couple of glass jars
containing the mangled vestiges of the crayfish, mussels, frogs, and guineapigs
upon which the students had been working, and down the side of the room,
facing the windows, were shelves bearing bleached dissections in spirits,
surmounted by a row of beautifully executed anatomical drawings in whitewood
frames and overhanging a row of cubical lockers. All the doors of the laboratory
were panelled with blackboard, and on these were the half-erased diagrams of the
previous day's work. The laboratory was empty, save for the demonstrator, who
sat near the preparation-room door, and silent, save for a low, continuous
murmur and the clicking of the rocker microtome at which he was working. But
scattered about the room were traces of numerous students: hand-bags, polished
boxes of instruments, in one place a large drawing covered by newspaper, and in
another a prettily bound copy of 'News from Nowhere', a book oddly at variance
with its surroundings. These things had been put down hastily as the students had
arrived and hurried at once to secure their seats in the adjacent lecture theatre.
Deadened by the closed door, the measured accents of the professor sounded as a
featureless muttering.
Presently, faint through the closed windows came the sound of the Oratory clock
striking the hour of eleven. The clicking of the microtome ceased, and the
demonstrator looked at his watch, rose, thrust his hands into his pockets, and
walked slowly down the laboratory towards the lecture theatre door. He stood
listening for a moment, and then his eye fell on the little volume by William
Morris. He picked it up, glanced at the title, smiled, opened it, looked at the name
on the fly-leaf, ran the leaves through with his hand, and put it down. Almost
immediately the even murmur of the lecturer ceased, there was a sudden burst of
pencils rattling on the desks in the lecture theatre, a stirring, a scraping of feet,
and a number of voices speaking together. Then a firm footfall approached the
door, which began to open, and stood ajar, as some indistinctly heard question
arrested the new-comer.
412
The demonstrator turned, walked slowly back past the microtome, and left the
laboratory by the preparation-room door. As he did so, first one, and then several
students carrying notebooks entered the laboratory from the lecture theatre, and
distributed themselves among the little tables, or stood in a group about the
doorway. They were an exceptionally heterogeneous assembly, for while Oxford
and Cambridge still recoil from the blushing prospect of mixed classes, the
College of Science anticipated America in the matter years ago--mixed socially,
too, for the prestige of the College is high, and its scholarships, free of any age
limit, dredge deeper even than do those of the Scotch universities. The class
numbered one-and-twenty, but some remained in the theatre questioning the
professor, copying the blackboard diagrams before they were washed off, or
examining the special specimens he had produced to illustrate the day's teaching.
Of the nine who had come into the laboratory three were girls, one of whom, a
little fair woman, wearing spectacles and dressed in greyish-green, was peering
out of the window at the fog, while the other two, both wholesome-looking,
plain-faced schoolgirls, unrolled and put on the brown holland aprons they wore
while dissecting. Of the men, two went down the laboratory to their places, one a
pallid, dark-bearded man, who had once been a tailor; the other a pleasantfeatured, ruddy young man of twenty, dressed in a well-fitting brown suit; young
Wedderburn, the son of Wedderburn, the eye specialist. The others formed a little
knot near the theatre door. One of these, a dwarfed, spectacled figure, with a
hunchback, sat on a bent wood stool; two others, one a short, dark youngster, and
the other a flaxen-haired, reddish-complexioned young man, stood leaning side
by side against the slate sink, while the fourth stood facing them, and maintained
the larger share of the conversation.
This last person was named Hill. He was a sturdily built young fellow, of the
same age as Wedderburn; he had a white face, dark grey eyes, hair of an
indeterminate colour, and prominent, irregular features. He talked rather louder
than was needful, and thrust his hands deeply into his pockets. His collar was
frayed and blue with the starch of a careless laundress, his clothes were evidently
ready-made, and there was a patch on the side of his boot near the toe. And as he
talked or listened to the others, he glanced now and again towards the lecture
theatre door. They were discussing the depressing peroration of the lecture they
had just heard, the last lecture it was in the introductory course in zoology. "From
ovum to ovum is the goal of the higher vertebrata," the lecturer had said in his
melancholy tones, and so had neatly rounded off the sketch of comparative
anatomy he had been developing. The spectacled hunchback had repeated it, with
noisy appreciation, had tossed it towards the fair-haired student with an evident
provocation, and had started one of these vague, rambling discussions on
generalities, so unaccountably dear to the student mind all the world over.
413
"That is our goal, perhaps--I admit it, as far as science goes," said the fair-haired
student, rising to the challenge. "But there are things above science."
"Science," said Hill confidently, "is systematic knowledge. Ideas that don't come
into the system--must anyhow--be loose ideas." He was not quite sure whether
that was a clever saying or a fatuity until his hearers took it seriously.
"The thing I cannot understand," said the hunchback, at large, "is whether Hill is
a materialist or not."
"There is one thing above matter," said Hill promptly, feeling he had a better
thing this time; aware too, of someone in the doorway behind him, and raising his
voice a trifle for her benefit, "and that is, the delusion that there is something
above matter."
"So we have your gospel at last," said the fair student. "It's all a delusion, is it?
All our aspirations to lead something more than dogs' lives, all our work for
anything beyond ourselves. But see how inconsistent you are. Your socialism, for
instance. Why do you trouble about the interests of the race? Why do you
concern yourself about the beggar in the gutter? Why are you bothering yourself
to lend that book--" he indicated William Morris by a movement of the head--"to
everyone in the lab.?"
"Girl," said the hunchback indistinctly, and glanced guiltily over his shoulder.
The girl in brown, with the brown eyes, had come into the laboratory, and stood
on the other side of the table behind him, with her rolled-up apron in one hand,
looking over her shoulder, listening to the discussion. She did not notice the
hunchback, because she was glancing from Hill to his interlocutor. Hill's
consciousness of her presence betrayed itself to her only in his studious
ignorance of the fact; but she understood that, and it pleased her. "I see no
reason," said he, "why a man should live like a brute because he knows of
nothing beyond matter, and does not expect to exist a hundred years hence."
"Why shouldn't he?" said the fair-haired student.
"Why should he?" said Hill.
"What inducement has he?"
"That's the way with all you religious people. It's all a business of inducements.
Cannot a man seek after righteousness for righteousness' sake?"
414
There was a pause. The fair man answered, with a kind of vocal padding, "But-you see--inducement--when I said inducement," to gain time. And then the
hunchback came to his rescue and inserted a question. He was a terrible person in
the debating society with his questions, and they invariably took one form--a
demand for a definition, "What's your definition of righteousness?" said the
hunchback at this stage.
Hill experienced a sudden loss of complacency at this question, but even as it
was asked, relief came in the person of Brooks, the laboratory attendant, who
entered by the preparation-room door, carrying a number of freshly killed
guineapigs by their hind legs. "This is the last batch of material this session," said
the youngster who had not previously spoken.
Brooks advanced up the laboratory, smacking down a couple of guineapigs at
each table. The rest of the class, scenting the prey from afar, came crowding in
by the lecture theatre door, and the discussion perished abruptly as the students
who were not already in their places hurried to them to secure the choice of a
specimen. There was a noise of keys rattling on split rings as lockers were
opened and dissecting instruments taken out. Hill was already standing by his
table, and his box of scalpels was sticking out of his pocket. The girl in brown
came a step towards him, and leaning over his table, said softly, "Did you see
that I returned your book, Mr. Hill?"
During the whole scene she and the book had been vividly present in his
consciousness; but he made a clumsy pretence of looking at the book and seeing
it for the first time. "Oh, yes," he said, taking it up. "I see. Did you like it?"
"I want to ask you some questions about it--some time."
"Certainly," said Hill. "I shall be glad." He stopped awkwardly. "You liked it?"
he said.
"It's a wonderful book. Only some things I don't understand."
Then suddenly the laboratory was hushed by a curious, braying noise. It was the
demonstrator. He was at the blackboard ready to begin the day's instruction, and
it was his custom to demand silence by a sound midway between the "Er" of
common intercourse and the blast of a trumpet. The girl in brown slipped back to
her place: it was immediately in front of Hill's, and Hill, forgetting her forthwith,
took a notebook out of the drawer of his table, turned over its leaves hastily, drew
a stumpy pencil from his pocket, and prepared to make a copious note of the
coming demonstration. For demonstrations and lectures are the sacred text of the
415
College students. Books, saving only the Professor's own, you may--it is even
expedient to--ignore.
Hill was the son of a Landport cobbler, and had been hooked by a chance blue
paper the authorities had thrown out to the Landport Technical College. He kept
himself in London on his allowance of a guinea a week, and found that, with
proper care, this also covered his clothing allowance, an occasional waterproof
collar, that is; and ink and needles and cotton, and suchlike necessaries for a man
about town. This was his first year and his first session, but the brown old man in
Landport had already got himself detested in many public-houses by boasting of
his son, "the Professor." Hill was a vigorous youngster, with a serene contempt
for the clergy of all denominations, and a fine ambition to reconstruct the world.
He regarded his scholarship as a brilliant opportunity. He had begun to read at
seven, and had read steadily whatever came in his way, good or bad, since then.
His worldly experience had been limited to the island of Portsea, and acquired
chiefly in the wholesale boot factory in which he had worked by day, after
passing the seventh standard of the Board school. He had a considerable gift of
speech, as the College Debating Society, which met amidst the crushing
machines and mine models in the metallurgical theatre downstairs, already
recognised--recognised by a violent battering of desks whenever he rose. And he
was just at that fine emotional age when life opens at the end of a narrow pass
like a broad valley at one's feet, full of the promise of wonderful discoveries and
tremendous achievements. And his own limitations, save that he knew, that he
knew, neither Latin nor French, were all unknown to him.
At first his interest had been divided pretty equally between his biological work
at the College and social and theological theorising, an employment which he
took in deadly earnest. Of a night, when the big museum library was not open, he
would sit on the bed of his room in Chelsea with his coat and a muffler on, and
write out the lecture notes and revise his dissection memoranda, until Thorpe
called him out by a whistle--the landlady objected to open the door to attic
visitors--and then the two would go prowling about the shadowy, shiny, gas-lit
streets, talking, very much in the fashion of the sample just given, of the God
idea, and Righteousness, and Carlyle, and the Reorganisation of Society. And in
the midst of it all Hill, arguing not only for Thorpe, but for the casual passer-by,
would lose the thread of his argument glancing at some pretty painted face that
looked meaningly at him as he passed. Science and Righteousness! But once or
twice lately there had been signs that a third interest was creeping into his life,
and he had found his attention wandering from the fate of the mesoblastic
somites or the probable meaning of the blastopore, to the thought of the girl with
the brown eyes who sat at the table before him.
416
She was a paying student; she descended inconceivable social altitudes to speak
to him. At the thought of the education she must have had, and the
accomplishments she must possess, the soul of Hill became abject within him.
She had spoken to him first over a difficulty about the alisphenoid of a rabbit's
skull, and he had found that, in biology at least, he had no reason for selfabasement. And from that, after the manner of young people starting from any
starting-point, they got to generalities, and while Hill attacked her upon the
question of socialism--, some instinct told him to spare her a direct assault upon
her religion--she was gathering resolution to undertake what she told herself was
his aesthetic education. She was a year or two older than he, though the thought
never occurred to him. The loan of 'News from Nowhere' was the beginning of a
series of cross loans. Upon some absurd first principle of his, Hill had never
"wasted time" upon poetry, and it seemed an appalling deficiency to her. One day
in the lunch hour, when she chanced upon him alone in the little museum where
the skeletons were arranged, shamefully eating the bun that constituted his
midday meal, she retreated, and returned to lend him, with a slightly furtive air, a
volume of Browning. He stood sideways towards her and took the book rather
clumsily, because he was holding the bun in the other hand. And in the retrospect
his voice lacked the cheerful clearness he could have wished.
That occurred after the examination in comparative anatomy, on the day before
the College turned out its students, and was carefully locked up by the officials,
for the Christmas holidays. The excitement of cramming for the first trial of
strength had for a little while dominated Hill, to the exclusion of his other
interests. In the forecasts of the result in which everyone indulged he was
surprised to find that no one regarded him as a possible competitor for the
Harvey Commemoration Medal, of which this and the two subsequent
examinations disposed. It was about this time that Wedderburn, who so far had
lived inconspicuously on the uttermost margin of Hill's perceptions, began to take
on the appearance of an obstacle. By a mutual agreement, the nocturnal
prowlings with Thorpe ceased for the three weeks before the examination, and
his landlady pointed out that she really could not supply so much lamp oil at the
price. He walked to and fro from the College with little slips of mnemonics in his
hand, lists of crayfish appendages, rabbits' skull-bones, and vertebrate nerves, for
example, and became a positive nuisance to foot passengers in the opposite
direction.
But by a natural reaction, Poetry and the girl with the brown eyes ruled the
Christmas holiday. The pending results of the examination became such a
secondary consideration that Hill marvelled at his father's excitement. Even had
he wished it, there was no comparative anatomy to read in Landport, and he was
too poor to buy books, but the stock of poets in the library was extensive, and
417
Hill's attack was magnificently sustained. He saturated himself with the fluent
numbers of Longfellow and Tennyson, and fortified himself with Shakespeare;
found a kindred soul in Pope, and a master in Shelley, and heard and fled the
siren voices of Eliza Cook and Mrs. Hemans. But he read no more Browning,
because he hoped for the loan of other volumes from Miss Haysman when he
returned to London.
He walked from his lodgings to the College with that volume of Browning in his
shiny black bag, and his mind teeming with the finest general propositions about
poetry. Indeed, he framed first this little speech and then that with which to grace
the return. The morning was an exceptionally pleasant one for London; there was
a clear, hard frost and undeniable blue in the sky, a thin haze softened every
outline, and warm shafts of sunlight struck between the house blocks and turned
the sunny side of the street to amber and gold. In the hall of the College he pulled
off his glove and signed his name with fingers so stiff with cold that the
characteristic dash under the signature he cultivated became a quivering line. He
imagined Miss Haysman about him everywhere. He turned at the staircase, and
there, below he saw a crowd struggling at the foot of the notice-board. This
possibly, was the biology list. He forgot Browning and Miss Haysman for the
moment, and joined the scrimmage. And at last, with his cheek flattened against
the sleeve of the man on the step above him, he read the list-CLASS 1 H. J. Somers Wedderburn William Hill
and thereafter followed a second class that is outside our present sympathies. It
was characteristic that he did not trouble to look for Thorpe on the physics list,
but backed out of the struggle at once, and in a curious emotional state between
pride over common second-class humanity and acute disappointment at
Wedderburn's success, went on his way upstairs. At the top, as he was hanging
up his coat in the passage, the zoological demonstrator, a young man from
Oxford, who secretly regarded him as a blatant "mugger" of the very worst type,
offered his heartiest congratulations.
At the laboratory door Hill stopped for a second to get his breath, and then
entered. He looked straight up the laboratory and saw all five girl students
grouped in their places, and Wedderburn, the once retiring Wedderburn, leaning
rather gracefully against the window, playing with the blind tassel and talking,
apparently, to the five of them. Now, Hill could talk bravely enough and even
overbearingly to one girl, and he could have made a speech to a roomful of girls,
but this business of standing at ease and appreciating, fencing, and returning
quick remarks round a group was, he knew, altogether beyond him. Coming up
the staircase his feelings for Wedderburn had been generous, a certain admiration
418
perhaps, a willingness to shake his hand conspicuously and heartily as one who
had fought but the first round. But before Christmas Wedderburn had never gone
up to that end of the room to talk. In a flash Hill's mist of vague excitement
condensed abruptly to a vivid dislike of Wedderburn. Possibly his expression
changed. As he came up to his place, Wedderburn nodded carelessly to him, and
the others glanced round. Miss Haysman looked at him and away again, the
faintest touch of her eyes. "I can't agree with you, Mr. Wedderburn," she said.
"I must congratulate you on your first-class, Mr. Hill," said the spectacled girl in
green, turning round and beaming at him.
"It's nothing," said Hill, staring at Wedderburn and Miss Haysman talking
together, and eager to hear what they talked about.
"We poor folks in the second class don't think so," said the girl in spectacles.
What was it Wedderburn was saying? Something about William Morris! Hill did
not answer the girl in spectacles, and the smile died out of his face. He could not
hear, and failed to see how he could "cut in." Confound Wedderburn! He sat
down, opened his bag, hesitated whether to return the volume of Browning
forthwith, in the sight of all, and instead drew out his new notebooks for the short
course in elementary botany that was now beginning, and which would terminate
in February. As he did so, a fat, heavy man, with a white face and pale grey eyes-Bindon, the professor of botany, who came up from Kew for January and
February--came in by the lecture theatre door, and passed, rubbing his hands
together and smiling, in silent affability down the laboratory.
In the subsequent six weeks Hill experienced some very rapid and curiously
complex emotional developments. For the most part he had Wedderburn in
focus--a fact that Miss Haysman never suspected. She told Hill (for in the
comparative privacy of the museum she talked a good deal to him of socialism
and Browning and general propositions) that she had met Wedderburn at the
house of some people she knew, and "he's inherited his cleverness; for his father,
you know, is the great eye specialist."
"My father is a cobbler," said Hill, quite irrelevantly, and perceived the want of
dignity even as he said it. But the gleam of jealousy did not offend her. She
conceived herself the fundamental source of it. He suffered bitterly from a sense
of Wedderburn's unfairness, and a realisation of his own handicap. Here was this
Wedderburn had picked up a prominent man for a father, and instead of his
losing so many marks on the score of that advantage, it was counted to him for
righteousness! And while Hill had to introduce himself and talk to Miss Haysman
419
clumsily over mangled guineapigs in the laboratory, this Wedderburn, in some
backstairs way, had access to her social altitudes, and could converse in a
polished argot that Hill understood perhaps, but felt incapable of speaking. Not of
course, that he wanted to. Then it seemed to Hill that for Wedderburn to come
there day after day with cuffs unfrayed, neatly tailored, precisely barbered,
quietly perfect, was in itself an ill-bred, sneering sort of proceeding. Moreover, it
was a stealthy thing for Wedderburn to behave insignificantly for a space, to
mock modesty, to lead Hill to fancy that he himself was beyond dispute the man
of the year, and then suddenly to dart in front of him, and incontinently to swell
up in this fashion. In addition to these things, Wedderburn displayed an
increasing disposition to join in any conversational grouping that included Miss
Haysman, and would venture, and indeed seek occasion, to pass opinions
derogatory to socialism and atheism. He goaded Hill to incivilities by neat,
shallow, and exceedingly effective personalities about the socialist leaders, until
Hill hated Bernard Shaw's graceful egotisms, William Morris's limited editions
and luxurious wall-papers, and Walter Crane's charmingly absurd ideal working
men, about as much as he hated Wedderburn. The dissertations in the laboratory,
that had been his glory in the previous term, became a danger, degenerated into
inglorious tussles with Wedderburn, and Hill kept to them only out of an obscure
perception that his honour was involved. In the debating society Hill knew quite
clearly that, to a thunderous accompaniment of banged desks, he could have
pulverised Wedderburn. Only Wedderburn never attended the debating society to
be pulverised, because--nauseous affectation--! He "dined late."
You must not imagine that these things presented themselves in quite such a
crude form to Hill's perception. Hill was a born generaliser. Wedderburn to him
was not so much an individual obstacle as a type, the salient angle of a class. The
economic theories that, after infinite ferment, had shaped themselves in Hill's
mind, became abruptly concrete at the contact. The world became full of easymannered, graceful, gracefully-dressed, conversationally dexterous, finally
shallow Wedderburn's, Bishops Wedderburn, Wedderburn M.P.'s, Professors
Wedderburn, Wedderburn landlords, all with finger-bowl shibboleths and
epigrammatic cities of refuge from a sturdy debater. And everyone ill-clothed or
ill-dressed, from the cobbler to the cab-runner, was a man and a brother, a
fellow-sufferer, to Hill's imagination. So that he became, as it were, a champion
of the fallen and oppressed, albeit to outward seeming only a self-assertive, illmannered young man, and an unsuccessful champion at that. Again and again a
skirmish over the afternoon tea that the girl students had inaugurated left Hill
with flushed cheeks and a tattered temper, and the debating society noticed a new
quality of sarcastic bitterness in his speeches.
420
You will understand now how it was necessary, if only in the interests of
humanity, that Hill should demolish Wedderburn in the forthcoming examination
and outshine him in the eyes of Miss Haysman; and you will perceive too, how
Miss Haysman fell into some common feminine misconceptions. The HillWedderburn quarrel, for in his unostentatious way Wedderburn reciprocated
Hill's ill-veiled rivalry, became a tribute to her indefinable charm; she was the
Queen of Beauty in a tournament of scalpels and stumpy pencils. To her
confidential friend's secret annoyance, it even troubled her conscience, for she
was a good girl, and painfully aware, from Ruskin and contemporary fiction, how
entirely men's activities are determined by women's attitudes. And if Hill never
by any chance mentioned the topic of love to her, she only credited him with the
finer modesty for that omission.
So the time came on for the second examination, and Hill's increasing pallor
confirmed the general rumour that he was working hard. In the aerated bread
shop near South Kensington Station you would see him, breaking his bun and
sipping his milk, with his eyes intent upon a paper of closely written notes. In his
bedroom there were propositions about buds and stems round his looking-glass, a
diagram to catch his eye, if soap should chance to spare it, above his washing
basin. He missed several meetings of the debating society, but he found the
chance encounters with Miss Haysman in the spacious ways of the adjacent art
museum, or in the little museum at the top of the College, or in the College
corridors, more frequent and very restful. In particular, they used to meet in a
little gallery full of wrought-iron chests and gates, near the art library, and there
Hill used to talk, under the gentle stimulus of her flattering attention, of
Browning and his personal ambitions. A characteristic she found remarkable in
him was his freedom from avarice. He contemplated quite calmly the prospect of
living all his life on an income below a hundred pounds a year. But he was
determined to be famous, to make, recognisably in his own proper person, the
world a better place to live in. He took Bradlaugh and John Burns for his leaders
and models, poor, even impecunious, great men. But Miss Haysman thought that
such lives were deficient on the aesthetic side, by which, though she did not
know it, she meant good wall-paper and upholstery, pretty books, tasteful
clothes, concerts, and meals nicely cooked and respectfully served.
At last came the day of the second examination, and the professor of botany, a
fussy, conscientious man, rearranged all the tables in a long narrow laboratory to
prevent copying, and put his demonstrator on a chair on a table (where he felt, he
said, like a Hindoo god), to see all the cheating, and stuck a notice outside the
door, "Door closed," for no earthly reason that any human being could discover.
And all the morning from ten till one the quill of Wedderburn shrieked defiance
at Hill's, and the quills of the others chased their leaders in a tireless pack, and so
421
also it was in the afternoon. Wedderburn was a little quieter than usual, and Hill's
face was hot all day, and his overcoat bulged with textbooks and notebooks
against the last moment's revision. And the next day, in the morning and in the
afternoon, was the practical examination, when sections had to be cut and slides
identified. In the morning Hill was depressed because he knew he had cut a thick
section, and in the afternoon came the mysterious slip.
It was just the kind of thing that the botanical professor was always doing. Like
the income tax, it offered a premium to the cheat. It was a preparation under the
microscope, a little glass slip, held in its place on the stage of the instrument by
light steel clips, and the inscription set forth that the slip was not to be moved.
Each student was to go in turn to it, sketch it, write in his book of answers what
he considered it to be, and return to his place. Now, to move such a slip is a thing
one can do by a chance movement of the finger, and in a fraction of a second.
The professor's reason for decreeing that the slip should not be moved depended
on the fact that the object he wanted identified was characteristic of a certain tree
stem. In the position in which it was placed it was a difficult thing to recognise,
but once the slip was moved so as to bring other parts of the preparation into
view, its nature was obvious enough.
Hill came to this, flushed from a contest with staining re-agents, sat down on the
little stool before the microscope, turned the mirror to get the best light, and then,
out of