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\title{Twelve Stories and a Dream}


\author{H. G. Wells}

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\noindent This public-domain (U.S.) text was scanned by Aaron Cannon,
formatted and proofed by Stephanie Johnson. The Project Gutenberg
edition ({}``12sad10'') was subsequently converted to \LaTeX{} using
\textbf{GutenMark} software and modified (principally to correct formatting
problems) by Ron Burkey. Report problems to info@sandroid.org. Revision
B1 differs from B, in that {}``----'' has been corrected to {}``---''
everywhere.

\noindent \begin{center}Revision: B1\\
Date: 01/27/2008\end{center}

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\chapter*{\raggedright FILMER}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{FILMER}

\markboth{TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM}{FILMER}

In truth the mastery of flying was the work of thousands of men\mbox{---}this
man a suggestion and that an experiment, until at last only one vigorous
intellectual effort was needed to finish the work. But the inexorable
injustice of the popular mind has decided that of all these thousands,
one man, and that a man who never flew, should be chosen as the discoverer,
just as it has chosen to honour Watt as the discoverer of steam and
Stephenson of the steam-engine. And surely of all honoured names none
is so grotesquely and tragically honoured as poor Filmer's, the timid,
intellectual creature who solved the problem over which the world
had hung perplexed and a little fearful for so many generations, the
man who pressed the button that has changed peace and warfare and
well-nigh every condition of human life and happiness. Never has that
recurring wonder of the littleness of the scientific man in the face
of the greatness of his science found such an amazing exemplification.
Much concerning Filmer is, and must remain, profoundly obscure\mbox{---}Filmers
attract no Boswells\mbox{---}but the essential facts and the concluding
scene are clear enough, and there are letters, and notes, and casual
allusions to piece the whole together. And this is the story one makes,
putting this thing with that, of Filmer's life and death.

The first authentic trace of Filmer on the page of history is a document
in which he applies for admission as a paid student in physics to
the Government laboratories at South Kensington, and therein he describes
himself as the son of a {}``military bootmaker'' (\char`\"{}cobbler''\ in
the vulgar tongue)\ of Dover, and lists his various examination proofs
of a high proficiency in chemistry and mathematics. With a certain
want of dignity he seeks to enhance these attainments by a profession
of poverty and disadvantages, and he writes of the laboratory as the
{}``gaol''\ of his ambitions, a slip which reinforces his claim
to have devoted himself exclusively to the exact sciences. The document
is endorsed in a manner that shows Filmer was admitted to this coveted
opportunity; but until quite recently no traces of his success in
the Government institution could be found.

It has now, however, been shown that in spite of his professed zeal
for research, Filmer, before he had held this scholarship a year,
was tempted, by the possibility of a small increase in his immediate
income, to abandon it in order to become one of the nine-pence-an-hour
computers employed by a well-known Professor in his vicarious conduct
of those extensive researches of his in solar physics\mbox{---}researches
which are still a matter of perplexity to astronomers. Afterwards,
for the space of seven years, save for the pass lists of the London
University, in which he is seen to climb slowly to a double first
class B.Sc., in mathematics and chemistry, there is no evidence of
how Filmer passed his life. No one knows how or where he lived, though
it seems highly probable that he continued to support himself by teaching
while he prosecuted the studies necessary for this distinction. And
then, oddly enough, one finds him mentioned in the correspondence
of Arthur Hicks, the poet.

{}``You remember Filmer,''\ Hicks writes to his friend Vance; {}``well,
\textit{he} hasn't altered a bit, the same hostile mumble and the
nasty chin\mbox{---}how \textit{can} a man contrive to be always
three days from shaving?\mbox{---}and a sort of furtive air of being
engaged in sneaking in front of one; even his coat and that frayed
collar of his show no further signs of the passing years. He was writing
in the library and I sat down beside him in the name of God's charity,
whereupon he deliberately insulted me by covering up his memoranda.
It seems he has some brilliant research on hand that he suspects me
of all people\mbox{---}with a Bodley Booklet a-printing!\mbox{---}of
stealing. He has taken remarkable honours at the University\mbox{---}he
went through them with a sort of hasty slobber, as though he feared
I might interrupt him before he had told me all\mbox{---}and he
spoke of taking his D.Sc.\ as one might speak of taking a cab. And
he asked what I was doing\mbox{---}with a sort of comparative accent,
and his arm was spread nervously, positively a protecting arm, over
the paper that hid the precious idea\mbox{---}his one hopeful idea.

{}```Poetry,'\ he said, `Poetry. And what do you profess to teach
in it, Hicks?'

{}``The thing's a Provincial professorling in the very act of budding,
and I thank the Lord devoutly that but for the precious gift of indolence
I also might have gone this way to D.Sc.\ and destruction\ldots{}''

A curious little vignette that I am inclined to think caught Filmer
in or near the very birth of his discovery. Hicks was wrong in anticipating
a provincial professorship for Filmer. Our next glimpse of him is
lecturing on {}``rubber and rubber substitutes,''\ to the Society
of Arts\mbox{---}he had become manager to a great plastic-substance
manufactory\mbox{---}and at that time, it is now known, he was a
member of the Aeronautical Society, albeit he contributed nothing
to the discussions of that body, preferring no doubt to mature his
great conception without external assistance. And within two years
of that paper before the Society of Arts he was hastily taking out
a number of patents and proclaiming in various undignified ways the
completion of the divergent inquiries which made his flying machine
possible. The first definite statement to that effect appeared in
a halfpenny evening paper through the agency of a man who lodged in
the same house with Filmer. His final haste after his long laborious
secret patience seems to have been due to a needless panic, Bootle,
the notorious American scientific quack, having made an announcement
that Filmer interpreted wrongly as an anticipation of his idea.

Now what precisely was Filmer's idea? Really a very simple one. Before
his time the pursuit of aeronautics had taken two divergent lines,
and had developed on the one hand balloons\mbox{---}large apparatus
lighter than air, easy in ascent, and comparatively safe in descent,
but floating helplessly before any breeze that took them; and on the
other, flying machines that flew only in theory\mbox{---}vast flat
structures heavier than air, propelled and kept up by heavy engines
and for the most part smashing at the first descent. But, neglecting
the fact that the inevitable final collapse rendered them impossible,
the weight of the flying machines gave them this theoretical advantage,
that they could go through the air against a wind, a necessary condition
if aerial navigation was to have any practical value. It is Filmer's
particular merit that he perceived the way in which the contrasted
and hitherto incompatible merits of balloon and heavy flying machine
might be combined in one apparatus, which should be at choice either
heavier or lighter than air. He took hints from the contractile bladders
of fish and the pneumatic cavities of birds. He devised an arrangement
of contractile and absolutely closed balloons which when expanded
could lift the actual flying apparatus with ease, and when retracted
by the complicated {}``musculature''\ he wove about them, were
withdrawn almost completely into the frame; and he built the large
framework which these balloons sustained, of hollow, rigid tubes,
the air in which, by an ingenious contrivance, was automatically pumped
out as the apparatus fell, and which then remained exhausted so long
as the aeronaut desired. There were no wings or propellers to his
machine, such as there had been to all previous aeroplanes, and the
only engine required was the compact and powerful little appliance
needed to contract the balloons. He perceived that such an apparatus
as he had devised might rise with frame exhausted and balloons expanded
to a considerable height, might then contract its balloons and let
the air into its frame, and by an adjustment of its weights slide
down the air in any desired direction. As it fell it would accumulate
velocity and at the same time lose weight, and the momentum accumulated
by its down-rush could be utilised by means of a shifting of its weights
to drive it up in the air again as the balloons expanded. This conception,
which is still the structural conception of all successful flying
machines, needed, however, a vast amount of toil upon its details
before it could actually be realised, and such toil Filmer\mbox{---}as
he was accustomed to tell the numerous interviewers who crowded upon
him in the heyday of his fame\mbox{---}{}``ungrudgingly and unsparingly
gave.'' His particular difficulty was the elastic lining of the contractile
balloon. He found he needed a new substance, and in the discovery
and manufacture of that new substance he had, as he never failed to
impress upon the interviewers, {}``performed a far more arduous work
than even in the actual achievement of my seemingly greater discovery.''

But it must not be imagined that these interviews followed hard upon
Filmer's proclamation of his invention. An interval of nearly five
years elapsed during which he timidly remained at his rubber factory\mbox{---}he
seems to have been entirely dependent on his small income from this
source\mbox{---}making misdirected attempts to assure a quite indifferent
public that he really \textit{had} invented what he had invented.
He occupied the greater part of his leisure in the composition of
letters to the scientific and daily press, and so forth, stating precisely
the net result of his contrivances, and demanding financial aid. That
alone would have sufficed for the suppression of his letters. He spent
such holidays as he could arrange in unsatisfactory interviews with
the door-keepers of leading London papers\mbox{---}he was singularly
not adapted for inspiring hall-porters with confidence\mbox{---}and
he positively attempted to induce the War Office to take up his work
with him. There remains a confidential letter from Major-General Volleyfire
to the Earl of Frogs. {}``The man's a crank and a bounder to boot,''\ says
the Major-General in his bluff, sensible, army way, and so left it
open for the Japanese to secure, as they subsequently did, the priority
in this side of warfare\mbox{---}a priority they still to our great
discomfort retain.

And then by a stroke of luck the membrane Filmer had invented for
his contractile balloon was discovered to be useful for the valves
of a new oil-engine, and he obtained the means for making a trial
model of his invention. He threw up his rubber factory appointment,
desisted from all further writing, and, with a certain secrecy that
seems to have been an inseparable characteristic of all his proceedings,
set to work upon the apparatus. He seems to have directed the making
of its parts and collected most of it in a room in Shoreditch, but
its final putting together was done at Dymchurch, in Kent. He did
not make the affair large enough to carry a man, but he made an extremely
ingenious use of what were then called the Marconi rays to control
its flight. The first flight of this first practicable flying machine
took place over some fields near Burford Bridge, near Hythe, in Kent,
and Filmer followed and controlled its flight upon a specially constructed
motor tricycle.

The flight was, considering all things, an amazing success. The apparatus
was brought in a cart from Dymchurch to Burford Bridge, ascended there
to a height of nearly three hundred feet, swooped thence very nearly
back to Dymchurch, came about in its sweep, rose again, circled, and
finally sank uninjured in a field behind the Burford Bridge Inn. At
its descent a curious thing happened. Filmer got off his tricycle,
scrambled over the intervening dyke, advanced perhaps twenty yards
towards his triumph, threw out his arms in a strange gesticulation,
and fell down in a dead faint. Every one could then recall the ghastliness
of his features and all the evidences of extreme excitement they had
observed throughout the trial, things they might otherwise have forgotten.
Afterwards in the inn he had an unaccountable gust of hysterical weeping.

Altogether there were not twenty witnesses of this affair, and those
for the most part uneducated men. The New Romney doctor saw the ascent
but not the descent, his horse being frightened by the electrical
apparatus on Filmer's tricycle and giving him a nasty spill. Two members
of the Kent constabulary watched the affair from a cart in an unofficial
spirit, and a grocer calling round the Marsh for orders and two lady
cyclists seem almost to complete the list of educated people. There
were two reporters present, one representing a Folkestone paper and
the other being a fourth-class interviewer and {}``symposium''\ journalist,
whose expenses down, Filmer, anxious as ever for adequate advertisement\mbox{---}and
now quite realising the way in which adequate advertisement may be
obtained\mbox{---}had paid. The latter was one of those writers
who can throw a convincing air of unreality over the most credible
events, and his half-facetious account of the affair appeared in the
magazine page of a popular journal. But, happily for Filmer, this
person's colloquial methods were more convincing. He went to offer
some further screed upon the subject to Banghurst, the proprietor
of the \emph{New Paper}, and one of the ablest and most unscrupulous
men in London journalism, and Banghurst instantly seized upon the
situation. The interviewer vanishes from the narrative, no doubt very
doubtfully remunerated, and Banghurst, Banghurst himself, double chin,
grey twill suit, abdomen, voice, gestures and all, appears at Dymchurch,
following his large, unrivalled journalistic nose. He had seen the
whole thing at a glance, just what it was and what it might be.

At his touch, as it were, Filmer's long-pent investigations exploded
into fame. He instantly and most magnificently was a Boom. One turns
over the files of the journals of the year 1907 with a quite incredulous
recognition of how swift and flaming the boom of those days could
be. The July papers know nothing of flying, see nothing in flying,
state by a most effective silence that men never would, could or should
fly. In August flying and Filmer and flying and parachutes and aerial
tactics and the Japanese Government and Filmer and again flying, shouldered
the war in Yunnan and the gold mines of Upper Greenland off the leading
page. And Banghurst had given ten thousand pounds, and, further, Banghurst
was giving five thousand pounds, and Banghurst had devoted his well-known,
magnificent (but hitherto sterile)\ private laboratories and several
acres of land near his private residence on the Surrey hills to the
strenuous and violent completion\mbox{---}Banghurst fashion\mbox{---}of
the life-size practicable flying machine. Meanwhile, in the sight
of privileged multitudes in the walled-garden of the Banghurst town
residence in Fulham, Filmer was exhibited at weekly garden parties
putting the working model through its paces. At enormous initial cost,
but with a final profit, the \emph{New Paper} presented its readers
with a beautiful photographic souvenir of the first of these occasions.

Here again the correspondence of Arthur Hicks and his friend Vance
comes to our aid.

{}``I saw Filmer in his glory,''\ he writes, with just the touch
of envy natural to his position as a poet passe. {}``The man is brushed
and shaved, dressed in the fashion of a Royal-Institution-Afternoon
Lecturer, the very newest shape in frock-coats and long patent shoes,
and altogether in a state of extraordinary streakiness between an
owlish great man and a scared abashed self-conscious bounder cruelly
exposed. He hasn't a touch of colour in the skin of his face, his
head juts forward, and those queer little dark amber eyes of his watch
furtively round him for his fame. His clothes fit perfectly and yet
sit upon him as though he had bought them ready-made. He speaks in
a mumble still, but he says, you perceive indistinctly, enormous self-assertive
things, he backs into the rear of groups by instinct if Banghurst
drops the line for a minute, and when he walks across Banghurst's
lawn one perceives him a little out of breath and going jerky, and
that his weak white hands are clenched. His is a state of tension\mbox{---}horrible
tension. And he is the Greatest Discoverer of This or Any Age\mbox{---}the
Greatest Discoverer of This or Any Age! What strikes one so forcibly
about him is that he didn't somehow quite expect it ever, at any rate,
not at all like this. Banghurst is about everywhere, the energetic
M.C.\ of his great little catch, and I swear he will have every one
down on his lawn there before he has finished with the engine; he
had bagged the prime minister yesterday, and he, bless his heart!\ didn't
look particularly outsize, on the very first occasion. Conceive it!
Filmer! Our obscure unwashed Filmer, the Glory of British science!
Duchesses crowd upon him, beautiful, bold peeresses say in their beautiful,
clear loud voices\mbox{---}have you noticed how penetrating the
great lady is becoming nowadays?\mbox{---}`Oh, Mr.\ Filmer, how
\textit{did} you do it?'

{}``Common men on the edge of things are too remote for the answer.
One imagines something in the way of that interview, `toil ungrudgingly
and unsparingly given, Madam, and, perhaps\mbox{---}I don't know\mbox{---}but
perhaps a little special aptitude.'''

So far Hicks, and the photographic supplement to the \emph{New Paper}
is in sufficient harmony with the description. In one picture the
machine swings down towards the river, and the tower of Fulham church
appears below it through a gap in the elms, and in another, Filmer
sits at his guiding batteries, and the great and beautiful of the
earth stand around him, with Banghurst massed modestly but resolutely
in the rear. The grouping is oddly apposite. Occluding much of Banghurst,
and looking with a pensive, speculative expression at Filmer, stands
the Lady Mary Elkinghorn, still beautiful, in spite of the breath
of scandal and her eight-and-thirty years, the only person whose face
does not admit a perception of the camera that was in the act of snapping
them all.

So much for the exterior facts of the story, but, after all, they
are very exterior facts. About the real interest of the business one
is necessarily very much in the dark. How was Filmer feeling at the
time? How much was a certain unpleasant anticipation present inside
that very new and fashionable frock-coat? He was in the halfpenny,
penny, six-penny, and more expensive papers alike, and acknowledged
by the whole world as {}``the Greatest Discoverer of This or Any
Age.'' He had invented a practicable flying machine, and every day
down among the Surrey hills the life-sized model was getting ready.
And when it was ready, it followed as a clear inevitable consequence
of his having invented and made it\mbox{---}everybody in the world,
indeed, seemed to take it for granted; there wasn't a gap anywhere
in that serried front of anticipation\mbox{---}that he would proudly
and cheerfully get aboard it, ascend with it, and fly.

But we know now pretty clearly that simple pride and cheerfulness
in such an act were singularly out of harmony with Filmer's private
constitution. It occurred to no one at the time, but there the fact
is. We can guess with some confidence now that it must have been drifting
about in his mind a great deal during the day, and, from a little
note to his physician complaining of persistent insomnia, we have
the soundest reason for supposing it dominated his nights, \mbox{---}the
idea that it would be after all, in spite of his theoretical security,
an abominably sickening, uncomfortable, and dangerous thing for him
to flap about in nothingness a thousand feet or so in the air. It
must have dawned upon him quite early in the period of being the Greatest
Discoverer of This or Any Age, the vision of doing this and that with
an extensive void below. Perhaps somewhen in his youth he had looked
down a great height or fallen down in some excessively uncomfortable
way; perhaps some habit of sleeping on the wrong side had resulted
in that disagreeable falling nightmare one knows, and given him his
horror; of the strength of that horror there remains now not a particle
of doubt.

Apparently he had never weighed this duty of flying in his earlier
days of research; the machine had been his end, but now things were
opening out beyond his end, and particularly this giddy whirl up above
there. He was a Discoverer and he had Discovered. But he was not a
Flying Man, and it was only now that he was beginning to perceive
clearly that he was expected to fly. Yet, however much the thing was
present in his mind he gave no expression to it until the very end,
and meanwhile he went to and fro from Banghurst's magnificent laboratories,
and was interviewed and lionised, and wore good clothes, and ate good
food, and lived in an elegant flat, enjoying a very abundant feast
of such good, coarse, wholesome Fame and Success as a man, starved
for all his years as he had been starved, might be reasonably expected
to enjoy.

After a time, the weekly gatherings in Fulham ceased. The model had
failed one day just for a moment to respond to Filmer's guidance,
or he had been distracted by the compliments of an archbishop. At
any rate, it suddenly dug its nose into the air just a little too
steeply as the archbishop was sailing through a Latin quotation for
all the world like an archbishop in a book, and it came down in the
Fulham Road within three yards of a 'bus horse. It stood for a second
perhaps, astonishing and in its attitude astonished, then it crumpled,
shivered into pieces, and the 'bus horse was incidentally killed.

Filmer lost the end of the archiepiscopal compliment. He stood up
and stared as his invention swooped out of sight and reach of him.
His long, white hands still gripped his useless apparatus. The archbishop
followed his skyward stare with an apprehension unbecoming in an archbishop.

Then came the crash and the shouts and uproar from the road to relieve
Filmer's tension. {}``My God!''\ he whispered, and sat down.

Every one else almost was staring to see where the machine had vanished,
or rushing into the house.

The making of the big machine progressed all the more rapidly for
this. Over its making presided Filmer, always a little slow and very
careful in his manner, always with a growing preoccupation in his
mind. His care over the strength and soundness of the apparatus was
prodigious. The slightest doubt, and he delayed everything until the
doubtful part could be replaced. Wilkinson, his senior assistant,
fumed at some of these delays, which, he insisted, were for the most
part unnecessary. Banghurst magnified the patient certitude of Filmer
in the \emph{New Paper}, and reviled it bitterly to his wife, and
MacAndrew, the second assistant, approved Filmer's wisdom. {}``We're
not wanting a \emph{fiasco}, man,''\ said MacAndrew. {}``He's perfectly
well advised.''

And whenever an opportunity arose Filmer would expound to Wilkinson
and MacAndrew just exactly how every part of the flying machine was
to be controlled and worked, so that in effect they would be just
as capable, and even more capable, when at last the time came, of
guiding it through the skies.

Now I should imagine that if Filmer had seen fit at this stage to
define just what he was feeling, and to take a definite line in the
matter of his ascent, he might have escaped that painful ordeal quite
easily. If he had had it clearly in his mind he could have done endless
things. He would surely have found no difficulty with a specialist
to demonstrate a weak heart, or something gastric or pulmonary, to
stand in his way\mbox{---}that is the line I am astonished he did
not take,\mbox{---}or he might, had he been man enough, have declared
simply and finally that he did not intend to do the thing. But the
fact is, though the dread was hugely present in his mind, the thing
was by no means sharp and clear. I fancy that all through this period
he kept telling himself that when the occasion came he would find
himself equal to it. He was like a man just gripped by a great illness,
who says he feels a little out of sorts, and expects to be better
presently. Meanwhile he delayed the completion of the machine, and
let the assumption that he was going to fly it take root and flourish
exceedingly about him. He even accepted anticipatory compliments on
his courage. And, barring this secret squeamishness, there can be
no doubt he found all the praise and distinction and fuss he got a
delightful and even intoxicating draught.

The Lady Mary Elkinghorn made things a little more complicated for
him.

How \textit{that} began was a subject of inexhaustible speculation
to Hicks. Probably in the beginning she was just a little {}``nice''\ to
him with that impartial partiality of hers, and it may be that to
her eyes, standing out conspicuously as he did ruling his monster
in the upper air, he had a distinction that Hicks was not disposed
to find. And somehow they must have had a moment of sufficient isolation,
and the great Discoverer a moment of sufficient courage for something
just a little personal to be mumbled or blurted. However it began,
there is no doubt that it did begin, and presently became quite perceptible
to a world accustomed to find in the proceedings of the Lady Mary
Elkinghorn a matter of entertainment. It complicated things, because
the state of love in such a virgin mind as Filmer's would brace his
resolution, if not sufficiently, at any rate considerably towards
facing a danger he feared, and hampered him in such attempts at evasion
as would otherwise be natural and congenial.

It remains a matter for speculation just how the Lady Mary felt for
Filmer and just what she thought of him. At thirty-eight one may have
gathered much wisdom and still be not altogether wise, and the imagination
still functions actively enough in creating glamours and effecting
the impossible. He came before her eyes as a very central man, and
that always counts, and he had powers, unique powers as it seemed,
at any rate in the air. The performance with the model had just a
touch of the quality of a potent incantation, and women have ever
displayed an unreasonable disposition to imagine that when a man has
powers he must necessarily have Power. Given so much, and what was
not good in Filmer's manner and appearance became an added merit.
He was modest, he hated display, but given an occasion where \textit{true}
qualities are needed, then\mbox{---}then one would see!

The late Mrs.\ Bampton thought it wise to convey to Lady Mary her
opinion that Filmer, all things considered, was rather a {}``grub.''
{}``He's certainly not a sort of man I have ever met before,''\ said
the Lady Mary, with a quite unruffled serenity. And Mrs.\ Bampton,
after a swift, imperceptible glance at that serenity, decided that
so far as saying anything to Lady Mary went, she had done as much
as could be expected of her. But she said a great deal to other people.

And at last, without any undue haste or unseemliness, the day dawned,
the great day, when Banghurst had promised his public\mbox{---}
the world in fact\mbox{---}that flying should be finally attained
and overcome. Filmer saw it dawn, watched even in the darkness before
it dawned, watched its stars fade and the grey and pearly pinks give
place at last to the clear blue sky of a sunny, cloudless day. He
watched it from the window of his bedroom in the new-built wing of
Banghurst's Tudor house. And as the stars were overwhelmed and the
shapes and substances of things grew into being out of the amorphous
dark, he must have seen more and more distinctly the festive preparations
beyond the beech clumps near the green pavilion in the outer park,
the three stands for the privileged spectators, the raw, new fencing
of the enclosure, the sheds and workshops, the Venetian masts and
fluttering flags that Banghurst had considered essential, black and
limp in the breezeless dawn, and amidst all these things a great shape
covered with tarpauling. A strange and terrible portent for humanity
was that shape, a beginning that must surely spread and widen and
change and dominate all the affairs of men, but to Filmer it is very
doubtful whether it appeared in anything but a narrow and personal
light. Several people heard him pacing in the small hours\mbox{---}for
the vast place was packed with guests by a proprietor editor who,
before all understood compression. And about five o'clock, if not
before, Filmer left his room and wandered out of the sleeping house
into the park, alive by that time with sunlight and birds and squirrels
and the fallow deer. MacAndrew, who was also an early riser, met him
near the machine, and they went and had a look at it together.

It is doubtful if Filmer took any breakfast, in spite of the urgency
of Banghurst. So soon as the guests began to be about in some number
he seems to have retreated to his room. Thence about ten he went into
the shrubbery, very probably because he had seen the Lady Mary Elkinghorn
there. She was walking up and down, engaged in conversation with her
old school friend, Mrs.\ Brewis-Craven, and although Filmer had never
met the latter lady before, he joined them and walked beside them
for some time. There were several silences in spite of the Lady Mary's
brilliance. The situation was a difficult one, and Mrs.\ Brewis-Craven
did not master its difficulty. {}``He struck me,'' she said afterwards
with a luminous self-contradiction, {}``as a very unhappy person
who had something to say, and wanted before all things to be helped
to say it. But how was one to help him when one didn't know what it
was?''

At half-past eleven the enclosures for the public in the outer park
were crammed, there was an intermittent stream of \textit{\emph{equipages}}
along the belt which circles the outer park, and the house party was
dotted over the lawn and shrubbery and the corner of the inner park,
in a series of brilliantly attired knots, all making for the flying
machine. Filmer walked in a group of three with Banghurst, who was
supremely and conspicuously happy, and Sir Theodore Hickle, the president
of the Aeronautical Society. Mrs.\ Banghurst was close behind with
the Lady Mary Elkinghorn, Georgina Hickle, and the Dean of Stays.
Banghurst was large and copious in speech, and such interstices as
he left were filled in by Hickle with complimentary remarks to Filmer.
And Filmer walked between them saying not a word except by way of
unavoidable reply. Behind, Mrs.\ Banghurst listened to the admirably
suitable and shapely conversation of the Dean with that fluttered
attention to the ampler clergy ten years of social ascent and ascendency
had not cured in her; and the Lady Mary watched, no doubt with an
entire confidence in the world's disillusionment, the drooping shoulders
of the sort of man she had never met before.

There was some cheering as the central party came into view of the
enclosures, but it was not very unanimous nor invigorating cheering.
They were within fifty yards of the apparatus when Filmer took a hasty
glance over his shoulder to measure the distance of the ladies behind
them, and decided to make the first remark he had initiated since
the house had been left. His voice was just a little hoarse, and he
cut in on Banghurst in mid-sentence on Progress.

{}``I say, Banghurst,''\ he said, and stopped.

{}``Yes,''\ said Banghurst.

{}``I wish\mbox{---}''\ He moistened his lips. {}``I'm not feeling
well.''

Banghurst stopped dead. {}``Eh?''\ he shou\-t\-ed.

{}``A queer feeling.'' Filmer made to move on, but Banghurst was
immovable.\  {}``I don't know. I may be better in a minute. If not\mbox{---}perhaps
\ldots{} MacAndrew\mbox{---}''

{}``You're not feeling \textit{well}?''\ said Banghurst, and stared
at his white face.

{}``My dear!''\ he said, as Mrs.\ Banghurst came up with them,
{}``Filmer says he isn't feeling \textit{well}.''

{}``A little queer,''\ exclaimed Filmer, avoiding the Lady Mary's
eyes. {}``It may pass off\mbox{---}''

There was a pause.

It came to Filmer that he was the most isolated person in the world.

{}``In any case,''\ said Banghurst, {}``the ascent must be made.
Perhaps if you were to sit down somewhere for a moment\mbox{---}''

{}``It's the crowd, I think,''\ said Filmer.

There was a second pause. Banghurst's eye rested in scrutiny on Filmer,
and then swept the sample of public in the enclosure.

{}``It's unfortunate,''\ said Sir Theodore Hic\-k\-le; but still
\mbox{---} I suppose \mbox{---} Your assistants \mbox{---} Of
course, if you feel out of condition and disinclined\mbox{---}''

{}``I don't think Mr.\ Filmer would permit \textit{that} for a moment,''\ said
Lady Mary.

{}``But if Mr.\ Filmer's nerve is run\mbox{---}It might even be
dangerous for him to attempt\mbox{---}''\ Hickle coughed.

{}``It's just because it's dangerous,''\ began the Lady Mary, and
felt she had made her point of view and Filmer's plain enough.

Conflicting motives struggled for Filmer.

{}``I feel I ought to go up,''\ he said, regarding the ground.
He looked up and met the Lady Mary's eyes. {}``I want to go up,''\ he
said, and smiled whitely at her. He turned towards Banghurst. {}``If
I could just sit down somewhere for a moment out of the crowd and
sun\mbox{---}''

Banghurst, at least, was beginning to understand the case. {}``Come
into my little room in the green pavilion,''\ he said. {}``It's
quite cool there.'' He took Filmer by the arm.

Filmer turned his face to the Lady Mary Elkinghorn again. {}``I shall
be all right in five minutes,''\ he said. {}``I'm tremendously
sorry\mbox{---}''

The Lady Mary Elkinghorn smiled at him. {}``I couldn't think\mbox{---}''\ he
said to Hickle, and obeyed the compulsion of Banghurst's pull.

The rest remained watching the two recede.

{}``He is so fragile,''\ said the Lady Mary.

{}``He's certainly a highly nervous type,''\ said the Dean, whose
weakness it was to regard the whole world, except married clergymen
with enormous families, as {}``neurotic.''

{}``Of course,''\ said Hickle, {}``it isn't absolutely necessary
for him to go up because he has invented\mbox{---}''

{}``How \textit{could} he avoid it?''\ asked the Lady Mary, with
the faintest shadow of scorn.

{}``It's certainly most unfortunate if he's going to be ill now,''\ said
Mrs.\ Banghurst a little severely.

{}``He's not going to be ill,''\ said the Lady Mary, and certainly
she had met Filmer's eye.

{}``\textit{You'll} be all right,''\ said Banghurst, as they went
towards the pavilion. {}``All you want is a nip of brandy. It ought
to be you, you know. You'll be\mbox{---}you'd get it rough, you
know, if you let another man\mbox{---}''

{}``Oh, I want to go,''\ said Filmer. {}``I shall be all right.
As a matter of fact I'm almost inclined \textit{now}\mbox{---}.
No! I think I'll have that nip of brandy first.''

Banghurst took him into the little room and routed out an empty decanter.
He departed in search of a supply. He was gone perhaps five minutes.

The history of those five minutes cannot be written. At intervals
Filmer's face could be seen by the people on the easternmost of the
stands erected for spectators, against the window pane peering out,
and then it would recede and fade. Banghurst vanished shouting behind
the grand stand, and presently the butler appeared going pavilionward
with a tray.

The apartment in which Filmer came to his last solution was a pleasant
little room very simply furnished with green furniture and an old
bureau\mbox{---}for Banghurst was simple in all his private ways.
It was hung with little engravings after Morland and it had a shelf
of books. But as it happened, Banghurst had left a rook rifle he sometimes
played with on the top of the desk, and on the corner of the mantelshelf
was a tin with three or four cartridges remaining in it. As Filmer
went up and down that room wrestling with his intolerable dilemma
he went first towards the neat little rifle athwart the blotting-pad
and then towards the neat little red label

\noindent \begin{center}\emph{\noun{{}``.22}} \textit{\emph{\noun{Long}}}\emph{\noun{.''}}\end{center}

The thing must have jumped into his mind in a moment.

Nobody seems to have connected the report with him, though the gun,
being fired in a confined space, must have sounded loud, and there
were several people in the billiard-room, separated from him only
by a lath-and-plaster partition. But directly Banghurst's butler opened
the door and smelt the sour smell of the smoke, he knew, he says,
what had happened. For the servants at least of Banghurst's household
had guessed something of what was going on in Filmer's mind.

All through that trying afternoon Banghurst behaved as he held a man
should behave in the presence of hopeless disaster, and his guests
for the most part succeeded in not insisting upon the fact\mbox{---}though
to conceal their perception of it altogether was impossible\mbox{---}that
Banghurst had been pretty elaborately and completely swindled by the
deceased. The public in the enclosure, Hicks told me, dispersed {}``like
a party that has been ducking a welsher,''\ and there wasn't a soul
in the train to London, it seems, who hadn't known all along that
flying was a quite impossible thing for man. {}``But he might have
tried it,'' said many, {}``after carrying the thing so far.''

In the evening, when he was comparatively alone, Banghurst broke down
and went on like a man of clay. I have been told he wept, which must
have made an imposing scene, and he certainly said Filmer had ruined
his life, and offered and sold the whole apparatus to MacAndrew for
half-a-crown. {}``I've been thinking\mbox{---}''\ said MacAndrew
at the conclusion of the bargain, and stopped.

The next morning the name of Filmer was, for the first time, less
conspicuous in the \emph{New Paper} than in any other daily paper
in the world. The rest of the world's instructors, with varying emphasis,
according to their dignity and the degree of competition between themselves
and the \emph{New Paper}, proclaimed the {}``Entire Failure of the
New Flying Machine,''\ and {}``Suicide of the Impostor.'' But
in the district of North Surrey the reception of the news was tempered
by a perception of unusual aerial phenomena.

Overnight Wilkinson and MacAndrew had fallen into violent argument
on the exact motives of their \textit{\emph{principal's}} rash act.

{}``The man was certainly a poor, cowardly body, but so far as his
science went he was \textit{no} impostor,''\ said MacAndrew, {}``and
I'm prepared to give that proposition a very practical demonstration,
Mr.\ Wilkinson, so soon as we've got the place a little more to ourselves.
For I've no faith in all this publicity for experimental trials.''

And to that end, while all the world was reading of the certain failure
of the new flying machine, MacAndrew was soaring and curvetting with
great amplitude and dignity over the Epsom and Wimbledon divisions;
and Banghurst, restored once more to hope and energy, and regardless
of public security and the Board of Trade, was pursuing his gyrations
and trying to attract his attention, on a motor car and in his pyjamas\mbox{---}he
had caught sight of the ascent when pulling up the blind of his bedroom
window\mbox{---}equipped, among other things, with a film camera
that was subsequently discovered to be jammed. And Filmer was lying
on the billiard table in the green pavilion with a sheet about his
body.

\ 


\chapter*{\raggedright THE MAGIC SHOP}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{THE MAGIC SHOP}

\markboth{TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM}{THE MAGIC SHOP}

I had seen the Magic Shop from afar several times; I had passed it
once or twice, a shop window of alluring little objects, magic balls,
magic hens, wonderful cones, ventriloquist dolls, the material of
the basket trick, packs of cards that \textit{looked} all right, and
all that sort of thing, but never had I thought of going in until
one day, almost without warning, Gip hauled me by my finger right
up to the window, and so conducted himself that there was nothing
for it but to take him in. I had not thought the place was there,
to tell the truth\mbox{---}a modest-sized frontage in Regent Street,
between the picture shop and the place where the chicks run about
just out of patent incubators, but there it was sure enough. I had
fancied it was down nearer the Circus, or round the corner in Oxford
Street, or even in Holborn; always over the way and a little inaccessible
it had been, with something of the mirage in its position; but here
it was now quite indisputably, and the fat end of Gip's pointing finger
made a noise upon the glass.

{}``If I was rich,''\ said Gip, dabbing a finger at the Disappearing
Egg, {}``I'd buy myself that. And that''\mbox{---}which was The
Crying Baby, Very Human\mbox{---}and that,''\ which was a mystery,
and called, so a neat card asserted, {}``Buy One and Astonish Your
Friends.''

{}``Anything,''\ said Gip, {}``will disappear under one of those
cones. I have read about it in a book.

{}``And there, dadda, is the Vanishing Halfpenny\mbox{---}, only
they've put it this way up so's we can't see how it's done.''

Gip, dear boy, inherits his mother's breeding, and he did not propose
to enter the shop or worry in any way; only, you know, quite unconsciously
he lugged my finger doorward, and he made his interest clear.

{}``That,''\ he said, and pointed to the Magic Bottle.

{}``If you had that?''\ I said; at which promising inquiry he looked
up with a sudden radiance.

{}``I could show it to Jessie,''\ he said, thoughtful as ever of
others.

{}``It's less than a hundred days to your birthday, Gibbles,''\ I
said, and laid my hand on the door-handle.

Gip made no answer, but his grip tightened on my finger, and so we
came into the shop.

It was no common shop this; it was a magic shop, and all the prancing
precedence Gip would have taken in the matter of mere toys was wanting.
He left the burthen of the conversation to me.

It was a little, narrow shop, not very well lit, and the door-bell
pinged again with a plaintive note as we closed it behind us. For
a moment or so we were alone and could glance about us. There was
a tiger in \textit{papier}-\textit{m\^{a}che} on the glass case that
covered the low counter\mbox{---}a grave, kind-eyed tiger that waggled
his head in a methodical manner; there were several crystal spheres,
a china hand holding magic cards, a stock of magic fish-bowls in various
sizes, and an immodest magic hat that shamelessly displayed its springs.
On the floor were magic mirrors; one to draw you out long and thin,
one to swell your head and vanish your legs, and one to make you short
and fat like a draught; and while we were laughing at these the shopman,
as I suppose, came in.

At any rate, there he was behind the counter\mbox{---}a curious,
sallow, dark man, with one ear larger than the other and a chin like
the toe-cap of a boot.

{}``What can we have the pleasure?''\ he said, spreading his long,
magic fingers on the glass case; and so with a start we were aware
of him.

{}``I want,''\ I said, {}``to buy my little boy a few simple tricks.''

{}``Legerdemain?''\ he asked. {}``Mechanical? Domestic?''

{}``Anything amusing?''\ said I.

{}``Um!''\ said the shopman, and scratched his head for a moment
as if thinking. Then, quite distinctly, he drew from his head a glass
ball. {}``Something in this way?''\ he said, and held it out.

The action was unexpected. I had seen the trick done at entertainments
endless times before\mbox{---}it's part of the common stock of conjurers\mbox{---}but
I had not expected it here.

{}``That's good,''\ I said, with a laugh.

{}``Isn't it?''\ said the shopman.

Gip stretched out his disengaged hand to take this object and found
merely a blank palm.

{}``It's in your pocket,''\ said the shopman, and there it was!

{}``How much will that be?''\ I asked.

{}``We make no charge for glass balls,''\ said the shopman politely.
{}``We get them,''\mbox{---}he picked one out of his elbow as
he spoke\mbox{---}{}``free.'' He produced another from the back
of his neck, and laid it beside its predecessor on the counter. Gip
regarded his glass ball sagely, then directed a look of inquiry at
the two on the counter, and finally brought his round-eyed scrutiny
to the shopman, who smiled.

{}``You may have those too,''\ said the shopman, {}``and, if you
\textit{don't} mind, one from my mouth. \textit{So}!''

Gip counselled me mutely for a moment, and then in a profound silence
put away the four balls, resumed my reassuring finger, and nerved
himself for the next event.

{}``We get all our smaller tricks in that way,''\ the shopman remarked.

I laughed in the manner of one who subscribes to a jest. {}``Instead
of going to the wholesale shop,''\ I said. {}``Of course, it's
cheaper.''

{}``In a way,''\ the shopman said. {}``Though we pay in the end.
But not so heavily\mbox{---}as people suppose\ldots{}. Our larger
tricks, and our daily provisions and all the other things we want,
we get out of that hat\ldots{}. And you know, sir, if you'll excuse
my saying it, there \textit{isn't} a wholesale shop, not for Genuine
Magic goods, sir. I don't know if you noticed our inscription\mbox{---}the
Genuine Magic shop.'' He drew a business-card from his cheek and
handed it to me. {}``Genuine,'' he said, with his finger on the
word, and added, {}``There is absolutely no deception, sir.''

He seemed to be carrying out the joke pretty thoroughly, I thought.

He turned to Gip with a smile of remarkable affability. {}``You,
you know, are the Right Sort of Boy.''

I was surprised at his knowing that, because, in the interests of
discipline, we keep it rather a secret even at home; but Gip received
it in unflinching silence, keeping a steadfast eye on him.

{}``It's only the Right Sort of Boy gets through that doorway.''

And, as if by way of illustration, there came a rattling at the door,
and a squeaking little voice could be faintly heard. {}``Nyar! I
\textit{warn} 'a go in there, dadda, I \textit{warn} 'a go in there.
Ny-a-a-ah!''\ and then the accents of a down-trodden parent, urging
consolations and \textit{\emph{propitiations}}. {}``It's locked,
Edward,''\ he said.

{}``But it isn't,''\ said I.

{}``It is, sir,''\ said the shopman, {}``always\mbox{---}for
that sort of child,'' and as he spoke we had a glimpse of the other
youngster, a little, white face, pallid from sweet-eating and over-sapid
food, and distorted by evil passions, a ruthless little egotist, pawing
at the enchanted pane. {}``It's no good, sir,''\ said the shopman,
as I moved, with my natural helpfulness, doorward, and presently the
spoilt child was carried off howling.

{}``How do you manage that?''\ I said, breathing a little more
freely.

{}``Magic!''\ said the shopman, with a careless wave of the hand,
and behold! sparks of coloured fire flew out of his fingers and vanished
into the shadows of the shop.

{}``You were saying,''\ he said, addressing himself to Gip, {}``before
you came in, that you would like one of our `Buy One and Astonish
your Friends'\ boxes?''

Gip, after a gallant effort, said {}``Yes.''

{}``It's in your pocket.''

And leaning over the counter\mbox{---}he really had an extraordinarily
long body\mbox{---}this amazing person produced the article in the
customary conjurer's manner. {}``Paper,''\ he said, and took a
sheet out of the empty hat with the springs; {}``string,''\ and
behold his mouth was a string-box, from which he drew an unending
thread, which when he had tied his parcel he bit off\mbox{---}and,
it seemed to me, swallowed the ball of string. And then he lit a candle
at the nose of one of the ventriloquist's dummies, stuck one of his
fingers (which had become sealing-wax red)\ into the flame, and so
sealed the parcel. {}``Then there was the Disappearing Egg,''\ he
remarked, and produced one from within my coat-breast and packed it,
and also The Crying Baby, Very Human. I handed each parcel to Gip
as it was ready, and he clasped them to his chest.

He said very little, but his eyes were eloquent; the clutch of his
arms was eloquent. He was the playground of unspeakable emotions.
These, you know, were \textit{real} Magics. Then, with a start, I
discovered something moving about in my hat\mbox{---}something soft
and jumpy. I whipped it off, and a ruffled pigeon\mbox{---}no doubt
a confederate\mbox{---}dropped out and ran on the counter, and went,
I fancy, into a cardboard box behind the \textit{papier}-\textit{m\^{a}che}
tiger.

{}``Tut, tut!''\ said the shopman, dexterously relieving me of
my headdress; {}``careless bird, and\mbox{---}as I live\mbox{---}nesting!''

He shook my hat, and shook out into his extended hand two or three
eggs, a large marble, a watch, about half-a-dozen of the inevitable
glass balls, and then crumpled, crinkled paper, more and more and
more, talking all the time of the way in which people neglect to brush
their hats \textit{inside} as well as out, politely, of course, but
with a certain personal application. {}``All sorts of things accumulate,
sir\ldots{}. Not \textit{you}, of course, in particular\ldots{}.
Nearly every customer\ldots{}. Astonishing what they carry about
with them\ldots{}.'' The crumpled paper rose and billowed on the
counter more and more and more, until he was nearly hidden from us,
until he was altogether hidden, and still his voice went on and on.
{}``We none of us know what the fair semblance of a human being may
conceal, sir. Are we all then no better than brushed exteriors, whited
sepulchres\mbox{---}''

His voice stopped\mbox{---}exactly like when you hit a neighbour's
gramophone with a well-aimed brick, the same instant silence, and
the rustle of the paper stopped, and everything was still\ldots{}.

{}``Have you done with my hat?''\ I said, after an interval.

There was no answer.

I stared at Gip, and Gip stared at me, and there were our distortions
in the magic mirrors, looking very rum, and grave, and quiet\ldots{}.

{}``I think we'll go now,''\ I said. {}``Will you tell me how
much all this comes to?\ldots{}

{}``I say,''\ I said, on a rather louder note, {}``I want the
bill; and my hat, please.''

It might have been a sniff from behind the paper pile\ldots{}.

{}``Let's look behind the counter, Gip,''\ I said. {}``He's making
fun of us.''

I led Gip round the head-wagging tiger, and what do you think there
was behind the counter? No one at all! Only my hat on the floor, and
a common conjurer's lop-eared white rabbit lost in meditation, and
looking as stupid and crumpled as only a conjurer's rabbit can do.
I resumed my hat, and the rabbit lolloped a lollop or so out of my
way.

{}``Dadda!''\ said Gip, in a guilty whisper.

{}``What is it, Gip?''\ said I.

{}``I \textit{do} like this shop, dadda.''

{}``So should I,''\ I said to myself, {}``if the counter wouldn't
suddenly extend itself to shut one off from the door.'' But I didn't
call Gip's attention to that. {}``Pussy!''\ he said, with a hand
out to the rabbit as it came lolloping past us; {}``Pussy, do Gip
a magic!''\ and his eyes followed it as it squeezed through a door
I had certainly not remarked a moment before. Then this door opened
wider, and the man with one ear larger than the other appeared again.
He was smiling still, but his eye met mine with something between
amusement and defiance. {}``You'd like to see our show-room, sir,''\ he
said, with an innocent suavity. Gip tugged my finger forward. I glanced
at the counter and met the shopman's eye again. I was beginning to
think the magic just a little too genuine. {}``We haven't \textit{very}
much time,''\ I said. But somehow we were inside the show-room before
I could finish that.

{}``All goods of the same quality,''\ said the shopman, rubbing
his flexible hands together, {}``and that is the Best. Nothing in
the place that isn't genuine Magic, and warranted thoroughly rum.
Excuse me, sir!''

I felt him pull at something that clung to my coat-sleeve, and then
I saw he held a little, wriggling red demon by the tail\mbox{---}the
little creature bit and fought and tried to get at his hand\mbox{---}and
in a moment he tossed it carelessly behind a counter. No doubt the
thing was only an image of twisted indiarubber, but for the moment\mbox{---}!
And his gesture was exactly that of a man who handles some petty biting
bit of vermin. I glanced at Gip, but Gip was looking at a magic rocking-horse.
I was glad he hadn't seen the thing. {}``I say,''\ I said, in an
undertone, and indicating Gip and the red demon with my eyes, {}``you
haven't many things like \textit{that} about, have you?''

{}``None of ours! Probably brought it with you,''\ said the shopman\mbox{---}also
in an undertone, and with a more dazzling smile than ever. {}``Astonishing
what people \textit{will} carry about with them unawares!'' And then
to Gip, {}``Do you see anything you fancy here?''

There were many things that Gip fancied there.

He turned to this astonishing tradesman with mingled confidence and
respect. {}``Is that a Magic Sword?''\ he said.

{}``A Magic Toy Sword. It neither bends, breaks, nor cuts the fingers.
It renders the bearer invincible in battle against any one under eighteen.
Half-a-crown to seven and sixpence, according to size. \textit{\emph{These}}
\emph{}\textit{\emph{panoplies}} on cards are for juvenile knights-errant
and very useful\mbox{---}shield of safety, sandals of swiftness,
helmet of invisibility.''

{}``Oh, daddy!''\ gasped Gip.

I tried to find out what they cost, but the shopman did not heed me.
He had got Gip now; he had got him away from my finger; he had embarked
upon the exposition of all his confounded stock, and nothing was going
to stop him. Presently I saw with a qualm of distrust and something
very like jealousy that Gip had hold of this person's finger as usually
he has hold of mine. No doubt the fellow was interesting, I thought,
and had an interestingly faked lot of stuff, really \textit{good}
faked stuff, still\mbox{---}

I wandered after them, saying very little, but keeping an eye on this
prestidigital fellow. After all, Gip was enjoying it. And no doubt
when the time came to go we should be able to go quite easily.

It was a long, rambling place, that show-room, a gallery broken up
by stands and stalls and pillars, with archways leading off to other
departments, in which the queerest-looking assistants loafed and stared
at one, and with perplexing mirrors and curtains. So perplexing, indeed,
were these that I was presently unable to make out the door by which
we had come.

The shopman showed Gip magic trains that ran without steam or clockwork,
just as you set the signals, and then some very, very valuable boxes
of soldiers that all came alive directly you took off the lid and
said\mbox{---}. I myself haven't a very quick ear and it was a tongue-twisting
sound, but Gip\mbox{---}he has his mother's ear\mbox{---}got it
in no time. {}``Bravo!''\ said the shopman, putting the men back
into the box unceremoniously and handing it to Gip. {}``Now,''\ said
the shopman, and in a moment Gip had made them all alive again.

{}``You'll take that box?''\ asked the shopman.

{}``We'll take that box,''\ said I, {}``unless you charge its
full value. In which case it would need a Trust Magnate\mbox{---}''

{}``Dear heart! \textit{No}!''\ and the shopman swept the little
men back again, shut the lid, waved the box in the air, and there
it was, in brown paper, tied up and\mbox{---}\textit{with} \textit{Gip's}
\textit{full} \textit{name} \textit{and} \textit{address} \textit{on}
\textit{the} \textit{paper}!

The shopman laughed at my amazement.

{}``This is the genuine magic,''\ he said. {}``The real thing.''

{}``It's a little too genuine for my taste,''\ I said again.

After that he fell to showing Gip tricks, odd tricks, and still odder
the way they were done. He explained them, he turned them inside out,
and there was the dear little chap nodding his busy bit of a head
in the sagest manner.

I did not attend as well as I might. {}``Hey, presto!''\ said the
Magic Shopman, and then would come the clear, small {}``Hey, presto!''
of the boy. But I was distracted by other things. It was being borne
in upon me just how tremendously rum this place was; it was, so to
speak, inundated by a sense of rumness. There was something a little
rum about the fixtures even, about the ceiling, about the floor, about
the casually distributed chairs. I had a queer feeling that whenever
I wasn't looking at them straight they went askew, and moved about,
and played a noiseless puss-in-the-corner behind my back. And the
cornice had a serpentine design with masks\mbox{---}masks altogether
too expressive for proper plaster.

Then abruptly my attention was caught by one of the odd-looking assistants.
He was some way off and evidently unaware of my presence\mbox{---}I
saw a sort of three-quarter length of him over a pile of toys and
through an arch\mbox{---}and, you know, he was leaning against a
pillar in an idle sort of way doing the most horrid things with his
features! The particular horrid thing he did was with his nose. He
did it just as though he was idle and wanted to amuse himself. First
of all it was a short, blobby nose, and then suddenly he shot it out
like a telescope, and then out it flew and became thinner and thinner
until it was like a long, red, flexible whip. Like a thing in a nightmare
it was! He flourished it about and flung it forth as a fly-fisher
flings his line.

My instant thought was that Gip mustn't see him. I turned about, and
there was Gip quite preoccupied with the shopman, and thinking no
evil. They were whispering together and looking at me. Gip was standing
on a little stool, and the shopman was holding a sort of big drum
in his hand.

{}``Hide and seek, dadda!''\ cried Gip. {}``You're He!''

And before I could do anything to prevent it, the shopman had clapped
the big drum over him. I saw what was up directly. {}``Take that
off,'' I cried, {}``this instant! You'll frighten the boy. Take
it off!''

The shopman with the unequal ears did so without a word, and held
the big cylinder towards me to show its emptiness. And the little
stool was vacant! In that instant my boy had utterly disappeared?\ldots{}

You know, perhaps, that sinister something that comes like a hand
out of the unseen and grips your heart about. You know it takes your
common self away and leaves you tense and deliberate, neither slow
nor hasty, neither angry nor afraid. So it was with me.

I came up to this grinning shopman and kicked his stool aside.

{}``Stop this folly!''\ I said. {}``Where is my boy?''

{}``You see,''\ he said, still displaying the drum's interior,
{}``there is no deception\mbox{---}-''

I put out my hand to grip him, and he eluded me by a dexterous movement.
I snatched again, and he turned from me and pushed open a door to
escape. {}``Stop!''\ I said, and he laughed, receding. I leapt
after him\mbox{---}into utter darkness.

\textit{Thud}!

{}``Lor'\ bless my 'eart! I didn't see you coming, sir!''

I was in Regent Street, and I had collided with a decent-looking working
man; and a yard away, perhaps, and looking a little perplexed with
himself, was Gip. There was some sort of apology, and then Gip had
turned and come to me with a bright little smile, as though for a
moment he had missed me.

And he was carrying four parcels in his arm!

He secured immediate possession of my finger.

For the second I was rather at a loss. I stared round to see the door
of the magic shop, and, behold, it was not there! There was no door,
no shop, nothing, only the common pilaster between the shop where
they sell pictures and the window with the chicks!\ldots{}

I did the only thing possible in that mental tumult; I walked straight
to the kerbstone and held up my umbrella for a cab.

{}``'Ansoms,''\ said Gip, in a note of culminating exultation.

I helped him in, recalled my address with an effort, and got in also.
Something unusual proclaimed itself in my tail-coat pocket, and I
felt and discovered a glass ball. With a petulant expression I flung
it into the street.

Gip said nothing.

For a space neither of us spoke.

{}``Dada!''\ said Gip, at last, {}``that \textit{was} a proper
shop!''

I came round with that to the problem of just how the whole thing
had seemed to him. He looked completely undamaged\mbox{---}so far,
good; he was neither scared nor unhinged, he was simply tremendously
satisfied with the afternoon's entertainment, and there in his arms
were the four parcels.

Confound it!\ what could be in them?

{}``Um!''\ I said. {}``Little boys can't go to shops like that
every day.''

He received this with his usual stoicism, and for a moment I was sorry
I was his father and not his mother, and so couldn't suddenly there,
\textit{coram} \textit{publico}, in our hansom, kiss him. After all,
I thought, the thing wasn't so very bad.

But it was only when we opened the parcels that I really began to
be reassured. Three of them contained boxes of soldiers, quite ordinary
lead soldiers, but of so good a quality as to make Gip altogether
forget that originally these parcels had been Magic Tricks of the
only genuine sort, and the fourth contained a kitten, a little living
white kitten, in excellent health and appetite and temper.

I saw this unpacking with a sort of provisional relief. I hung about
in the nursery for quite an unconscionable time\ldots{}.

That happened six months ago. And now I am beginning to believe it
is all right. The kitten had only the magic natural to all kittens,
and the soldiers seem as steady a company as any colonel could desire.
And Gip\mbox{---}?

The intelligent parent will understand that I have to go cautiously
with Gip.

But I went so far as this one day. I said, {}``How would you like
your soldiers to come alive, Gip, and march about by themselves?''

{}``Mine do,''\ said Gip. {}``I just have to say a word I know
before I open the lid.''

{}``Then they march about alone?''

{}``Oh, \textit{quite}, dadda. I shouldn't like them if they didn't
do that.''

I displayed no unbecoming surprise, and since then I have taken occasion
to drop in upon him once or twice, unannounced, when the soldiers
were about, but so far I have never discovered them performing in
anything like a magical manner.

It's so difficult to tell.

There's also a question of finance. I have an incurable habit of paying
bills. I have been up and down Regent Street several times, looking
for that shop. I am inclined to think, indeed, that in that matter
honour is satisfied, and that, since Gip's name and address are known
to them, I may very well leave it to these people, whoever they may
be, to send in their bill in their own time.


\chapter*{\raggedright THE VALLEY OF SPIDERS}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{THE VALLEY OF SPIDERS}

\markboth{TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM}{THE VALLEY OF SPIDERS}

Towards mid-day the three pursuers came abruptly round a bend in the
torrent bed upon the sight of a very broad and spacious valley. The
difficult and winding trench of pebbles along which they had tracked
the fugitives for so long, expanded to a broad slope, and with a common
impulse the three men left the trail, and rode to a little eminence
set with olive-dun trees, and there halted, the two others, as became
them, a little behind the man with the silver-studded bridle.

For a space they scanned the great expanse below them with eager eyes.
It spread remoter and remoter, with only a few clusters of sere thorn
bushes here and there, and the dim suggestions of some now waterless
ravine, to break its desolation of yellow grass. Its purple distances
melted at last into the bluish slopes of the further hills\mbox{---}hills
it might be of a greener kind\mbox{---}and above them invisibly
supported, and seeming indeed to hang in the blue, were the snowclad
summits of mountains that grew larger and bolder to the north-westward
as the sides of the valley drew together. And westward the valley
opened until a distant darkness under the sky told where the forests
began. But the three men looked neither east nor west, but only steadfastly
across the valley.

The gaunt man with the scarred lip was the first to speak. {}``Nowhere,''
he said, with a sigh of disappointment in his voice. {}``But after
all, they had a full day's start.''

{}``They don't know we are after them,''\ said the little man on
the white horse.

{}``\textit{She} would know,''\ said the leader bitterly, as if
speaking to himself.

{}``Even then they can't go fast. They've got no beast but the mule,
and all to-day the girl's foot has been bleeding\mbox{---}''

The man with the silver bridle flashed a quick intensity of rage on
him. {}``Do you think I haven't seen that?''\ he snarled.

{}``It helps, anyhow,''\ whispered the little man to himself.

The gaunt man with the scarred lip stared impassively. {}``They can't
be over the valley,''\ he said. {}``If we ride hard\mbox{---}''

He glanced at the white horse and paused.

{}``Curse all white horses!''\ said the man with the silver bridle,
and turned to scan the beast his curse included.

The little man looked down between the melancholy ears of his steed.

{}``I did my best,''\ he said.

The two others stared again across the valley for a space. The gaunt
man passed the back of his hand across the scarred lip.

{}``Come up!''\ said the man who owned the silver bridle, suddenly.
The little man started and jerked his rein, and the horse hoofs of
the three made a multitudinous faint pattering upon the withered grass
as they turned back towards the trail\ldots{}.

They rode cautiously down the long slope before them, and so came
through a waste of prickly, twisted bushes and strange dry shapes
of horny branches that grew amongst the rocks, into the levels below.
And there the trail grew faint, for the soil was scanty, and the only
herbage was this scorched dead straw that lay upon the ground. Still,
by hard scanning, by leaning beside the horses'\ necks and pausing
ever and again, even these white men could contrive to follow after
their prey.

There were trodden places, bent and broken blades of the coarse grass,
and ever and again the sufficient intimation of a footmark. And once
the leader saw a brown smear of blood where the half-caste girl may
have trod. And at that under his breath he cursed her for a fool.

The gaunt man checked his leader's tracking, and the little man on
the white horse rode behind, a man lost in a dream. They rode one
after another, the man with the silver bridle led the way, and they
spoke never a word. After a time it came to the little man on the
white horse that the world was very still. He started out of his dream.
Besides the little noises of their horses and equipment, the whole
great valley kept the brooding quiet of a painted scene.

Before him went his master and his fellow, each intently leaning forward
to the left, each impassively moving with the paces of his horse;
their shadows went before them\mbox{---}still, noiseless, tapering
attendants; and nearer a crouched cool shape was his own. He looked
about him. What was it had gone? Then he remembered the reverberation
from the banks of the gorge and the perpetual accompaniment of shifting,
jostling pebbles. And, moreover\mbox{---}? There was no breeze.
That was it! What a vast, still place it was, a monotonous afternoon
slumber. And the sky open and blank, except for a sombre veil of haze
that had gathered in the upper valley.

He straightened his back, fretted with his bridle, puckered his lips
to whistle, and simply sighed. He turned in his saddle for a time,
and stared at the throat of the mountain gorge out of which they had
come. Blank! Blank slopes on either side, with never a sign of a decent
beast or tree\mbox{---}much less a man. What a land it was! What
a wilderness! He dropped again into his former pose.

It filled him with a momentary pleasure to see a wry stick of purple
black flash out into the form of a snake, and vanish amidst the brown.
After all, the infernal valley \textit{was} alive. And then, to rejoice
him still more, came a little breath across his face, a whisper that
came and went, the faintest inclination of a stiff black-antlered
bush upon a little crest, the first intimations of a possible breeze.
Idly he wetted his finger, and held it up.

He pulled up sharply to avoid a collision with the gaunt man, who
had stopped at fault upon the trail. Just at that guilty moment he
caught his master's eye looking towards him.

For a time he forced an interest in the tracking. Then, as they rode
on again, he studied his master's shadow and hat and shoulder, appearing
and disappearing behind the gaunt man's nearer contours. They had
ridden four days out of the very limits of the world into this desolate
place, short of water, with nothing but a strip of dried meat under
their saddles, over rocks and mountains, where surely none but these
fugitives had ever been before\mbox{---}for \textit{that}!

And all this was for a girl, a mere wilful child! And the man had
whole cityfuls of people to do his basest bidding\mbox{---}girls,
women! Why in the name of passionate folly \textit{this} one in particular?\ asked
the little man, and scowled at the world, and licked his parched lips
with a blackened tongue. It was the way of the master, and that was
all he knew. Just because she sought to evade him\ldots{}.

His eye caught a whole row of high plumed canes bending in unison,
and then the tails of silk that hung before his neck flapped and fell.
The breeze was growing stronger. Somehow it took the stiff stillness
out of things\mbox{---}and that was well.

{}``Hullo!''\ said the gaunt man.

All three stopped abruptly.

{}``What?''\ asked the master. {}``What?''

{}``Over there,''\ said the gaunt man, pointing up the valley.

{}``What?''

{}``Something coming towards us.''

And as he spoke a yellow animal crested a rise and came bearing down
upon them. It was a big wild dog, coming before the wind, tongue out,
at a steady pace, and running with such an intensity of purpose that
he did not seem to see the horsemen he approached. He ran with his
nose up, following, it was plain, neither scent nor quarry. As he
drew nearer the little man felt for his sword. {}``He's mad,''\ said
the gaunt rider.

{}``Shout!''\ said the little man, and shouted.

The dog came on. Then when the little man's blade was already out,
it swerved aside and went panting by them and past. The eyes of the
little man followed its flight. {}``There was no foam,''\ he said.
For a space the man with the silver-studded bridle stared up the valley.
{}``Oh, come on!''\ he cried at last. {}``What does it matter?''
and jerked his horse into movement again.

The little man left the insoluble mystery of a dog that fled from
nothing but the wind, and lapsed into profound musings on human character.
{}``Come on!''\ he whispered to himself. {}``Why should it be
given to one man to say `Come on!'\ with that stupendous violence
of effect. Always, all his life, the man with the silver bridle has
been saying that. If \textit{I}\ said it\mbox{---}!''\ thought
the little man. But people marvelled when the master was disobeyed
even in the wildest things. This half-caste girl seemed to him, seemed
to every one, mad\mbox{---}blasphemous almost. The little man, by
way of comparison, reflected on the gaunt rider with the scarred lip,
as stalwart as his master, as brave and, indeed, perhaps braver, and
yet for him there was obedience, nothing but to give obedience duly
and stoutly\ldots{}.

Certain sensations of the hands and knees called the little man back
to more immediate things. He became aware of something. He rode up
beside his gaunt fellow. {}``Do you notice the horses?''\ he said
in an undertone.

The gaunt face looked interrogation.

{}``They don't like this wind,''\ said the little man, and dropped
behind as the man with the silver bridle turned upon him.

{}``It's all right,''\ said the gaunt-faced man.

They rode on again for a space in silence. The foremost two rode downcast
upon the trail, the hindmost man watched the haze that crept down
the vastness of the valley, nearer and nearer, and noted how the wind
grew in strength moment by moment. Far away on the left he saw a line
of dark bulks\mbox{---}wild hog perhaps, galloping down the valley,
but of that he said nothing, nor did he remark again upon the uneasiness
of the horses.

And then he saw first one and then a second great white ball, a great
shining white ball like a gigantic head of thistle-down, that drove
before the wind athwart the path. These balls soared high in the air,
and dropped and rose again and caught for a moment, and hurried on
and passed, but at the sight of them the restlessness of the horses
increased.

Then presently he saw that more of these drifting globes\mbox{---}and
then soon very many more\mbox{---}were hurrying towards him down
the valley.

They became aware of a squealing. Athwart the path a huge boar rushed,
turning his head but for one instant to glance at them, and then hurling
on down the valley again. And at that, all three stopped and sat in
their saddles, staring into the thickening haze that was coming upon
them.

{}``If it were not for this thistle-down\mbox{---}''\ began the
leader.

But now a big globe came drifting past within a score of yards of
them. It was really not an even sphere at all, but a vast, soft, ragged,
filmy thing, a sheet gathered by the corners, an aerial jelly-fish,
as it were, but rolling over and over as it advanced, and trailing
long, cobwebby threads and streamers that floated in its wake.

{}``It isn't thistle-down,''\ said the little man.

{}``I don't like the stuff,''\ said the gaunt man.

And they looked at one another.

{}``Curse it!''\ cried the leader. {}``The \textit{\emph{air's}}
\textit{full} of it up there. If it keeps on at this pace long, it
will stop us altogether.''

An instinctive feeling, such as lines out a herd of deer at the approach
of some ambiguous thing, prompted them to turn their horses to the
wind, ride forward for a few paces, and stare at that advancing multitude
of floating masses. They came on before the wind with a sort of smooth
swiftness, rising and falling noiselessly, sinking to earth, rebounding
high, soaring\mbox{---}all with a perfect unanimity, with a still,
deliberate assurance.

Right and left of the horsemen the pioneers of this strange army passed.
At one that rolled along the ground, breaking shapelessly and trailing
out reluctantly into long grappling ribbons and bands, all three horses
began to shy and dance. The master was seized with a sudden unreasonable
impatience. He cursed the drifting globes roundly. {}``Get on!''\ he
cried; {}``get on! What do these things matter? How \textit{can}
they matter? Back to the trail!''\ He fell swearing at his horse
and sawed the bit across its mouth.

He shouted aloud with rage. {}``I will follow that trail, I tell
you!'' he cried. {}``Where is the trail?''

He gripped the bridle of his prancing horse and searched amidst the
grass. A long and clinging thread fell across his face, a grey streamer
dropped about his bridle-arm, some big, active thing with many legs
ran down the back of his head. He looked up to discover one of those
grey masses anchored as it were above him by these things and flapping
out ends as a sail flaps when a boat comes, about\mbox{---}but noiselessly.

He had an impression of many eyes, of a dense crew of squat bodies,
of long, many-jointed limbs hauling at their mooring ropes to bring
the thing down upon him. For a space he stared up, reining in his
prancing horse with the instinct born of years of horsemanship. Then
the flat of a sword smote his back, and a blade flashed overhead and
cut the drifting balloon of spider-web free, and the whole mass lifted
softly and drove clear and away.

{}``Spiders!''\ cried the voice of the gaunt man. {}``The things
are full of big spiders! Look, my lord!''

The man with the silver bridle still followed the mass that drove
away.

{}``Look, my lord!''

The master found himself staring down at a red, smashed thing on the
ground that, in spite of partial obliteration, could still wriggle
unavailing legs. Then when the gaunt man pointed to another mass that
bore down upon them, he drew his sword hastily. Up the valley now
it was like a fog bank torn to rags. He tried to grasp the situation.

{}``Ride for it!''\ the little man was shouting. {}``Ride for
it down the valley.''

What happened then was like the confusion of a battle. The man with
the silver bridle saw the little man go past him slashing furiously
at imaginary cobwebs, saw him cannon into the horse of the gaunt man
and hurl it and its rider to earth. His own horse went a dozen paces
before he could rein it in. Then he looked up to avoid imaginary dangers,
and then back again to see a horse rolling on the ground, the gaunt
man standing and slashing over it at a rent and fluttering mass of
grey that streamed and wrapped about them both. And thick and fast
as thistle-down on waste land on a windy day in July, the cobweb masses
were coming on.

The little man had dismounted, but he dared not release his horse.
He was endeavouring to lug the struggling brute back with the strength
of one arm, while with the other he slashed aimlessly. The tentacles
of a second grey mass had entangled themselves with the struggle,
and this second grey mass came to its moorings, and slowly sank.

The master set his teeth, gripped his bridle, lowered his head, and
spurred his horse forward. The horse on the ground rolled over, there
were blood and moving shapes upon the flanks, and the gaunt man, suddenly
leaving it, ran forward towards his master, perhaps ten paces. His
legs were swathed and encumbered with grey; he made ineffectual movements
with his sword. Grey streamers waved from him; there was a thin veil
of grey across his face. With his left hand he beat at something on
his body, and suddenly he stumbled and fell. He struggled to rise,
and fell again, and suddenly, horribly, began to howl, {}``Oh\mbox{---}ohoo,
ohooh!''

The master could see the great spiders upon him, and others upon the
ground.

As he strove to force his horse nearer to this gesticulating, screaming
grey object that struggled up and down, there came a clatter of hoofs,
and the little man, in act of mounting, swordless, balanced on his
belly athwart the white horse, and clutching its mane, whirled past.
And again a clinging thread of grey gossamer swept across the master's
face. All about him, and over him, it seemed this drifting, noiseless
cobweb circled and drew nearer him\ldots{}.

To the day of his death he never knew just how the event of that moment
happened. Did he, indeed, turn his horse, or did it really of its
own accord stampede after its fellow? Suffice it that in another second
he was galloping full tilt down the valley with his sword whirling
furiously overhead. And all about him on the quickening breeze, the
spiders'\ airships, their air bundles and air sheets, seemed to him
to hurry in a conscious pursuit.

Clatter, clatter, thud, thud\mbox{---}the man with the silver bridle
rode, heedless of his direction, with his fearful face looking up
now right, now left, and his sword arm ready to slash. And a few hundred
yards ahead of him, with a tail of torn cobweb trailing behind him,
rode the little man on the white horse, still but imperfectly in the
saddle. The reeds bent before them, the wind blew fresh and strong,
over his shoulder the master could see the webs hurrying to overtake\ldots{}.

He was so intent to escape the spiders'\ webs that only as his horse
gathered together for a leap did he realise the ravine ahead. And
then he reaIised it only to misunderstand and interfere. He was leaning
forward on his horse's neck and sat up and back all too late.

But if in his excitement he had failed to leap, at any rate he had
not forgotten how to fall. He was horseman again in mid-air. He came
off clear with a mere bruise upon his shoulder, and his horse rolled,
kicking spasmodic legs, and lay still. But the master's sword drove
its point into the hard soil, and snapped clean across, as though
Chance refused him any longer as her Knight, and the splintered end
missed his face by an inch or so.

He was on his feet in a moment, breathlessly scanning the onrushing
spider-webs. For a moment he was minded to run, and then thought of
the ravine, and turned back. He ran aside once to dodge one drifting
terror, and then he was swiftly clambering down the precipitous sides,
and out of the touch of the gale.

There under the lee of the dry torrent's steeper banks he might crouch,
and watch these strange, grey masses pass and pass in safety till
the wind fell, and it became possible to escape. And there for a long
time he crouched, watching the strange, grey, ragged masses trail
their streamers across his narrowed sky.

Once a stray spider fell into the ravine close beside him\mbox{---}a
full foot it measured from leg to leg, and its body was half a man's
hand\mbox{---}and after he had watched its monstrous alacrity of
search and escape for a little while, and tempted it to bite his broken
sword, he lifted up his iron-heeled boot and smashed it into a pulp.
He swore as he did so, and for a time sought up and down for another.

Then presently, when he was surer these spider swarms could not drop
into the ravine, he found a place where he could sit down, and sat
and fell into deep thought and began after his manner to gnaw his
knuckles and bite his nails. And from this he was moved by the coming
of the man with the white horse.

He heard him long before he saw him, as a clattering of hoofs, stumbling
footsteps, and a reassuring voice. Then the little man appeared, a
rueful figure, still with a tail of white cobweb trailing behind him.
They approached each other without speaking, without a salutation.
The little man was fatigued and shamed to the pitch of hopeless bitterness,
and came to a stop at last, face to face with his seated master. The
latter winced a little under his dependant's eye. {}``Well?''\ he
said at last, with no pretence of authority.

{}``You left him?''

{}``My horse bolted.''

{}``I know. So did mine.''

He laughed at his master mirthlessly.

{}``I say my horse bolted,''\ said the man who once had a silver-studded
bridle.

{}``Cowards both,''\ said the little man.

The other gnawed his knuckle through some meditative moments, with
his eye on his inferior.

{}``Don't call me a coward,''\ he said at length.

{}``You are a coward like myself.''

{}``A coward possibly. There is a limit beyond which every man must
fear. That I have learnt at last. But not like yourself. That is where
the difference comes in.''

{}``I never could have dreamt you would have left him. He saved your
life two minutes before\ldots{}. Why are you our lord?''

The master gnawed his knuckles again, and his countenance was dark.

{}``No man calls me a coward,''\ he said. {}``No. A broken sword
is better than none\ldots{}. One spavined white horse cannot be expected
to carry two men a four days'\ journey. I hate white horses, but
this time it cannot be helped. You begin to understand me?\ldots{}
I perceive that you are minded, on the strength of what you have seen
and fancy, to taint my reputation. It is men of your sort who unmake
kings. Besides which\mbox{---}I never liked you.''

{}``My lord!''\ said the little man.

{}``No,''\ said the master. {}``\textit{No}!''

He stood up sharply as the little man moved. For a minute perhaps
they faced one another. Overhead the spiders'\ balls went driving.
There was a quick movement among the pebbles; a running of feet, a
cry of despair, a gasp and a blow\ldots{}.

Towards nightfall the wind fell. The sun set in a calm serenity, and
the man who had once possessed the silver bridle came at last very
cautiously and by an easy slope out of the ravine again; but now he
led the white horse that once belonged to the little man. He would
have gone back to his horse to get his silver-mounted bridle again,
but he feared night and a quickening breeze might still find him in
the valley, and besides he disliked greatly to think he might discover
his horse all swathed in cobwebs and perhaps unpleasantly eaten.

And as he thought of those cobwebs and of all the dangers he had been
through, and the manner in which he had been preserved that day, his
hand sought a little reliquary that hung about his neck, and he clasped
it for a moment with heartfelt gratitude. As he did so his eyes went
across the valley.

{}``I was hot with passion,''\ he said, {}``and now she has met
her reward. They also, no doubt\mbox{---}''

And behold! Far away out of the wooded slopes across the valley, but
in the clearness of the sunset distinct and unmistakable, he saw a
little spire of smoke.

At that his expression of serene resignation changed to an amazed
anger. Smoke? He turned the head of the white horse about, and hesitated.
And as he did so a little rustle of air went through the grass about
him. Far away upon some reeds swayed a tattered sheet of grey. He
looked at the cobwebs; he looked at the smoke.

{}``Perhaps, after all, it is not them,''\ he said at last.

But he knew better.

After he had stared at the smoke for some time, he mounted the white
horse.

As he rode, he picked his way amidst stranded masses of web. For some
reason there were many dead spiders on the ground, and those that
lived feasted guiltily on their fellows. At the sound of his horse's
hoofs they fled.

Their time had passed. From the ground without either a wind to carry
them or a winding sheet ready, these things, for all their poison,
could do him little evil. He flicked with his belt at those he fancied
came too near. Once, where a number ran together over a bare place,
he was minded to dismount and trample them with his boots, but this
impulse he overcame. Ever and again he turned in his saddle, and looked
back at the smoke.

{}``Spiders,''\ he muttered over and over again. {}``Spiders!
Well, well\ldots{}. The next time I must spin a web.''


\chapter*{\raggedright THE TRUTH ABOUT PYECRAFT}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{THE TRUTH ABOUT PYECRAFT}

\markboth{TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM}{THE TRUTH ABOUT PYECRAFT}

He sits not a dozen yards away. If I glance over my shoulder I can
see him. And if I catch his eye\mbox{---}and usually I catch his
eye\mbox{---} it meets me with an expression.

It is mainly an imploring look\mbox{---}and yet with suspicion in
it.

Confound his suspicion! If I wanted to tell on him I should have told
long ago. I don't tell and I don't tell, and he ought to feel at his
ease. As if anything so gross and fat as he could feel at ease! Who
would believe me if I did tell?

Poor old Pyecraft! Great, uneasy jelly of substance! The fattest clubman
in London.

He sits at one of the little club tables in the huge bay by the fire,
stuffing. What is he stuffing? I glance judiciously and catch him
biting at a round of hot buttered tea-cake, with his eyes on me. Confound
him!\mbox{---}with his eyes on me!

That settles it, Pyecraft! Since you \textit{will} be abject, since
you \textit{will} behave as though I was not a man of honour, here,
right under your embedded eyes, I write the thing down\mbox{---}the
plain truth about Pyecraft. The man I helped, the man I shielded,
and who has requited me by making my club unendurable, absolutely
unendurable, with his liquid appeal, with the perpetual {}``don't
tell''\ of his looks.

And, besides, why does he keep on eternally eating?

Well, here goes for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth!

Pyecraft\mbox{---}. I made the acquaintance of Pyecraft in this
very smoking-room. I was a young, nervous new member, and he saw it.
I was sitting all alone, wishing I knew more of the members, and suddenly
he came, a great rolling front of chins and abdomina, towards me,
and grunted and sat down in a chair close by me and wheezed for a
space, and scraped for a space with a match and lit a cigar, and then
addressed me. I forget what he said\mbox{---}something about the
matches not lighting properly, and afterwards as he talked he kept
stopping the waiters one by one as they went by, and telling them
about the matches in that thin, fluty voice he has. But, anyhow, it
was in some such way we began our talking.

He talked about various things and came round to games. And thence
to my figure and complexion. {}``\textit{You} ought to be a good
cricketer,'' he said. I suppose I am slender, slender to what some
people would call lean, and I suppose I am rather dark, still\mbox{---}I
am not ashamed of having a Hindu great-grandmother, but, for all that,
I don't want casual strangers to see through me at a glance to \textit{her}.
So that I was set against Pyecraft from the beginning.

But he only talked about me in order to get to himself.

{}``I expect,''\ he said, {}``you take no more exercise than I
do, and probably you eat no less.''\ (Like all excessively obese
people he fancied he ate nothing.)\ {}``Yet,''\mbox{---}and he
smiled an oblique smile\mbox{---}{}``we differ.''

And then he began to talk about his fatness and his fatness; all he
did for his fatness and all he was going to do for his fatness; what
people had advised him to do for his fatness and what he had heard
of people doing for fatness similar to his. {}``\emph{A priori},''\ he
said, {}``one would think a question of nutrition could be answered
by dietary and a question of assimilation by drugs.'' It was stifling.
It was dumpling talk. It made me feel swelled to hear him.

One stands that sort of thing once in a way at a club, but a time
came when I fancied I was standing too much. He took to me altogether
too conspicuously. I could never go into the smoking-room but he would
come wallowing towards me, and sometimes he came and gormandised round
and about me while I had my lunch. He seemed at times almost to be
clinging to me. He was a bore, but not so fearful a bore as to be
limited to me; and from the first there was something in his manner\mbox{---}almost
as though he knew, almost as though he penetrated to the fact that
I \textit{might}\mbox{---}that there was a remote, exceptional chance
in me that no one else presented.

{}``I'd give anything to get it down,''\ he would say\mbox{---}{}``anything,''
and peer at me over his vast cheeks and pant.

Poor old Pyecraft! He has just gonged, no doubt to order another buttered
tea-cake!

He came to the actual thing one day. {}``Our Pharmacop\oe{}ia,''\ he
said, {}``our Western Pharmacop\oe{}ia, is anything but the last
word of medical science. In the East, I've been told\mbox{---}''

He stopped and stared at me. It was like being at an aquarium.

I was quite suddenly angry with him. {}``Look here,''\ I said,
{}``who told you about my great-grandmother's recipes?''

{}``Well,''\ he fenced.

{}``Every time we've met for a week,''\ I said, {}``and we've
met pretty often\mbox{---}you've given me a broad hint or so about
that little secret of mine.''

{}``Well,''\ he said, {}``now the cat's out of the bag, I'll admit,
yes, it is so. I had it\mbox{---}''

{}``From Pattison?''

{}``Indirectly,''\ he said, which I believe was lying, {}``yes.''

{}``Pattison,''\ I said, {}``took that stuff at his own risk.''

He pursed his mouth and bowed.

{}``My great-grandmother's recipes,''\ I said, {}``are queer things
to handle. My father was near making me promise\mbox{---}''

{}``He didn't?''

{}``No. But he warned me. He himself used one\mbox{---}once.''

{}``Ah!\ldots{} But do you think\mbox{---}? Sup\-pose\mbox{---}suppose
there did happen to be one\mbox{---}''

{}``The things are curious documents,''\ I said. {}``Even the
smell of 'em\ldots{}. No!''

But after going so far Pyecraft was resolved I should go farther.
I was always a little afraid if I tried his patience too much he would
fall on me suddenly and smother me. I own I was weak. But I was also
annoyed with Pyecraft. I had got to that state of feeling for him
that disposed me to say, {}``Well, \textit{take} the risk!''\ The
little affair of Pattison to which I have alluded was a different
matter altogether. What it was doesn't concern us now, but I knew,
anyhow, that the particular recipe I used then was safe. The rest
I didn't know so much about, and, on the whole, I was inclined to
doubt their safety pretty completely.

Yet even if Pyecraft got poisoned\mbox{---}

I must confess the poisoning of Pyecraft struck me as an immense undertaking.

That evening I took that queer, odd-scented sandalwood box out of
my safe and turned the rustling skins over. The gentleman who wrote
the recipes for my great-grandmother evidently had a weakness for
skins of a miscellaneous origin, and his handwriting was cramped to
the last degree. Some of the things are quite unreadable to me\mbox{---}though
my family, with its Indian Civil Service associations, has kept up
a knowledge of Hindustani from generation to generation\mbox{---}and
none are absolutely plain sailing. But I found the one that I knew
was there soon enough, and sat on the floor by my safe for some time
looking at it.

{}``Look here,''\ said I to Pyecraft next day, and snatched the
slip away from his eager grasp.

{}``So far as I\mbox{---}can make it out, this is a recipe for
Loss of Weight. (\char`\"{}Ah!''\ said Pyecraft.)\ I'm not absolutely
sure, but I think it's that. And if you take my advice you'll leave
it alone. Because, you know\mbox{---}I blacken my blood in your
interest, Pyecraft\mbox{---}my ancestors on that side were, so far
as I can gather, a jolly queer lot. See?''

{}``Let me try it,''\ said Pyecraft.

I leant back in my chair. My imagination made one mighty effort and
fell flat within me. {}``What in Heaven's name, Pyecraft,''\ I
asked, {}``do you think you'll look like when you get thin?''

He was impervious to reason. I made him promise never to say a word
to me about his disgusting fatness again whatever happened\mbox{---}never,
and then I handed him that little piece of skin.

{}``It's nasty stuff,''\ I said.

{}``No matter,''\ he said, and took it.

He goggled at it. {}``But\mbox{---}but\mbox{---}''\ he said.

He had just discovered that it wasn't English.

{}``To the best of my ability,''\ I said, {}``I will do you a
translation.''

I did my best. After that we didn't speak for a fortnight. Whenever
he approached me I frowned and motioned him away, and he respected
our compact, but at the end of a fortnight he was as fat as ever.
And then he got a word in.

{}``I must speak,''\ he said. {}``It isn't fair. There's something
wrong. It's done me no good. You're not doing your great-grandmother
justice.''

{}``Where's the recipe?''

He produced it gingerly from his pocket-book.

I ran my eye over the items. {}``Was the egg addled?''\ I asked.

{}``No. Ought it to have been?''

{}``That,''\ I said, {}``goes without saying in all my poor dear
great-grandmother's recipes. When condition or quality is not specified
you must get the worst. She was drastic or nothing\ldots{}. And there's
one or two possible alternatives to some of these other things. You
got \textit{fresh} rattlesnake venom.''

{}``I got a rattlesnake from Jamrach's. It cost\mbox{---}it cost\mbox{---}''

{}``That's your affair, anyhow. This last item\mbox{---}''

{}``I know a man who\mbox{---}''

{}``Yes. H'm. Well, I'll write the alternatives down. So far as I
know the language, the spelling of this recipe is particularly atrocious.
By-the-bye, dog here probably means pariah dog.''

For a month after that I saw Pyecraft constantly at the club and as
fat and anxious as ever. He kept our treaty, but at times he broke
the spirit of it by shaking his head despondently. Then one day in
the cloakroom he said, {}``Your great-grandmother\mbox{---}''

{}``Not a word against her,''\ I said; and he held his peace.

I could have fancied he had desisted, and I saw him one day talking
to three new members about his fatness as though he was in search
of other recipes. And then, quite unexpectedly, his telegram came.

{}``Mr.\ Formalyn!''\ bawled a page-boy under my nose, and I took
the telegram and opened it at once.

{}``For Heaven's sake come.\mbox{---}Pyecraft.''

{}``H'm,''\ said I, and to tell the truth I was so pleased at the
rehabilitation of my great grandmother's reputation this evidently
promised that I made a most excellent lunch.

I got Pyecraft's address from the hall porter. Pyecraft inhabited
the upper half of a house in Bloomsbury, and I went there so soon
as I had done my coffee and \textit{Trappistine}. I did not wait to
finish my cigar.

{}``Mr.\ Pyecraft?''\ said I, at the front door.

They believed he was ill; he hadn't been out for two days.

{}``He expects me,''\ said I, and they sent me up.

I rang the bell at the lattice-door upon the landing.

{}``He shouldn't have tried it, anyhow,''\ I said to myself. {}``A
man who eats like a pig ought to look like a pig.''

An obviously worthy woman, with an anxious face and a carelessly placed
cap, came and surveyed me through the lattice.

I gave my name and she let me in in a dubious fashion.

{}``Well?''\ said I, as we stood together inside Pyecraft's piece
of the landing.

{}``'E said you was to come in if you came,''\ she said, and regarded
me, making no motion to show me anywhere. And then, confidentially,
{}``'E's locked in, sir.''

{}``Locked in?''

{}``Locked himself in yesterday morning and 'asn't let any one in
since, sir. And ever and again \textit{swearing}. Oh, my!''

I stared at the door she indicated by her glances.

{}``In there?''\ I said.

{}``Yes, sir.''

{}``What's up?''

She shook her head sadly, {}``'E keeps on calling for vittles, sir.
\emph{'eavy} vittles 'e wants. I get 'im what I can. Pork 'e's 'ad,
sooit puddin', sossiges, noo bread. Everythink like that. Left outside,
if you please, and me go away. 'E's eatin', sir, somethink \textit{awful}.''

There came a piping bawl from inside the door: {}``That Formalyn?''

{}``That you, Pyecraft?''\ I shouted, and went and banged the door.

{}``Tell her to go away.''

I did.

Then I could hear a curious pattering upon the door, almost like some
one feeling for the handle in the dark, and Pyecraft's familiar grunts.

{}``It's all right,''\ I said, {}``she's gone.''

But for a long time the door didn't open.

I heard the key turn. Then Pyecraft's voice said, {}``Come in.''

I turned the handle and opened the door. Naturally I expected to see
Pyecraft.

Well, you know, he wasn't there!

I never had such a shock in my life. There was his sitting-room in
a state of untidy disorder, plates and dishes among the books and
writing things, and several chairs overturned, but Pyecraft\mbox{---}

{}``It's all right, o'\ man; shut the door,''\ he said, and then
I discovered him.

There he was right up close to the cornice in the corner by the door,
as though some one had glued him to the ceiling. His face was anxious
and angry. He panted and gesticulated. {}``Shut the door,''\ he
said. {}``If that woman gets hold of it\mbox{---}''

I shut the door, and went and stood away from him and stared.

{}``If anything gives way and you tumble down,''\ I said, {}``you'll
break your neck, Pyecraft.''

{}``I wish I could,''\ he wheezed.

{}``A man of your age and weight getting up to kiddish gymnastics\mbox{---}''

{}``Don't,''\ he said, and looked agonised.

{}``I'll tell you,''\ he said, and gesticulated.

{}``How the deuce,''\ said I, {}``are you holding on up there?''

And then abruptly I realised that he was not holding on at all, that
he was floating up there\mbox{---}just as a gas-filled bladder might
have floated in the same position. He began a struggle to thrust himself
away from the ceiling and to clamber down the wall to me. {}``It's
that prescription,''\ he panted, as he did so. {}``Your great-\textit{gran}\mbox{---}''

He took hold of a framed engraving rather carelessly as he spoke and
it gave way, and he flew back to the ceiling again, while the picture
smashed onto the sofa. Bump he went against the ceiling, and I knew
then why he was all over white on the more salient curves and angles
of his person. He tried again more carefully, coming down by way of
the mantel.

It was really a most extraordinary spectacle, that great, fat, apoplectic-looking
man upside down and trying to get from the ceiling to the floor. {}``That
prescription,''\ he said. {}``Too successful.''

{}``How?''

{}``Loss of weight\mbox{---}almost complete.''

And then, of course, I understood.

{}``By Jove, Pyecraft,''\ said I, {}``what you wanted was a cure
for fatness! But you always called it weight. You would call it weight.''

Somehow I was extremely delighted. I quite liked Pyecraft for the
time. {}``Let me help you!''\ I said, and took his hand and pulled
him down. He kicked about, trying to get a foothold somewhere. It
was very like holding a flag on a windy day.

{}``That table,''\ he said, pointing, {}``is solid mahogany and
very heavy. If you can put me under that\mbox{---}-''

I did, and there he wallowed about like a captive balloon, while I
stood on his hearthrug and talked to him.

I lit a cigar. {}``Tell me,''\ I said, {}``what happened?''

{}``I took it,''\ he said.

{}``How did it taste?''

{}``Oh, \textit{beastly}!''

I should fancy they all did. Whether one regards the ingredients or
the probable compound or the possible results, almost all of my great-grandmother's
remedies appear to me at least to be extraordinarily uninviting. For
my own part\mbox{---}

{}``I took a little sip first.''

{}``Yes?''

{}``And as I felt lighter and better after an hour, I decided to
take the draught.''

{}``My dear Pyecraft!''

{}``I held my nose,''\ he explained. {}``And then I kept on getting
lighter and lighter\mbox{---}and helpless, you know.''

He gave way to a sudden burst of passion. {}``What the goodness am
I to \textit{do}?''\ he said.

{}``There's one thing pretty evident,''\ I said, {}``that you
mustn't do. If you go out of doors, you'll go up and up.'' I waved
an arm upward. {}``They'd have to send Santos-Dumont after you to
bring you down again.''

{}``I suppose it will wear off?''

I shook my head. {}``I don't think you can count on that,''\ I
said.

And then there was another burst of passion, and he kicked out at
adjacent chairs and banged the floor. He behaved just as I should
have expected a great, fat, self-indulgent man to behave under trying
circumstances\mbox{---}that is to say, very badly. He spoke of me
and my great-grandmother with an utter want of discretion.

{}``I never asked you to take the stuff,''\ I said.

And generously disregarding the insults he was putting upon me, I
sat down in his armchair and began to talk to him in a sober, friendly
fashion.

I pointed out to him that this was a trouble he had brought upon himself,
and that it had almost an air of poetical justice. He had eaten too
much. This he disputed, and for a time we argued the point.

He became noisy and violent, so I desisted from this aspect of his
lesson. {}``And then,''\ said I, {}``you committed the sin of
euphuism. You called it not Fat, which is just and inglorious, but
Weight. You\mbox{---}''

He interrupted to say he recognised all that. What was he to \textit{do}?

I suggested he should adapt himself to his new conditions. So we came
to the really sensible part of the business. I suggested that it would
not be difficult for him to learn to walk about on the ceiling with
his hands\mbox{---}

{}``I can't sleep,''\ he said.

But that was no great difficulty. It was quite possible, I pointed
out, to make a shake-up under a wire mattress, fasten the under things
on with tapes, and have a blanket, sheet, and coverlet to button at
the side. He would have to confide in his housekeeper, I said; and
after some squabbling he agreed to that.\ (Afterwards it was quite
delightful to see the beautifully matter-of-fact way with which the
good lady took all these amazing inversions.)\ He could have a library
ladder in his room, and all his meals could be laid on the top of
his bookcase. We also hit on an ingenious device by which he could
get to the floor whenever he wanted, which was simply to put the British
Encyclop\ae{}dia (tenth edition)\ on the top of his open shelves.
He just pulled out a couple of volumes and held on, and down he came.
And we agreed there must be iron staples along the skirting, so that
he could cling to those whenever he wanted to get about the room on
the lower level.

As we got on with the thing I found myself almost keenly interested.
It was I who called in the housekeeper and broke matters to her, and
it was I chiefly who fixed up the inverted bed. In fact, I spent two
whole days at his flat. I am a handy, interfering sort of man with
a screw-driver, and I made all sorts of ingenious adaptations for
him\mbox{---}ran a wire to bring his bells within reach, turned
all his electric lights up instead of down, and so on. The whole affair
was extremely curious and interesting to me, and it was delightful
to think of Pyecraft like some great, fat blow-fly, crawling about
on his ceiling and clambering round the lintels of his doors from
one room to another, and never, never, never coming to the club any
more\ldots{}.

Then, you know, my fatal ingenuity got the better of me. I was sitting
by his fire drinking his whisky, and he was up in his favourite corner
by the cornice, tacking a Turkey carpet to the ceiling, when the idea
struck me. {}``By Jove, Pyecraft!''\ I said, {}``all this is totally
unnecessary.''

And before I could calculate the complete consequences of my notion
I blurted it out. {}``Lead underclothing,''\ said I, and the mischief
was done.

Pyecraft received the thing almost in tears. {}``To be right ways
up again\mbox{---}''\ he said. I gave him the whole secret before
I saw where it would take me. {}``Buy sheet lead,''\ I said, {}``stamp
it into discs. Sew 'em all over your underclothes until you have enough.
Have lead-soled boots, carry a bag of solid lead, and the thing is
done! Instead of being a prisoner here you may go abroad again, Pyecraft;
you may travel\mbox{---}''

A still happier idea came to me. {}``You need never fear a shipwreck.
All you need do is just slip off some or all of your clothes, take
the necessary amount of luggage in your hand, and float up in the
air\mbox{---}''

In his emotion he dropped the tack-hammer within an ace of my head.
{}``By Jove!''\ he said, {}``I shall be able to come back to the
club again.''

The thing pulled me up short. {}``By Jove!''\ I said faintly. {}``Yes.
Of course\mbox{---}you will.''

He did. He does. There he sits behind me now, stuffing\mbox{---}as
I live!\mbox{---}a third go of buttered tea-cake. And no one in
the whole world knows\mbox{---}except his housekeeper and me\mbox{---}that
he weighs practically nothing; that he is a mere boring mass of assimilatory
matter, mere clouds in clothing, \textit{niente}, \textit{nefas},
the most inconsiderable of men. There he sits watching until I have
done this writing. Then, if he can, he will waylay me. He will come
billowing up to me\ldots{}.

He will tell me over again all about it, how it feels, how it doesn't
feel, how he sometimes hopes it is passing off a little. And always
somewhere in that fat, abundant discourse he will say, {}``The secret's
keeping, eh? If any one knew of it\mbox{---}I should be so ashamed\ldots{}.
Makes a fellow look such a fool, you know. Crawling about on a ceiling
and all that\ldots{}.''

And now to elude Pyecraft, occupying, as he does, an admirable strategic
position between me and the door.


\chapter*{\raggedright MR.\ SKELMERSDALE IN FAIRYLAND}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{MR. SKELMERSDALE\\
IN FAIRYLAND}

\markboth{TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM}{MR. SKELMERSDALE IN FAIRYLAND}

{}``There's a man in that shop,''\ said the Doctor, {}``who has
been in Fairyland.''

{}``Nonsense!''\ I said, and stared back at the shop. It was the
usual village shop, post-office, telegraph wire on its brow, zinc
pans and brushes outside, boots, shirtings, and potted meats in the
window. {}``Tell me about it,''\ I said, after a pause.

{}``\textit{I}\ don't know,''\ said the Doctor. {}``He's an ordinary
sort of lout\mbox{---}Skelmersdale is his name. But everybody about
here believes it like Bible truth.''

I reverted presently to the topic.

{}``I know nothing about it,''\ said the Doctor, {}``and I don't
\textit{want} to know. I attended him for a broken finger\mbox{---}Married
and Single cricket match\mbox{---}and that's when I struck the nonsense.
That's all. But it shows you the sort of stuff I have to deal with,
anyhow, eh? Nice to get modern sanitary ideas into a people like this!''

{}``Very,''\ I said in a mildly sympathetic tone, and he went on
to tell me about that business of the Bonham drain. Things of that
kind, I observe, are apt to weigh on the minds of Medical Officers
of Health. I was as sympathetic as I knew how, and when he called
the Bonham people {}``asses,''\ I said they were {}``thundering
asses,''\ but even that did not allay him.

Afterwards, later in the summer, an urgent desire to seclude myself,
while finishing my chapter on Spiritual Pathology\mbox{---}it was
really, I believe, stiffer to write than it is to read\mbox{---}took
me to Bignor. I lodged at a farmhouse, and presently found myself
outside that little general shop again, in search of tobacco. {}``Skelmersdale,''
said I to myself at the sight of it, and went in.

I was served by a short, but shapely, young man, with a fair downy
complexion, good, small teeth, blue eyes, and a languid manner. I
scrutinised him curiously. Except for a touch of melancholy in his
expression, he was nothing out of the common. He was in the shirt-sleeves
and tucked-up apron of his trade, and a pencil was thrust behind his
inoffensive ear. Athwart his black waistcoat was a gold chain, from
which dangled a bent guinea.

{}``Nothing more to-day, sir?''\ he inquired. He leant forward
over my bill as he spoke.

{}``Are you Mr.\ Skelmersdale?''\ said I.

{}``I am, sir,''\ he said, without looking up.

{}``Is it true that you have been in Fairyland?''

He looked up at me for a moment with wrinkled brows, with an aggrieved,
exasperated face. {}``O \textit{shut} it!\ \char`\"{}\ he said,
and, after a moment of hostility, eye to eye, he went on adding up
my bill. {}``Four, six and a half,''\ he said, after a pause. {}``Thank
you, Sir.''

So, unpropitiously, my acquaintance with Mr.\ Skelmersdale began.

Well, I got from that to con\-fi\-d\-ence\mbox{---}through a
series of toilsome ef\-f\-orts. I picked him up again in the Village
Room, where of a night I went to play billiards after my supper, and
mitigate the extreme seclusion from my kind that was so helpful to
work during the day. I contrived to play with him and afterwards to
talk with him. I found the one subject to avoid was Fairyland. On
everything else he was open and amiable in a commonplace sort of way,
but on that he had been worried\mbox{---}it was a manifest taboo.
Only once in the room did I hear the slightest allusion to his experience
in his presence, and that was by a cross-grained farm hand who was
losing to him. Skelmersdale had run a break into double figures, which,
by the Bignor standards, was uncommonly good play. {}``Steady on!''\ said
his adversary. {}``None of your fairy flukes!''

Skelmersdale stared at him for a moment, cue in hand, then flung it
down and walked out of the room.

{}``Why can't you leave 'im alone?''\ said a respectable elder
who had been enjoying the game, and in the general murmur of disapproval
the grin of satisfied wit faded from the ploughboy's face.

I scented my opportunity. {}``What's this joke,''\ said I, {}``about
Fairyland?''

{}``'Tain't no joke about Fairyland, not to young Skelmersdale,''\ said
the respectable elder, drinking. A little man with rosy cheeks was
more communicative. {}``They \textit{do} say, sir,''\ he said,
{}``that they took him into Aldington Knoll an'\ kep'\ him there
a matter of three weeks.''

And with that the gathering was well under weigh. Once one sheep had
started, others were ready enough to follow, and in a little time
I had at least the exterior aspect of the Skelmersdale affair. Formerly,
before he came to Bignor, he had been in that very similar little
shop at Aldington Corner, and there whatever it was did happen had
taken place. The story was clear that he had stayed out late one night
on the Knoll and vanished for three weeks from the sight of men, and
had returned with {}``his cuffs as clean as when he started,'' and
his pockets full of dust and ashes. He returned in a state of moody
wretchedness that only slowly passed away, and for many days he would
give no account of where it was he had been. The girl he was engaged
to at Clapton Hill tried to get it out of him, and threw him over
partly because he refused, and partly because, as she said, he fairly
gave her the {}``'ump.'' And then when, some time after, he let
out to some one carelessly that he had been in Fairyland and wanted
to go back, and when the thing spread and the simple badinage of the
countryside came into play, he threw up his situation abruptly, and
came to Bignor to get out of the fuss. But as to what had happened
in Fairyland none of these people knew. There the gathering in the
Village Room went to pieces like a pack at fault. One said this, and
another said that.

Their air in dealing with this marvel was ostensibly critical and
sceptical, but I could see a considerable amount of belief showing
through their guarded qualifications. I took a line of intelligent
interest, tinged with a reasonable doubt of the whole story.

{}``If Fairyland's inside Aldington Knoll,''\ I said, {}``why
don't you dig it out?''

{}``That's what I says,''\ said the young ploughboy.

{}``There's a-many have tried to dig on Aldington Knoll,''\ said
the respectable elder, solemnly, {}``one time and another. But there's
none as goes about to-day to tell what they got by digging.''

The unanimity of vague belief that surrounded me was rather impressive;
I felt there must surely be \textit{something} at the root of so much
conviction, and the already pretty keen curiosity I felt about the
real facts of the case was distinctly whetted. If these real facts
were to be got from any one, they were to be got from Skelmersdale
himself; and I set myself, therefore, still more assiduously to efface
the first bad impression I had made and win his confidence to the
pitch of voluntary speech. In that endeavour I had a social advantage.
Being a person of affability and no apparent employment, and wearing
\textit{\emph{tweeds}} and knickerbockers, I was naturally classed
as an artist in Bignor, and in the remarkable code of social precedence
prevalent in Bignor an artist ranks considerably higher than a grocer's
assistant. Skelmersdale, like too many of his class, is something
of a snob; he had told me to {}``shut it,''\ only under sudden,
excessive provocation, and with, I am certain, a subsequent repentance;
he was, I knew, quite glad to be seen walking about the village with
me. In due course, he accepted the proposal of a pipe and whisky in
my rooms readily enough, and there, scenting by some happy instinct
that there was trouble of the heart in this, and knowing that confidences
beget confidences, I plied him with much of interest and suggestion
from my real and fictitious past. And it was after the third whisky
of the third visit of that sort, if I remember rightly, that \emph{\`{a}
propos} of some artless expansion of a little affair that had touched
and left me in my teens, that he did at last, of his own free will
and motion, break the ice. {}``It was like that with me,''\ he
said, {}``over there at Aldington. It's just that that's so rum.
First I didn't care a bit and it was all her, and afterwards, when
it was too late, it was, in a manner of speaking, all me.''

I forbore to jump upon this allusion, and so he presently threw out
another, and in a little while he was making it as plain as daylight
that the one thing he wanted to talk about now was this Fairyland
adventure he had sat tight upon for so long. You see, I'd done the
trick with him, and from being just another half-incredulous, would-be
facetious stranger, I had, by all my wealth of shameless self-exposure,
become the possible confidant. He had been bitten by the desire to
show that he, too, had lived and felt many things, and the fever was
upon him.

He was certainly confoundedly allusive at first, and my eagerness
to clear him up with a few precise questions was only equalled and
controlled by my anxiety not to get to this sort of thing too soon.
But in another meeting or so the basis of confidence was complete;
and from first to last I think I got most of the items and aspects\mbox{---}indeed,
I got quite a number of times over almost everything that Mr.\ Skelmersdale,
with his very limited powers of narration, will ever be able to tell.
And so I come to the story of his adventure, and I piece it all together
again. Whether it really happened, whether he imagined it or dreamt
it, or fell upon it in some strange hallucinatory trance, I do not
profess to say. But that he invented it I will not for one moment
entertain. The man simply and honestly believes the thing happened
as he says it happened; he is transparently incapable of any lie so
elaborate and sustained, and in the belief of the simple, yet often
keenly penetrating, rustic minds about him I find a very strong confirmation
of his sincerity. He believes\mbox{---}and nobody can produce any
positive fact to falsify his belief. As for me, with this much of
endorsement, I transmit his story\mbox{---}I am a little old now
to justify or explain.

He says he went to sleep on Aldington Knoll about ten o'clock one
night\mbox{---}it was quite possibly Midsummer night, though he
has never thought of the date, and he cannot be sure within a week
or so\mbox{---}and it was a fine night and windless, with a rising
moon. I have been at the pains to visit this Knoll thrice since his
story grew up under my persuasions, and once I went there in the twilight
summer moonrise on what was, perhaps, a similar night to that of his
adventure. Jupiter was great and splendid above the moon, and in the
north and northwest the sky was green and vividly bright over the
sunken sun. The Knoll stands out bare and bleak under the sky, but
surrounded at a little distance by dark thickets, and as I went up
towards it there was a mighty starting and scampering of ghostly or
quite invisible rabbits. Just over the crown of the Knoll, but nowhere
else, was a multitudinous thin trumpeting of midges. The Knoll is,
I believe, an artificial mound, the tumulus of some great prehistoric
chieftain, and surely no man ever chose a more spacious prospect for
a sepulchre. Eastward one sees along the hills to Hythe, and thence
across the Channel to where, thirty miles and more perhaps, away,
the great white lights by Gris Nez and Boulogne wink and pass and
shine. Westward lies the whole tumbled valley of the Weald, visible
as far as Hindhead and Leith Hill, and the valley of the Stour opens
the Downs in the north to interminable hills beyond Wye. All Romney
Marsh lies southward at one's feet, Dymchurch and Romney and Lydd,
Hastings and its hill are in the middle distance, and the hills multiply
vaguely far beyond where Eastbourne rolls up to Beachy Head.

And out upon all this it was that Skelmersdale wandered, being troubled
in his earlier love affair, and as he says, {}``not caring \textit{where}
he went.'' And there he sat down to think it over, and so, sulking
and grieving, was overtaken by sleep. And so he fell into the fairies'\ power.

The quarrel that had upset him was some trivial matter enough between
himself and the girl at Clapton Hill to whom he was engaged. She was
a farmer's daughter, said Skelmersdale, and {}``very respectable,''
and no doubt an excellent match for him; but both girl and lover were
very young and with just that mutual jealousy, that intolerantly keen
edge of criticism, that irrational hunger for a beautiful perfection,
that life and wisdom do presently and most mercifully dull. What the
precise matter of quarrel was I have no idea. She may have said she
liked men in gaiters when he hadn't any gaiters on, or he may have
said he liked her better in a different sort of hat, but however it
began, it got by a series of clumsy stages to bitterness and tears.
She no doubt got tearful and smeary, and he grew dusty and drooping,
and she parted with invidious comparisons, grave doubts whether she
ever had \textit{really} cared for him, and a clear certainty she
would never care again. And with this sort of thing upon his mind
he came out upon Aldington Knoll grieving, and presently, after a
long interval, perhaps, quite inexplicably, fell asleep.

He woke to find himself on a softer turf than ever he had slept on
before, and under the shade of very dark trees that completely hid
the sky. Always, indeed, in Fairyland the sky is hidden, it seems.
Except for one night when the fairies were dancing, Mr.\ Skelmersdale,
during all his time with them, never saw a star. And of that night
I am in doubt whether he was in Fairyland proper or out where the
rings and rushes are, in those low meadows near the railway line at
Smeeth.

But it was light under these trees for all that, and on the leaves
and amidst the turf shone a multitude of glow-worms, very bright and
fine. Mr.\ Skelmersdale's first impression was that he was \textit{small},
and the next that quite a number of people still smaller were standing
all about him. For some reason, he says, he was neither surprised
nor frightened, but sat up quite deliberately and rubbed the sleep
out of his eyes. And there all about him stood the smiling elves who
had caught him sleeping under their privileges and had brought him
into Fairyland.

What these elves were like I have failed to gather, so vague and imperfect
is his vocabulary, and so unobservant of all minor detail does he
seem to have been. They were clothed in something very light and beautiful,
that was neither wool, nor silk, nor leaves, nor the petals of flowers.
They stood all about him as he sat and waked, and down the glade towards
him, down a glow-worm avenue and fronted by a star, came at once that
Fairy Lady who is the chief personage of his memory and tale. Of her
I gathered more. She was clothed in filmy green, and about her little
waist was a broad silver girdle. Her hair waved back from her forehead
on either side; there were curls not too wayward and yet astray, and
on her brow was a little tiara, set with a single star. Her sleeves
were some sort of open sleeves that gave little glimpses of her arms;
her throat, I think, was a little displayed, because he speaks of
the beauty of her neck and chin. There was a necklace of coral about
her white throat, and in her breast a coral-coloured flower. She had
the soft lines of a little child in her chin and cheeks and throat.
And her eyes, I gather, were of a kindled brown, very soft and straight
and sweet under her level brows. You see by these particulars how
greatly this lady must have loomed in Mr.\ Skelmersdale's picture.
Certain things he tried to express and could not express; {}``the
way she moved,'' he said several times; and I fancy a sort of demure
joyousness radiated from this Lady.

And it was in the company of this delightful person, as the guest
and chosen companion of this delightful person, that Mr.\ Skelmersdale
set out to be taken into the intimacies of Fairyland. She welcomed
him gladly and a little warmly\mbox{---}I suspect a pressure of
his hand in both of hers and a lit face to his. After all, ten years
ago young Skelmersdale may have been a very comely youth. And once
she took his arm, and once, I think, she led him by the hand adown
the glade that the glow-worms lit.

Just how things chanced and happened there is no telling from Mr.\ Skelmersdale's
disarticulated skeleton of description. He gives little unsatisfactory
glimpses of strange corners and doings, of places where there were
many fairies together, of {}``toadstool things that shone pink,''\ of
fairy food, of which he could only say {}``you should have tasted
it!''\ and of fairy music, {}``like a little musical box,'' that
came out of nodding flowers. There was a great open place where fairies
rode and raced on {}``things,''\ but what Mr.\ Skelmersdale meant
by {}``these here things they rode,''\ there is no telling. Larvae,
perhaps, or crickets, or the little beetles that elude us so abundantly.
There was a place where water splashed and gigantic king-cups grew,
and there in the hotter times the fairies bathed together. There were
games being played and dancing and much elvish love-making, too, I
think, among the moss-branch thickets. There can be no doubt that
the Fairy Lady made love to Mr.\ Skelmersdale, and no doubt either
that this young man set himself to resist her. A time came, indeed,
when she sat on a bank beside him, in a quiet, secluded place {}``all
smelling of vi'lets,''\ and talked to him of love.

{}``When her voice went low and she whispered,''\ said Mr.\ Skelmersdale,
{}``and laid '\textit{\emph{er}} 'and on my 'and, you know, and came
close with a soft, warm friendly way she 'ad, it was as much as I
could do to keep my 'ead.''

It seems he kept his head to a certain limited unfortunate extent.
He saw {}``'ow the wind was blowing,''\ he says, and so, sitting
there in a place all smelling of violets, with the touch of this lovely
Fairy Lady about him, Mr.\ Skelmersdale broke it to her gently\mbox{---}that
he was engaged!

She had told him she loved him dearly, that he was a sweet human lad
for her, and whatever he would ask of her he should have\mbox{---}even
his heart's desire.

And Mr.\ Skelmersdale, who, I fancy, tried hard to avoid looking
at her little lips as they just dropped apart and came together, led
up to the more intimate question by saying he would like enough capital
to start a little shop. He'd just like to feel, he said, he had money
enough to do that. I imagine a little surprise in those brown eyes
he talked about, but she seemed sympathetic for all that, and she
asked him many questions about the little shop, {}``laughing like''
all the time. So he got to the complete statement of his affianced
position, and told her all about Millie.

{}``All?''\ said I.

{}``Everything,''\ said Mr.\ Skelmersdale, {}``just who she was,
and where she lived, and everything about her. I sort of felt I 'ad
to all the time, I did.''

{}```Whatever you want you shall have,'\ said the Fairy Lady. `That's
as good as done. You \textit{shall} feel you have the money just as
you wish. And now, you know\mbox{---}\textit{you} \textit{must}
\textit{kiss} \textit{me}.'''

And Mr.\ Skelmersdale pretended not to hear the latter part of her
remark, and said she was very kind. That he really didn't deserve
she should be so kind. And\mbox{---}

The Fairy Lady suddenly came quite close to him and whispered, {}``Kiss
me!''

{}``And,''\ said Mr.\ Skelmersdale, {}``like a fool, I did.''

There are kisses and kisses, I am told, and this must have been quite
the other sort from Millie's resonant signals of regard. There was
something magic in that kiss; assuredly it marked a turning point.
At any rate, this is one of the passages that he thought sufficiently
important to describe most at length. I have tried to get it right,
I have tried to disentangle it from the hints and gestures through
which it came to me, but I have no doubt that it was all different
from my telling and far finer and sweeter, in the soft filtered light
and the subtly stirring silences of the fairy glades. The Fairy Lady
asked him more about Millie, and was she very lovely, and so on\mbox{---}a
great many times. As to Millie's loveliness, I conceive him answering
that she was {}``all right.'' And then, or on some such occasion,
the Fairy Lady told him she had fallen in love with him as he slept
in the moonlight, and so he had been brought into Fairyland, and she
had thought, not knowing of Millie, that perhaps he might chance to
love her. {}``But now you know you can't,''\ she said, {}``so
you must stop with me just a little while, and then you must go back
to Millie.'' She told him that, and you know Skelmersdale was already
in love with her, but the pure inertia of his mind kept him in the
way he was going. I imagine him sitting in a sort of stupefaction
amidst all these glowing beautiful things, answering about his Millie
and the little shop he projected and the need of a horse and cart\ldots{}.
And that absurd state of affairs must have gone on for days and days.
I see this little lady, hovering about him and trying to amuse him,
too dainty to understand his complexity and too tender to let him
go. And he, you know, hypnotised as it were by his earthly position,
went his way with her hither and thither, blind to everything in Fairyland
but this wonderful intimacy that had come to him. It is hard, it is
impossible, to give in print the effect of her radiant sweetness shining
through the jungle of poor Skelmersdale's rough and broken sentences.
To me, at least, she shone clear amidst the muddle of his story like
a glow-worm in a tangle of weeds.

There must have been many days of things while all this was happening\mbox{---}and
once, I say, they danced under the moonlight in the fairy rings that
stud the meadows near Smeeth\mbox{---}but at last it all came to
an end. She led him into a great cavernous place, lit by a red nightlight
sort of thing, where there were coffers piled on coffers, and cups
and golden boxes, and a great heap of what certainly seemed to all
Mr.\ Skelmersdale's senses\mbox{---}coined gold. There were little
gnomes amidst this wealth, who saluted her at her coming, and stood
aside. And suddenly she turned on him there with brightly shining
eyes.

{}``And now,''\ she said, {}``you have been kind to stay with
me so long, and it is time I let you go. You must go back to your
Millie. You must go back to your Millie, and here\mbox{---}just
as I promised you\mbox{---}they will give you gold.''

{}``She choked like,''\ said Mr.\ Skelmersdale. {}``At that,
I had a sort of feeling\mbox{---}''\ (he touched his breastbone)\ {}``as
though I was fainting here. I felt pale, you know, and shivering,
and even then\mbox{---}I 'adn't a thing to say.''

He paused. {}``Yes,''\ I said.

The scene was beyond his describing. But I know that she kissed him
good-bye.

{}``And you said nothing?''

{}``Nothing,''\ he said. {}``I stood like a stuffed calf. She
just looked back once, you know, and stood smiling like and crying\mbox{---}I
could see the shine of her eyes\mbox{---}and then she was gone,
and there was all these little fellows bustling about me, stuffing
my 'ands and my pockets and the back of my collar and everywhere with
gold.''

And then it was, when the Fairy Lady had vanished, that Mr.\ Skelmersdale
really understood and knew. He suddenly began plucking out the gold
they were thrusting upon him, and shouting out at them to prevent
their giving him more.\ {}```I don't \textit{want} yer gold,'\ I
said. `I 'aven't done yet. I'm not going. I want to speak to that
Fairy Lady again.' I started off to go after her and they held me
back. Yes, stuck their little 'ands against my middle and shoved me
back. They kept giving me more and more gold until it was running
all down my trouser legs and dropping out of my 'ands. `I don't \textit{want}
yer gold,' I says to them, `I want just to speak to the Fairy Lady
again.'''

{}``And did you?''

{}``It came to a tussle.''

{}``Before you saw her?''

{}``I didn't see her. When I got out from them she wasn't anywhere
to be seen.''

So he ran in search of her out of this red-lit cave, down a long grotto,
seeking her, and thence he came out in a great and desolate place
athwart which a swarm of will-o'-the-wisps were flying to and fro.
And about him elves were dancing in derision, and the little gnomes
came out of the cave after him, carrying gold in handfuls and casting
it after him, shouting, {}``Fairy love and fairy gold! Fairy love
and fairy gold!''

And when he heard these words, came a great fear that it was all over,
and he lifted up his voice and called to her by her name, and suddenly
set himself to run down the slope from the mouth of the cavern, through
a place of thorns and briers, calling after her very loudly and often.
The elves danced about him unheeded, pinching him and pricking him,
and the will-o'-the-wisps circled round him and dashed into his face,
and the gnomes pursued him shouting and pelting him with fairy gold.
As he ran with all this strange rout about him and distracting him,
suddenly he was knee-deep in a swamp, and suddenly he was amidst thick
twisted roots, and he caught his foot in one and stumbled and fell\ldots{}.

He fell and he rolled over, and in that instant he found himself sprawling
upon Aldington Knoll, all lonely under the stars.

He sat up sharply at once, he says, and found he was very stiff and
cold, and his clothes were damp with dew. The first pallor of dawn
and a chilly wind were coming up together. He could have believed
the whole thing a strangely vivid dream until he thrust his hand into
his side pocket and found it stuffed with ashes. Then he knew for
certain it was fairy gold they had given him. He could feel all their
pinches and pricks still, though there was never a bruise upon him.
And in that manner, and so suddenly, Mr.\ Skelmersdale came out of
Fairyland back into this world of men. Even then he fancied the thing
was but the matter of a night until he returned to the shop at Aldington
Corner and discovered amidst their astonishment that he had been away
three weeks.

{}``Lor'!\ the trouble I 'ad!''\ said Mr.\ Skelmersdale.

{}``How?''

{}``Explaining. I suppose you've never had anything like that to
explain.''

{}``Never,''\ I said, and he expatiated for a time on the behaviour
of this person and that. One name he avoided for a space.

{}``And Millie?''\ said I at last.

{}``I didn't seem to care a bit for seeing Millie,''\ he said.

{}``I expect she seemed changed?''

{}``Every one was changed. Changed for good. Every one seemed big,
you know, and coarse. And their voices seemed loud. Why, the sun,
when it rose in the morning, fair hit me in the eye!''

{}``And Millie?''

{}``I didn't want to see Millie.''

{}``And when you did?''

{}``I came up against her Sunday, coming out of church. `Where you
been?' she said, and I saw there was a row.\ \textit{I}\ didn't
care if there was. I seemed to forget about her even while she was
there a-talking to me. She was just nothing. I couldn't make out whatever
I 'ad seen in \emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}} ever, or what there could
\emph{'}\textit{\emph{ave}} been. Sometimes when she wasn't about,
I did get back a little, but never when she was there. Then it was
always the other came up and blotted her out\ldots{}. Anyow, it didn't
break her heart.''

{}``Married?''\ I asked.

{}``Married \emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}} cousin,''\ said Mr.\ Skelmersdale,
and reflected on the pattern of the tablecloth for a space.

When he spoke again it was clear that his former sweetheart had clean
vanished from his mind, and that the talk had brought back the Fairy
Lady triumphant in his heart. He talked of her\mbox{---}soon he
was letting out the oddest things, queer love secrets it would be
treachery to repeat. I think, indeed, that was the queerest thing
in the whole affair, to hear that neat little grocer man after his
story was done, with a glass of whisky beside him and a cigar between
his fingers, witnessing, with sorrow still, though now, indeed, with
a time-blunted anguish, of the inappeasable hunger of the heart that
presently came upon him. {}``I couldn't eat,''\ he said, {}``I
couldn't sleep. I made mistakes in orders and got mixed with change.
There she was day and night, drawing me and drawing me. Oh, I wanted
her. Lord!\ how I wanted her! I was up there, most evenings I was
up there on the Knoll, often even when it rained. I used to walk over
the Knoll and round it and round it, calling for them to let me in.
Shouting. Near blubbering I was at times. Daft I was and miserable.
I kept on saying it was all a mistake. And every Sunday afternoon
I went up there, wet and fine, though I knew as well as you do it
wasn't no good by day. And I've tried to go to sleep there.''

He stopped sharply and decided to drink some whisky.

{}``I've tried to go to sleep there,''\ he said, and I could swear
his lips trembled. {}``I've tried to go to sleep there, often and
often. And, you know, I couldn't, sir\mbox{---}never. I've thought
if I could go to sleep there, there might be something. But I've sat
up there and laid up there, and I couldn't\mbox{---}not for thinking
and longing. It's the longing\ldots{}. I've tried\mbox{---}''

He blew, drank up the rest of his whisky spasmodically, stood up suddenly
and buttoned his jacket, staring closely and critically at the cheap
oleographs beside the mantel meanwhile. The little black notebook
in which he recorded the orders of his daily round projected stiffly
from his breast pocket. When all the buttons were quite done, he patted
his chest and turned on me suddenly. {}``Well,'' he said, {}``I
must be going.''

There was something in his eyes and manner that was too difficult
for him to express in words. {}``One gets talking,''\ he said at
last at the door, and smiled wanly, and so vanished from my eyes.
And that is the tale of Mr.\ Skelmersdale in Fairyland just as he
told it to me.


\chapter*{\raggedright THE STORY OF THE INEXPERIENCED GHOST}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{THE STORY OF THE\\
INEXPERIENCED GHOST}

\markboth{TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM}{THE INEXPERIENCED GHOST}

The scene amidst which Clayton told his last story comes back very
vividly to my mind. There he sat, for the greater part of the time,
in the corner of the authentic settle by the spacious open fire, and
Sanderson sat beside him smoking the Broseley clay that bore his name.
There was Evans, and that marvel among actors, Wish, who is also a
modest man. We had all come down to the Mermaid Club that Saturday
morning, except Clayton, who had slept there overnight\mbox{---}which
indeed gave him the opening of his story. We had golfed until golfing
was invisible; we had dined, and we were in that mood of tranquil
kindliness when men will suffer a story. When Clayton began to tell
one, we naturally supposed he was lying. It may be that indeed he
was lying\mbox{---}of that the reader will speedily be able to judge
as well as I. He began, it is true, with an air of matter-of-fact
anecdote, but that we thought was only the incurable artifice of the
man.

{}``I say!''\ he remarked, after a long consideration of the upward
rain of sparks from the log that Sanderson had thumped, {}``you know
I was alone here last night?''

{}``Except for the domestics,''\ said Wish.

{}``Who sleep in the other wing,''\ said Clayton. {}``Yes. Well\mbox{---}''\ He
pulled at his cigar for some little time as though he still hesitated
about his confidence. Then he said, quite quietly, {}``I caught a
ghost!''

{}``Caught a ghost, did you?''\ said Sanderson. {}``Where is it?''

And Evans, who admires Clayton immensely and has been four weeks in
America, shouted, {}``\textit{Caught} a ghost, did you, Clayton?
I'm glad of it! Tell us all about it right now.''

Clayton said he would in a minute, and asked him to shut the door.

He looked apologetically at me. {}``There's no eavesdropping of course,
but we don't want to upset our very excellent service with any rumours
of ghosts in the place. There's too much shadow and oak panelling
to trifle with that. And this, you know, wasn't a regular ghost. I
don't think it will come again\mbox{---}ever.''

{}``You mean to say you didn't keep it?''\ said Sanderson.

{}``I hadn't the heart to,''\ said Clayton.

And Sanderson said he was surprised.

We laughed, and Clayton looked aggrieved. {}``I know,''\ he said,
with the flicker of a smile, {}``but the fact is it really \textit{was}
a ghost, and I'm as sure of it as I am that I am talking to you now.
I'm not joking. I mean what I say.''

Sanderson drew deeply at his pipe, with one reddish eye on Clayton,
and then emitted a thin jet of smoke more eloquent than many words.

Clayton ignored the comment. {}``It is the strangest thing that has
ever happened in my life. You know, I never believed in ghosts or
anything of the sort, before, ever; and then, you know, I bag one
in a corner; and the whole business is in my hands.''

He meditated still more profoundly, and produced and began to pierce
a second cigar with a curious little stabber he affected.

{}``You talked to it?''\ asked Wish.

{}``For the space, probably, of an hour.''

{}``Chatty?''\ I said, joining the party of the sceptics.

{}``The poor devil was in trouble,''\ said Clayton, bowed over
his cigar-end and with the very faintest note of reproof.

{}``Sobbing?''\ some one asked.

Clayton heaved a realistic sigh at the memory. {}``Good Lord!''\ he
said; {}``yes.'' And then, {}``Poor fellow!\ yes.''

{}``Where did you strike it?''\ asked Evans, in his best American
accent.

{}``I never realised,''\ said Clayton, ignoring him, {}``the poor
sort of thing a ghost might be,''\ and he hung us up again for a
time, while he sought for matches in his pocket and lit and warmed
to his cigar.

{}``I took an advantage,''\ he reflected at last.

We were none of us in a hurry. {}``A character,''\ he said, {}``remains
just the same character for all that it's been disembodied. That's
a thing we too often forget. People with a certain strength or fixity
of purpose may have ghosts of a certain strength and fixity of purpose\mbox{---}most
haunting ghosts, you know, must be as one-idea'd as monomaniacs and
as obstinate as mules to come back again and again. This poor creature
wasn't.'' He suddenly looked up rather queerly, and his eye went
round the room. {}``I say it,''\ he said, {}``in all kindliness,
but that is the plain truth of the case. Even at the first glance
he struck me as weak.''

He punctuated with the help of his cigar.

{}``I came upon him, you know, in the long passage. His back was
towards me and I saw him first. Right off I knew him for a ghost.
He was transparent and whitish; clean through his chest I could see
the glimmer of the little window at the end. And not only his physique
but his attitude struck me as being weak. He looked, you know, as
though he didn't know in the slightest whatever he meant to do. One
hand was on the panelling and the other fluttered to his mouth. Like\mbox{---}\textit{so}!''

{}``What sort of physique?''\ said Sanderson.

{}``Lean. You know that sort of young man's neck that has two great
flutings down the back, here and here\mbox{---}so! And a little,
meanish head with scrubby hair\mbox{---}And rather bad ears. Shoulders
bad, narrower than the hips; turn-down collar, ready-made short jacket,
trousers baggy and a little frayed at the heels. That's how he took
me. I came very quietly up the staircase. I did not carry a light,
you know\mbox{---}the candles are on the landing table and there
is that lamp\mbox{---}and I was in my list slippers, and I saw him
as I came up. I stopped dead at that\mbox{---}taking him in. I wasn't
a bit afraid. I think that in most of these affairs one is never nearly
so afraid or excited as one imagines one would be. I was surprised
and interested. I thought, `Good Lord! Here's a ghost at last! And
I haven't believed for a moment in ghosts during the last five-and-twenty
years.'''

{}``Um,''\ said Wish.

{}``I suppose I wasn't on the landing a moment before he found out
I was there. He turned on me sharply, and I saw the face of an immature
young man, a weak nose, a scrubby little moustache, a feeble chin.
So for an instant we stood\mbox{---}he looking over his shoulder
at me and regarded one another. Then he seemed to remember his high
calling. He turned round, drew himself up, projected his face, raised
his arms, spread his hands in approved ghost fashion\mbox{---}came
towards me. As he did so his little jaw dropped, and he emitted a
faint, drawn-out `Boo.' No, it wasn't\mbox{---}not a bit dreadful.
I'd dined. I'd had a bottle of champagne, and being all alone, perhaps
two or three\mbox{---}perhaps even four or five\mbox{---}whiskies,
so I was as solid as rocks and no more frightened than if I'd been
assailed by a frog. `Boo!'\ I said. `Nonsense. You don't belong to
\textit{this} place. What are you doing here?'

{}``I could see him wince. `Boo-oo,'\ he said.

{}```Boo\mbox{---}be hanged! Are you a member?'\ I said; and just
to show I didn't care a pin for him I stepped through a corner of
him and made to light my candle. `Are you a member?'\ I repeated,
looking at him sideways.

{}``He moved a little so as to stand clear of me, and his bearing
became crestfallen. `No,'\ he said, in answer to the persistent interrogation
of my eye; `I'm not a member\mbox{---}I'm a ghost.'

{}```Well, that doesn't give you the run of the Mermaid Club. Is
there any one you want to see, or anything of that sort?'\ and doing
it as steadily as possible for fear that he should mistake the carelessness
of whisky for the distraction of fear, I got my candle alight. I turned
on him, holding it. `What are you doing here?'\ I said.

{}``He had dropped his hands and stopped his booing, and there he
stood, abashed and awkward, the ghost of a weak, silly, aimless young
man. `I'm haunting,'\ he said.

{}```You haven't any business to,'\ I said in a quiet voice.

{}```I'm a ghost,'\ he said, as if in defence.

{}```That may be, but you haven't any business to haunt here. This
is a respectable private club; people often stop here with nursemaids
and children, and, going about in the careless way you do, some poor
little mite could easily come upon you and be scared out of her wits.
I suppose you didn't think of that?'

{}```No, sir,'\ he said, `I didn't.'

{}```You should have done. You haven't any claim on the place, have
you? Weren't murdered here, or anything of that sort?'

{}```None, sir; but I thought as it was old and oak-panelled\mbox{---}'

{}```That's \textit{no} excuse.' I regarded him firmly. `Your coming
here is a mistake,'\ I said, in a tone of friendly superiority. I
feigned to see if I had my matches, and then looked up at him frankly.
`If I were you I wouldn't wait for cock-crow\mbox{---}I'd vanish
right away.'

{}``He looked embarrassed. `The fact \textit{is}, sir\mbox{---}'\ he
began.

{}```I'd vanish,'\ I said, driving it home.

{}```The fact is, sir, that\mbox{---}somehow\mbox{---}I can't.'

{}```You \textit{can't}?'

{}```No, sir. There's something I've forgotten. I've been hanging
about here since midnight last night, hiding in the cupboards of the
empty bedrooms and things like that. I'm flurried. I've never come
haunting before, and it seems to put me out.'

{}```Put you out?'

{}```Yes, sir. I've tried to do it several times, and it doesn't
come off. There's some little thing has slipped me, and I can't get
back.'

{}``That, you know, rather bowled me over. He looked at me in such
an abject way that for the life of me I couldn't keep up quite the
high, hectoring vein I had adopted. `That's queer,'\ I said, and
as I spoke I fancied I heard some one moving about down below. `Come
into my room and tell me more about it,'\ I said. `I didn't, of course,
understand this,'\ and I tried to take him by the arm. But, of course,
you might as well have tried to take hold of a puff of smoke! I had
forgotten my number, I think; anyhow, I remember going into several
bedrooms\mbox{---}it was lucky I was the only soul in that wing\mbox{---}until
I saw my traps. `Here we are,'\ I said, and sat down in the arm-chair;
`sit down and tell me all about it. It seems to me you have got yourself
into a jolly awkward position, old chap.'

{}``Well, he said he wouldn't sit down!\ he'd prefer to flit up
and down the room if it was all the same to me. And so he did, and
in a little while we were deep in a long and serious talk. And presently,
you know, something of those whiskies and \textit{\emph{sodas}} evaporated
out of me, and I began to realise just a little what a thundering
rum and weird business it was that I was in. There he was, semi-transparent\mbox{---}the
proper conventional phantom, and noiseless except for his ghost of
a voice\mbox{---}flitting to and fro in that nice, clean, chintz-hung
old bedroom. You could see the gleam of the copper candlesticks through
him, and the lights on the brass fender, and the corners of the framed
engravings on the wall,\mbox{---}and there he was telling me all
about this wretched little life of his that had recently ended on
earth. He hadn't a particularly honest face, you know, but being transparent,
of course, he couldn't avoid telling the truth.''

{}``Eh?''\ said Wish, suddenly sitting up in his chair.

{}``What?''\ said Clayton.

{}``Being transparent\mbox{---}couldn't avoid tel\-ling the truth\mbox{---}I
don't see it,'' said Wish.

{}``\textit{I}\ don't see it,''\ said Clayton, with inimitable
assurance. {}``But it \textit{is} so, I can assure you nevertheless.
I don't believe he got once a nail's breadth off the Bible truth.
He told me how he had been killed\mbox{---}he went down into a London
basement with a candle to look for a leakage of gas\mbox{---}and
described himself as a senior English master in a London private school
when that release occurred.''

{}``Poor wretch!''\ said I.

{}``That's what I thought, and the more he talked the more I thought
it. There he was, purposeless in life and purposeless out of it. He
talked of his father and mother and his schoolmaster, and all who
had ever been anything to him in the world, meanly. He had been too
sensitive, too nervous; none of them had ever valued him properly
or understood him, he said. He had never had a real friend in the
world, I think; he had never had a success. He had shirked games and
failed examinations. `It's like that with some people,'\ he said;
`whenever I got into the examination-room or anywhere everything seemed
to go.' Engaged to be married of course\mbox{---}to another over-sensitive
person, I suppose\mbox{---}when the indiscretion with the gas escape
ended his affairs. `And where are you now?'\ I asked. `Not in\mbox{---}?'

{}``He wasn't clear on that point at all. The impression he gave
me was of a sort of vague, intermediate state, a special reserve for
souls too non-existent for anything so positive as either sin or virtue.
\textit{I}\ don't know. He was much too egotistical and unobservant
to give me any clear idea of the kind of place, kind of country, there
is on the Other Side of Things. Wherever he was, he seems to have
fallen in with a set of kindred spirits: ghosts of weak Cockney young
men, who were on a footing of Christian names, and among these there
was certainly a lot of talk about `going haunting'\ and things like
that. Yes\mbox{---}going haunting! They seemed to think `haunting'\ a
tremendous adventure, and most of them funked it all the time. And
so primed, you know, he had come.''

{}``But really!''\ said Wish to the fire.

{}``These are the impressions he gave me, anyhow,''\ said Clayton,
modestly. {}``I may, of course, have been in a rather uncritical
state, but that was the sort of background he gave to himself. He
kept flitting up and down, with his thin voice going talking, talking
about his wretched self, and never a word of clear, firm statement
from first to last. He was thinner and sillier and more pointless
than if he had been real and alive. Only then, you know, he would
not have been in my bedroom here\mbox{---}if he \textit{had} been
alive. I should have kicked him out.''

{}``Of course,''\ said Evans, {}``there \textit{are} poor mortals
like that.''

{}``And there's just as much chance of their having ghosts as the
rest of us,''\ I admitted.

{}``What gave a sort of point to him, you know, was the fact that
he did seem within limits to have found himself out. The mess he had
made of haunting had depressed him terribly. He had been told it would
be a `lark'; he had come expecting it to be a `lark,' and here it
was, nothing but another failure added to his record! He proclaimed
himself an utter out-and-out failure. He said, and I can quite believe
it, that he had never tried to do anything all his life that he hadn't
made a perfect mess of\mbox{---}and through all the wastes of eternity
he never would. If he had had sympathy, perhaps\mbox{---}. He paused
at that, and stood regarding me. He remarked that, strange as it might
seem to me, nobody, not any one, ever, had given him the amount of
sympathy I was doing now. I could see what he wanted straight away,
and I determined to head him off at once. I may be a brute, you know,
but being the Only Real Friend, the recipient of the confidences of
one of these egotistical weaklings, ghost or body, is beyond my physical
endurance. I got up briskly. `Don't you brood on these things too
much,'\ I said. `The thing you've got to do is to get out of this\mbox{---}sharp.
You pull yourself together and \textit{try}.' `I can't,'\ he said.
`You try,'\ I said, and try he did.''

{}``Try!''\ said Sanderson. {}``\textit{How}?''

{}``Passes,''\ said Clayton.

{}``Passes?''

{}``Complicated series of gestures and passes with the hands. That's
how he had come in and that's how he had to get out again. Lord! what
a business I had!''

{}``But how could \textit{any} series of passes\mbox{---}?''\ I
began.

{}``My dear man,''\ said Clayton, turning on me and putting a great
emphasis on certain words, {}``you want \textit{everything} clear.\ \textit{I}\ don't
know \textit{how}. All I know is that you \textit{do}\mbox{---}that
\textit{he} did, anyhow, at least. After a fearful time, you know,
he got his passes right and suddenly disappeared.''

{}``Did you,''\ said Sanderson, slowly, {}``observe the passes?''

{}``Yes,''\ said Clayton, and seemed to think. {}``It was tremendously
queer,'' he said. {}``There we were, I and this thin vague ghost,
in that silent room, in this silent, empty inn, in this silent little
Friday-night town. Not a sound except our voices and a faint panting
he made when he swung. There was the bedroom candle, and one candle
on the dressing-table alight, that was all\mbox{---}sometimes one
or other would flare up into a tall, lean, astonished flame for a
space. And queer things happened. `I can't,'\ he said; `I shall never\mbox{---}!'\ And
suddenly he sat down on a little chair at the foot of the bed and
began to sob and sob. Lord!\ what a harrowing, whimpering thing he
seemed!

{}```You pull yourself together,'\ I said, and tried to pat him
on the back, and \ldots{}\ my confounded hand went through him!
By that time, you know, I wasn't nearly so\mbox{---}massive as I
had been on the landing. I got the queerness of it full. I remember
snatching back my hand out of him, as it were, with a little thrill,
and walking over to the dressing-table. `You pull yourself together,'\ I
said to him, `and try.' And in order to encourage and help him I began
to try as well.''

{}``What!''\ said Sanderson, {}``the passes?''

{}``Yes, the passes.''

{}``But\mbox{---}''\ I said, moved by an idea that eluded me
for a space.

{}``This is interesting,''\ said Sanderson, with his finger in
his pipe-bowl. {}``You mean to say this ghost of yours gave away\mbox{---}''

{}``Did his level best to give away the whole confounded barrier?
\textit{Yes}.''

{}``He didn't,''\ said Wish; {}``he couldn't. Or you'd have gone
there too.''

{}``That's precisely it,''\ I said, finding my elusive idea put
into words for me.

{}``That \textit{is} precisely it,''\ said Clayton, with thoughtful
eyes upon the fire.

For just a little while there was silence.

{}``And at last he did it?''\ said Sanderson.

{}``At last he did it. I had to keep him up to it hard, but he did
it at last\mbox{---}rather suddenly. He despaired, we had a scene,
and then he got up abruptly and asked me to go through the whole performance,
slowly, so that he might see. `I believe,'\ he said, `if I could
\textit{see} I should spot what was wrong at once.' And he did.\ `\textit{I}\ know,'
he said. `What do you know?'\ said I.\ `\textit{I}\ know,'\ he
repeated. Then he said, peevishly, `I \textit{can't} do it if you
look at me\mbox{---}I really \textit{can't}; it's been that, partly,
all along. I'm such a nervous fellow that you put me out.' Well, we
had a bit of an argument. Naturally I wanted to see; but he was as
obstinate as a mule, and suddenly I had come over as tired as a dog\mbox{---}he
tired me out. `All right,' I said, `\textit{I}\ won't look at you,'\ and
turned towards the mirror, on the wardrobe, by the bed.

He started off very fast. I tried to follow him by looking in the
looking-glass, to see just what it was had hung. Round went his arms
and his hands, so, and so, and so, and then with a rush came to the
last gesture of all\mbox{---}you stand erect and open out your arms\mbox{---}and
so, don't you know, he stood. And then he didn't! He didn't! He wasn't!
I wheeled round from the looking-glass to him. There was nothingl
I was alone, with the flaring candles and a staggering mind. What
had happened? Had anything happened? Had I been dreaming?\ldots{}
And then, with an absurd note of finality about it, the clock upon
the landing discovered the moment was ripe for striking \textit{one}.
So!\mbox{---}Ping! And I was as grave and sober as a judge, with
all my champagne and whisky gone into the vast serene. Feeling queer,
you know\mbox{---}confoundedly \textit{queer}! Queer! Good Lord!''

He regarded his cigar-ash for a moment. {}``That's all that happened,''\ he
said.

{}``And then you went to bed?''\ asked Evans.

{}``What else was there to do?''

I looked Wish in the eye. We wanted to scoff, and there was something,
something perhaps in Clayton's voice and manner, that hampered our
desire.

{}``And about these passes?''\ said Sanderson.

{}``I believe I could do them now.''

{}``Oh!''\ said Sanderson, and produced a penknife and set himself
to grub the dottel out of the bowl of his clay.

{}``Why don't you do them now?''\ said Sanderson, shutting his
pen-knife with a click.

{}``That's what I'm going to do,''\ said Clayton.

{}``They won't work,''\ said Evans.

{}``If they do\mbox{---}''\ I suggested.

{}``You know, I'd rather you didn't,''\ said Wish, stretching out
his legs.

{}``Why?''\ asked Evans.

{}``I'd rather he didn't,''\ said Wish.

{}``But he hasn't got 'em right,''\ said Sanderson, plugging too
much tobacco in his pipe.

{}``All the same, I'd rather he didn't,''\ said Wish.

We argued with Wish. He said that for Clayton to go through those
gestures was like mocking a serious matter. {}``But you don't believe\mbox{---}?''
I said. Wish glanced at Clayton, who was staring into the fire, weighing
something in his mind. {}``I do\mbox{---}more than half, anyhow,
I do,''\ said Wish.

{}``Clayton,''\ said I, {}``you're too good a liar for us. Most
of it was all right. But that disappearance \ldots{}\ happened to
be convincing. Tell us, it's a tale of cock and bull.''

He stood up without heeding me, took the middle of the hearthrug,
and faced me. For a moment he regarded his feet thoughtfully, and
then for all the rest of the time his eyes were on the opposite wall,
with an intent expression. He raised his two hands slowly to the level
of his eyes and so began\ldots{}.

Now, Sanderson is a Freemason, a member of the lodge of the Four Kings,
which devotes itself so ably to the study and elucidation of all the
mysteries of Masonry past and present, and among the students of this
lodge Sanderson is by no means the least. He followed Clayton's motions
with a singular interest in his reddish eye. {}``That's not bad,''\ he
said, when it was done. {}``You really do, you know, put things together,
Clayton, in a most amazing fashion. But there's one little detail
out.''

{}``I know,''\ said Clayton. {}``I believe I could tell you which.''

{}``Well?''

{}``This,''\ said Clayton, and did a queer little twist and writhing
and thrust of the hands.

{}``Yes.''

{}``That, you know, was what \textit{he} couldn't get right,''\ said
Clayton. {}``But how do \textit{you}\mbox{---}?''

{}``Most of this business, and particularly how you invented it,
I don't understand at all,''\ said Sanderson, {}``but just that
phase\mbox{---}I do.'' He reflected. {}``These happen to be a
series of gestures\mbox{---}connected with a certain branch of esoteric
Masonry. Probably you know. Or else\mbox{---}\textit{how}?''\ He
reflected still further. {}``I do not see I can do any harm in telling
you just the proper twist. After all, if you know, you know; if you
don't, you don't.''

{}``I know nothing,''\ said Clayton, {}``except what the poor
devil let out last night.''

{}``Well, anyhow,''\ said Sanderson, and placed his churchwarden
very carefully upon the shelf over the fireplace. Then very rapidly
he gesticulated with his hands.

{}``So?''\ said Clayton, repeating.

{}``So,''\ said Sanderson, and took his pipe in hand again.

{}``Ah, \textit{now},''\ said Clayton, {}``I can do the whole
thing\mbox{---}right.''

He stood up before the waning fire and smiled at us all. But I think
there was just a little hesitation in his smile. {}``If I begin\mbox{---}''
he said.

{}``I wouldn't begin,''\ said Wish.

{}``It's all right!''\ said Evans. {}``Matter is indestructible.
You don't think any jiggery-pokery of this sort is going to snatch
Clayton into the world of shades. Not it! You may try, Clayton, so
far as I'm concerned, until your arms drop off at the wrists.''

{}``I don't believe that,''\ said Wish, and stood up and put his
arm on Clayton's shoulder. {}``You've made me half believe in that
story somehow, and I don't want to see the thing done!''

{}``Goodness!''\ said I, {}``here's Wish frightened!''

{}``I am,''\ said Wish, with real or admirably feigned intensity.
{}``I believe that if he goes through these motions right he'll \textit{go}.''

{}``He'll not do anything of the sort,''\ I cried. {}``There's
only one way out of this world for men, and Clayton is thirty years
from that. Besides\ldots{}. And such a ghost! Do you think\mbox{---}?''

Wish interrupted me by moving. He walked out from among our chairs
and stopped beside the table and stood there. {}``Clayton,''\ he
said, {}``you're a fool.''

Clayton, with a humorous light in his eyes, smiled back at him. {}``Wish,''\ he
said, {}``is right and all you others are wrong. I shall go. I shall
get to the end of these passes, and as the last swish whistles through
the air, Presto!\mbox{---}this hearthrug will be vacant, the room
will be blank amazement, and a respectably dressed gentleman of fifteen
stone will plump into the world of shades. I'm certain. So will you
be. I decline to argue further. Let the thing be tried.''

{}``\textit{No},''\ said Wish, and made a step and ceased, and
Clayton raised his hands once more to repeat the spirit's passing.

By that time, you know, we were all in a state of tension\mbox{---}largely
because of the behaviour of Wish. We sat all of us with our eyes on
Clayton\mbox{---}I, at least, with a sort of tight, stiff feeling
about me as though from the back of my skull to the middle of my thighs
my body had been changed to steel. And there, with a gravity that
was imperturbably serene, Clayton bowed and swayed and waved his hands
and arms before us. As he drew towards the end one piled up, one tingled
in one's teeth. The last gesture, I have said, was to swing the arms
out wide open, with the face held up. And when at last he swung out
to this closing gesture I ceased even to breathe. It was ridiculous,
of course, but you know that ghost-story feeling. It was after dinner,
in a queer, old shadowy house. Would he, after all\mbox{---}?

There he stood for one stupendous moment, with his arms open and his
upturned face, assured and bright, in the glare of the hanging lamp.
We hung through that moment as if it were an age, and then came from
all of us something that was half a sigh of infinite relief and half
a reassuring {}``\textit{No}!''\ For visibly\mbox{---}he wasn't
going. It was all nonsense. He had told an idle story, and carried
it almost to conviction, that was all!\ldots{} And then in that moment
the face of Clayton, changed.

It changed. It changed as a lit house changes when its lights are
suddenly extinguished. His eyes were suddenly eyes that were fixed,
his smile was frozen on his lips, and he stood there still. He stood
there, very gently swaying.

That moment, too, was an age. And then, you know, chairs were scraping,
things were falling, and we were all moving. His knees seemed to give,
and he fell forward, and Evans rose and caught him in his arms\ldots{}.

It stunned us all. For a minute I suppose no one said a coherent thing.
We believed it, yet could not believe it\ldots{}. I came out of a
muddled stupefaction to find myself kneeling beside him, and his vest
and shirt were torn open, and Sanderson's hand lay on his heart\ldots{}.

Well\mbox{---}the simple fact before us could very well wait our
convenience; there was no hurry for us to comprehend. It lay there
for an hour; it lies athwart my memory, black and amazing still, to
this day. Clayton had, indeed, passed into the world that lies so
near to and so far from our own, and he had gone thither by the only
road that mortal man may take. But whether he did indeed pass there
by that poor ghost's incantation, or whether he was stricken suddenly
by apoplexy in the midst of an idle tale\mbox{---}as the coroner's
jury would have us believe\mbox{---}is no matter for my judging;
it is just one of those inexplicable riddles that must remain unsolved
until the final solution of all things shall come. All I certainly
know is that, in the very moment, in the very instant, of concluding
those passes, he changed, and staggered, and fell down before us\mbox{---}dead!


\chapter*{\raggedright JIMMY GOGGLES THE GOD}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{JIMMY GOGGLES THE GOD}

\markboth{TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM}{JIMMY GOGGLES THE GOD}

{}``It isn't every one who's been a god,''\ said the sunburnt man.
{}``But it's happened to me. Among other things.''

I intimated my sense of his condescension.

{}``It don't leave much for ambition, does it?''\ said the sunburnt
man.

{}``I was one of those men who were saved from the \emph{Ocean Pioneer}.
Gummy!\ how time flies! It's twenty years ago. I doubt if you'll
remember anything of the \emph{Ocean Pioneer}?''

The name was familiar, and I tried to recall when and where I had
read it. The \emph{Ocean Pioneer}? {}``Something about gold dust,''\ I
said vaguely, {}``but the precise\mbox{---}''

{}``That's it,''\ he said. {}``In a beastly little channel she
hadn't no business in\mbox{---}dodging pirates. It was before they'd
put the kybosh on that business. And there'd been volcanoes or something
and all the rocks was wrong. There's places about by Soona where you
fair have to follow the rocks about to see where they're going next.
Down she went in twenty fathoms before you could have dealt for whist,
with fifty thousand pounds worth of gold aboard, it was said, in one
form or another.''

{}``Survivors?''

{}``Three.''

{}``I remember the case now,''\ I said. {}``There was something
about salvage\mbox{---}''

But at the word salvage the sunburnt man exploded into language so
extraordinarily horrible that I stopped aghast. He came down to more
ordinary swearing, and pulled himself up abruptly. {}``Excuse me,''
he said, {}``but\mbox{---}salvage!''

He leant over towards me. {}``I was in that job,''\ he said. {}``Tried
to make myself a rich man, and got made a god instead. I've got my
feelings\mbox{---}

{}``It ain't all jam being a god,''\ said the sunburnt man, and
for some time conversed by means of such pithy but unprogressive axioms.
At last he took up his tale again.

{}``There was me,''\ said the sunburnt man, {}``and a seaman named
Jacobs, and Always, the mate of the \emph{Ocean Pioneer}. And him
it was that set the whole thing going. I remember him now, when we
was in the jolly-boat, suggesting it all to our minds just by one
sentence. He was a wonderful hand at suggesting things. `There was
forty thousand pounds,'\ he said, `on that ship, and it's for me
to say just where she went down.' It didn't need much brains to tumble
to that. And he was the leader from the first to the last. He got
hold of the Sanderses and their brig; they were brothers, and the
brig was the \emph{Pride of Banya}, and he it was bought the diving-dress\mbox{---}a
second-hand one with a compressed air apparatus instead of pumping.
He'd have done the diving too, if it hadn't made him sick going down.
And the salvage people were mucking about with a chart he'd cooked
up, as solemn as could be, at Starr Race, a hundred and twenty miles
away.

{}``I can tell you we was a happy lot aboard that brig, jokes and
drink and bright hopes all the time. It all seemed so neat and clean
and straightforward, and what rough chaps call a `cert.' And we used
to speculate how the other blessed lot, the proper salvagers, who'd
started two days before us, were getting on, until our sides fairly
ached. We all messed together in the Sanderses'\ cabin\mbox{---}it
was a curious crew, all officers and no men\mbox{---}and there stood
the diving-dress waiting its turn. Young Sanders was a humorous sort
of chap, and there certainly was something funny in the confounded
thing's great fat head and its stare, and he made us see it too. `Jimmie
Goggles,'\ he used to call it, and talk to it like a Christian. Asked
if he was married, and how Mrs.\ Goggles was, and all the little
Goggleses. Fit to make you split. And every blessed day all of us
used to drink the health of Jimmy Goggles in rum, and unscrew his
eye and pour a glass of rum in him, until, instead of that nasty mackintosheriness,
he smelt as nice in his inside as a cask of rum. It was jolly times
we had in those days, I can tell you\mbox{---}little suspecting,
poor chaps!\ what was a-coming.

{}``We weren't going to throw away our chances by any blessed hurry,
you know, and we spent a whole day sounding our way towards where
the \emph{Ocean Pioneer} had gone down, right between two chunks of
ropy grey rock\mbox{---}lava rocks that rose nearly out of the water.
We had to lay off about half a mile to get a safe anchorage, and there
was a thundering row who should stop on board. And there she lay just
as she had gone down, so that you could see the top of the masts that
was still standing perfectly distinctly. The row ending in all coming
in the boat. I went down in the diving-dress on Friday morning directly
it was light.

{}``What a surprise it was! I can see it all now quite distinctly.
It was a queer-looking place, and the light was just coming. People
over here think every blessed place in the tropics is a flat shore
and palm trees and surf, bless 'em! This place, for instance, wasn't
a bit that way. Not common rocks they were, undermined by waves; but
great curved banks like ironwork cinder heaps, with green slime below,
and thorny shrubs and things just waving upon them here and there,
and the water glassy calm and clear, and showing you a kind of dirty
grey-black shine, with huge flaring red-brown weeds spreading motionless,
and crawling and darting things going through it. And far away beyond
the ditches and pools and the heaps was a forest on the mountain flank,
growing again after the fires and cinder showers of the last eruption.
And the other way forest, too, and a kind of broken\mbox{---}what
is it?\mbox{---}ambytheatre of black and rusty cinders rising out
of it all, and the sea in a kind of bay in the middle.

{}``The dawn, I say, was just coming, and there wasn't much colour
about things, and not a human being but ourselves anywhere in sight
up or down the channel. Except the \emph{Pride of Banya}, lying out
beyond a lump of rocks towards the line of the sea.

{}``Not a human being in sight,''\ he repeated, and paused.

{}``I don't know where they came from, not a bit. And we were feeling
so safe that we were all alone that poor young Sanders was a-singing.
I was in Jimmy Goggles, all except the helmet. `Easy,'\ says Always,
`there's her mast.' And after I'd had just one squint over the gunwale,
I caught up the bogey and almost tipped out as old Sanders brought
the boat round. When the windows were screwed and everything was all
right, I shut the valve from the air belt in order to help my sinking,
and jumped overboard, feet foremost\mbox{---}for we hadn't a ladder.
I left the boat pitching, and all of them staring down into the water
after me, as my head sank down into the weeds and blackness that lay
about the mast. I suppose nobody, not the most cautious chap in the
world, would have bothered about a lookout at such a desolate place.
It stunk of solitude.

{}``Of course you must understand that I was a greenhorn at diving.
None of us were divers. We'd had to muck about with the thing to get
the way of it, and this was the first time I'd been deep. It feels
damnable. Your ears hurt beastly. I don't know if you've ever hurt
yourself yawning or sneezing, but it takes you like that, only ten
times worse. And a pain over the eyebrows here\mbox{---}splitting\mbox{---}and
a feeling like influenza in the head. And it isn't all heaven in your
lungs and things. And going down feels like the beginning of a lift,
only it keeps on. And you can't turn your head to see what's above
you, and you can't get a fair squint at what's happening to your feet
without bending down something painful. And being deep it was dark,
let alone the blackness of the ashes and mud that formed the bottom.
It was like going down out of the dawn back into the night, so to
speak.

{}``The mast came up like a ghost out of the black, and then a lot
of fishes, and then a lot of flapping red seaweed, and then whack
I came with a kind of dull bang on the deck of the \emph{Ocean Pioneer},
and the fishes that had been feeding on the dead rose about me like
a swarm of flies from road stuff in summer time. I turned on the compressed
air again\mbox{---}for the suit was a bit thick and mackintoshery
after all, in spite of the rum\mbox{---}and stood recovering myself.
It struck coolish down there, and that helped take off the stuffiness
a bit.

{}``When I began to feel easier, I started looking about me. It was
an extraordinary sight. Even the light was extraordinary, a kind of
reddy-coloured twilight, on account of the streamers of seaweed that
floated up on either side of the ship. And far overhead just a moony,
deep green-blue. The deck of the ship, except for a slight list to
starboard, was level, and lay all dark and long between the weeds,
clear except where the masts had snapped when she rolled, and vanishing
into black night towards the forecastle. There wasn't any dead on
the decks, most were in the weeds alongside, I suppose; but afterwards
I found two skeletons lying in the passengers'\ cabins, where death
had come to them. It was curious to stand on that deck and recognise
it all, bit by bit; a place against the rail where I'd been fond of
smoking by starlight, and the corner where an old chap from Sydney
used to flirt with a widow we had aboard. A comfortable couple they'd
been, only a month ago, and now you couldn't have got a meal for a
baby crab off either of them.

{}``I've always had a bit of a philosophical turn, and I dare say
I spent the best part of five minutes in such thoughts before I went
below to find where the blessed dust was stored. It was slow work
hunting, feeling it was for the most part, pitchy dark, with confusing
blue gleams down the companion. And there were things moving about,
a dab at my glass once, and once a pinch at my leg. Crabs, I expect.
I kicked a lot of loose stuff that puzzled me, and stooped and picked
up something all knobs and spikes. What do you think? Backbone! But
I never had any particular feeling for bones. We had talked the affair
over pretty thoroughly, and Always knew just where the stuff was stowed.
I found it that trip. I lifted a box one end an inch or more.''

He broke off in his story. {}``I've lifted it,''\ he said, {}``as
near as that! Forty thousand pounds worth of pure gold! Gold! I shouted
inside my helmet as a kind of cheer and hurt my ears. I was getting
confounded stuffy and tired by this time\mbox{---}I must have been
down twenty-five minutes or more\mbox{---}and I thought this was
good enough. I went up the companion again, and as my eyes came up
flush with the deck, a thundering great crab gave a kind of hysterical
jump and went scuttling off sideways. Quite a start it gave me. I
stood up clear on deck and shut the valve behind the helmet to let
the air accumulate to carry me up again\mbox{---}I noticed a kind
of whacking from above, as though they were hitting the water with
an oar, but I didn't look up. I fancied they were signalling me to
come up.

{}``And then something shot down by me\mbox{---}something heavy,
and stood a-quiver in the planks. I looked, and there was a long knife
I'd seen young Sanders handling. Thinks I, he's dropped it, and I
was still calling him this kind of fool and that\mbox{---}for it
might have hurt me serious\mbox{---}when I began to lift and drive
up towards the daylight. Just about the level of the top spars of
the \emph{Ocean Pioneer}, whack! I came against something sinking
down, and a boot knocked in front of my helmet. Then something else,
struggling frightful. It was a big weight atop of me, whatever it
was, and moving and twisting about. I'd have thought it a big octopus,
or some such thing, if it hadn't been for the boot. But octopuses
don't wear boots. It was all in a moment, of course. I felt myself
sinking down again, and I threw my arms about to keep steady, and
the whole lot rolled free of me and shot down as I went up\mbox{---}''

He paused.

{}``I saw young Sanders's face, over a naked black shoulder, and
a spear driven clean through his neck, and out of his mouth and neck
what looked like spirts of pink smoke in the water. And down they
went clutching one another, and turning over, and both too far gone
to leave go. And in another second my helmet came a whack, fit to
split, against the niggers'\ canoe. It was niggers! Two canoes full.

{}``It was lively times, I tell you! Overboard came Always with three
spears in him. There was the legs of three or four black chaps kicking
about me in the water. I couldn't see much, but I saw the game was
up at a glance, gave my valve a tremendous twist, and went bubbling
down again after poor Always, in as awful a state of scare and astonishment
as you can well imagine. I passed young Sanders and the nigger going
up again and struggling still a bit, and in another moment I was standing
in the dim again on the deck of the \emph{Ocean Pioneer}.

{}```Gummy,'\ thinks I, `here's a fix!'\ Niggers? At first I couldn't
see anything for it but Stifle below or Stabs above. I didn't properly
understand how much air there was to last me, but I didn't feel like
standing very much more of it down below. I was hot and frightfully
heady\mbox{---}quite apart from the blue funk I was in. We'd never
repined with these beastly natives, filthy Papuan beasts. It wasn't
any good, coming up where I was, but I had to do something. On the
spur of the moment, I clambered over the side of the brig and landed
among the weeds, and set off through the darkness as fast as I could.
I just stopped once and knelt, and twisted back my head in the helmet
and had a look up. It was a most extraordinary bright green-blue above,
and the two canoes and the boat floating there very small and distant
like a kind of twisted H.\ And it made me feel sick to squint up
at it, and think what the pitching and swaying of the three meant.

{}``It was just about the most horrible ten minutes I ever had, blundering
about in that darkness, pressure something awful, like being buried
in sand, pain across the chest, sick with funk, and breathing nothing
as it seemed but the smell of rum and mackintosh. Gummy! After a bit,
I found myself going up a steepish sort of slope. I had another squint
to see if anything was visible of the canoes and boats, and then kept
on. I stopped with my head a foot from the surface, and tried to see
where I was going, but, of course, nothing was to be seen but the
reflection of the bottom. Then out I dashed like knocking my head
through a mirror. Directly I got my eyes out of the water, I saw I'd
come up a kind of beach near the forest. I had a look round, but the
natives and the brig were both hidden by a big, hummucky heap of twisted
lava, the born fool in me suggested a run for the woods. I didn't
take the helmet off, but eased open one of the windows, and, after
a bit of a pant, went on out of the water. You'd hardly imagine how
clean and light the air tasted.

{}``Of course, with four inches of lead in your boot soles, and your
head in a copper knob the size of a football, and been thirty-five
minutes under water, you don't break any records running. I ran like
a ploughboy going to work. And half way to the trees I saw a dozen
niggers or more, coming out in a gaping, astonished sort of way to
meet me.

{}``I just stopped dead, and cursed myself for all the fools out
of London. I had about as much chance of cutting back to the water
as a turned turtle. I just screwed up my window again to leave my
hands free, and waited for them. There wasn't anything else for me
to do.

{}``But they didn't come on very much. I began to suspect why. `Jimmy
Goggles,'\ I says, `it's your beauty does it.' I was inclined to
be a little light-headed, I think, with all these dangers about and
the change in the pressure of the blessed air. `Who're ye staring
at?'\ I said, as if the savages could hear me. `What d'ye take me
for? I'm hanged if I don't give you something to stare at,'\ I said,
and with that I screwed up the escape valve and turned on the compressed
air from the belt, until I was swelled out like a blown frog. Regular
imposing it must have been. I'm blessed if they'd come on a step;
and presently one and then another went down on their hands and knees.
They didn't know what to make of me, and they was doing the extra
polite, which was very wise and reasonable of them. I had half a mind
to edge back seaward and cut and run, but it seemed too hopeless.
A step back and they'd have been after me. And out of sheer desperation
I began to march towards them up the beach, with slow, heavy steps,
and waving my blown-out arms about, in a dignified manner. And inside
of me I was singing as small as a tomtit.

{}``But there's nothing like a striking appearance to help a man
over a difficulty,\mbox{---}I've found that before and since. People
like ourselves, who're up to diving-dresses by the time we're seven,
can scarcely imagine the effect of one on a simple-minded savage.
One or two of these niggers cut and run, the others started in a great
hurry trying to knock their brains out on the ground. And on I went
as slow and solemn and silly-looking and artful as a jobbing plumber.
It was evident they took me for something immense.

{}``Then up jumped one and began pointing, making extraordinary gestures
to me as he did so, and all the others began sharing their attention
between me and something out at sea. `What's the matter now?'\ I
said. I turned slowly on account of my dignity, and there I saw, coming
round a point, the poor old \emph{Pride of Banya} towed by a couple
of canoes. The sight fairly made me sick. But they evidently expected
some recognition, so I waved my arms in a striking sort of non-committal
manner. And then I turned and stalked on towards the trees again.
At that time I was praying like mad, I remember, over and over again:
`Lord help me through with it! Lord help me through with it!'\ It's
only fools who know nothing of dangers can afford to laugh at praying.

{}``But these niggers weren't going to let me walk through and away
like that. They started a kind of bowing dance about me, and sort
of pressed me to take a pathway that lay through the trees. It was
clear to me they didn't take me for a British citizen, whatever else
they thought of me, and for my own part I was never less anxious to
own up to the old country.

{}``You'd hardly believe it, perhaps, unless you're familiar with
savages, but these poor misguided, ignorant creatures took me straight
to their kind of joss place to present me to the blessed old black
stone there. By this time I was beginning to sort of realise the depth
of their ignorance, and directly I set eyes on this deity I took my
cue. I started a baritone howl, `wow-wow,'\ very long on one note,
and began waving my arms about a lot, and then very slowly and ceremoniously
turned their image over on its side and sat down on it. I wanted to
sit down badly, for diving-dresses ain't much wear in the tropics.
Or, to put it different like, they're a sight too much. It took away
their breath, I could see, my sitting on their joss, but in less time
than a minute they made up their minds and were hard at work worshipping
me. And I can tell you I felt a bit relieved to see things turning
out so well, in spite of the weight on my shoulders and feet.

{}``But what made me anxious was what the chaps in the canoes might
think when they came back. If they'd seen me in the boat before I
went down, and without the helmet on\mbox{---}for they might have
been spying and hiding since over night\mbox{---}they would very
likely take a different view from the others. I was in a deuce of
a stew about that for hours, as it seemed, until the shindy of the
arrival began.

{}``But they took it down\mbox{---}the whole blessed village took
it down. At the cost of sitting up stiff and stern, as much like those
sitting Egyptian images one sees as I could manage, for pretty nearly
twelve hours, I should guess at least, on end, I got over it. You'd
hardly think what it meant in that heat and stink. I don't think any
of them dreamt of the man inside. I was just a wonderful leathery
great joss that had come up with luck out of the water. But the fatigue!\ the
heat!\ the beastly closeness!\ the mackintosheriness and the rum!\ and
the fuss! They lit a stinking fire on a kind of lava slab there was
before me, and brought in a lot of gory muck\mbox{---}the worst
parts of what they were feasting on outside, the Beasts\mbox{---}and
burnt it all in my honour. I was getting a bit hungry, but I understand
now how gods manage to do without eating, what with the smell of burnt
offerings about them. And they brought in a lot of the stuff they'd
got off the brig and, among other stuff, what I was a bit relieved
to see, the kind of pneumatic pump that was used for the compressed
air affair, and then a lot of chaps and girls came in and danced about
me something disgraceful. It's extraordinary the different ways different
people have of showing respect. If I'd had a hatchet handy I'd have
gone for the lot of them\mbox{---}they made me feel that wild. All
this time I sat as stiff as company, not knowing anything better to
do. And at last, when nightfall came, and the wattle joss-house place
got a bit too shadowy for their taste\mbox{---}all these here savages
are afraid of the dark, you know\mbox{---}and I started a sort of
`Moo'\ noise, they built big bonfires outside and left me alone in
peace in the darkness of my hut, free to unscrew my windows a bit
and think things over, and feel just as bad as I liked. And, Lord!
I was sick.

{}``I was weak and hungry, and my mind kept on behaving like a beetle
on a pin, tremendous activity and nothing done at the end of it. Come
round just where it was before. There was sorrowing for the other
chaps, beastly drunkards certainly, but not deserving such a fate,
and young Sanders with the spear through his neck wouldn't go out
of my mind. There was the treasure down there in the \emph{Ocean Pioneer},
and how one might get it and hide it somewhere safer, and get away
and come back for it. And there was the puzzle where to get anything
to eat. I tell you I was fair rambling. I was afraid to ask by signs
for food, for fear of behaving too human, and so there I sat and hungered
until very near the dawn. Then the village got a bit quiet, and I
couldn't stand it any longer, and I went out and got some stuff like
artichokes in a bowl and some sour milk. What was left of these I
put away among the other offerings, just to give them a hint of my
tastes. And in the morning they came to worship, and found me sitting
up stiff and respectable on their previous god, just as they'd left
me overnight. I'd got my back against the central pillar of the hut,
and, practically, I was asleep. And that's how I became a god among
the heathen\mbox{---}a false god no doubt, and blasphemous, but
one can't always pick and choose.

{}``Now, I don't want to crack myself up as a god beyond my merits,
but I must confess that while I was god to these people they was extraordinary
successful. I don't say there's anything in it, mind you. They won
a battle with another tribe\mbox{---}I got a lot of offerings I
didn't want through it\mbox{---}they had wonderful fishing, and
their crop of pourra was exceptional fine. And they counted the capture
of the brig among the benefits I brought 'em. I must say I don't think
that was a poor record for a perfectly new hand. And, though perhaps
you'd scarcely credit it, I was the tribal god of those beastly savages
for pretty nearly four months\ldots{}.

{}``What else could I do, man? But I didn't wear that diving-dress
all the time. I made 'em rig me up a sort of holy of holies, and a
deuce of a time I had too, making them understand what it was I wanted
them to do. That indeed was the great difficulty\mbox{---}making
them understand my wishes. I couldn't let myself down by talking their
lingo badly\mbox{---}even if I'd been able to speak at all\mbox{---}and
I couldn't go flapping a lot of gestures at them. So I drew pictures
in sand and sat down beside them and hooted like one o'clock. Sometimes
they did the things I wanted all right, and sometimes they did them
all wrong. They was always very willing, certainly. All the while
I was puzzling how I was to get the confounded business settled. Every
night before the dawn I used to march out in full rig and go off to
a place where I could see the channel in which the \emph{Ocean Pioneer}
lay sunk, and once even, one moonlight night, I tried to walk out
to her, but the weeds and rocks and dark clean beat me. I didn't get
back till full day, and then I found all those silly niggers out on
the beach praying their sea-god to return to them. I was that vexed
and tired, messing and tumbling about, and coming up and going down
again, I could have punched their silly heads all round when they
started rejoicing. I'm hanged if I like so much ceremony.

{}``And then came the missionary. That missionary! It was in the
afternoon, and I was sitting in state in my outer temple place, sitting
on that old black stone of theirs when he came. I heard a row outside
and jabbering, and then his voice speaking to an interpreter. `They
worship stocks and stones,'\ he said, and I knew what was up, in
a flash. I had one of my windows out for comfort, and I sang out straight
away on the spur of the moment. `Stocks and stones!'\ I says. `You
come inside,'\ I says, `and I'll punch your blooming head.' There
was a kind of silence and more jabbering, and in he came, Bible in
hand, after the manner of them\mbox{---}a little sandy chap in specks
and a pith helmet. I flatter myself that me sitting there in the shadows,
with my copper head and my big goggles, struck him a bit of a heap
at first. `Well,'\ I says, `how's the trade in calico?' for I don't
hold with missionaries.

{}``I had a lark with that missionary. He was a raw hand, and quite
outclassed with a man like me. He gasped out who was I, and I told
him to read the inscription at my feet if he wanted to know. Down
he goes to read, and his interpreter, being of course as superstitious
as any of them, took it as an act of worship and plumped down like
a shot. All my people gave a howl of triumph, and there wasn't any
more business to be done in my village after that journey, not by
the likes of him.

{}``But, of course, I was a fool to choke him off like that. If I'd
had any sense I should have told him straight away of the treasure
and taken him into Co. I've no doubt he'd have come into Co. A child,
with a few hours to think it over, could have seen the connection
between my diving-dress and the loss of the \emph{Ocean Pioneer}.
A week after he left I went out one morning and saw the \emph{Motherhood},
the salver's ship from Starr Race, towing up the channel and sounding.
The whole blessed game was up, and all my trouble thrown away. Gummy!
How wild I felt! And guying it in that stinking silly dress! Four
months!''

The sunburnt man's story degenerated again. {}``Think of it,''\ he
said, when he emerged to linguistic purity once more. {}``Forty thousand
pounds worth of gold.''

{}``Did the little missionary come back?''\ I asked.

{}``Oh, yes! Bless him! And he pledged his reputation there was a
man inside the god, and started out to see as much with tremendous
ceremony. But there wasn't\mbox{---}he got sold again. I always
did hate scenes and explanations, and long before he came I was out
of it all\mbox{---}going home to Banya along the coast, hiding in
bushes by day, and thieving food from the villages by night. Only
weapon, a spear. No clothes, no money. Nothing. My face was my fortune,
as the saying is. And just a squeak of eight thousand pounds of gold\mbox{---}fifth
share. But the natives cut up rusty, thank goodness, because they
thought it was him had driven their luck away.''


\chapter*{\raggedright THE NEW ACCELERATOR}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{THE NEW ACCELERATOR}

\markboth{TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM}{THE NEW ACCELERATOR}

Certainly, if ever a man found a guinea when he was looking for a
pin it is my good friend Professor Gibberne. I have heard before of
investigators overshooting the mark, but never quite to the extent
that he has done. He has really, this time at any rate, without any
touch of exaggeration in the phrase, found something to revolutionise
human life. And that when he was simply seeking an all-round nervous
stimulant to bring languid people up to the stresses of these pushful
days. I have tasted the stuff now several times, and I cannot do better
than describe the effect the thing had on me. That there are astonishing
experiences in store for all in search of new sensations will become
apparent enough.

Professor Gibberne, as many people know, is my neighbour in Folkestone.
Unless my memory plays me a trick, his portrait at various ages has
already appeared in \emph{The Strand Magazine}\mbox{---}I think
late in 1899; but I am unable to look it up because I have lent that
volume to some one who has never sent it back. The reader may, perhaps,
recall the high forehead and the singularly long black eyebrows that
give such a Mephistophelian touch to his face. He occupies one of
those pleasant little detached houses in the mixed style that make
the western end of the Upper Sandgate Road so interesting. His is
the one with the Flemish gables and the Moorish portico, and it is
in the little room with the mullioned bay window that he works when
he is down here, and in which of an evening we have so often smoked
and talked together. He is a mighty jester, but, besides, he likes
to talk to me about his work; he is one of those men who find a help
and stimulus in talking, and so I have been able to follow the conception
of the New Accelerator right up from a very early stage. Of course,
the greater portion of his experimental work is not done in Folkestone,
but in Gower Street, in the fine new laboratory next to the hospital
that he has been the first to use.

As every one knows, or at least as all intelligent people know, the
special department in which Gibberne has gained so great and deserved
a reputation among physiologists is the action of drugs upon the nervous
system. Upon soporifics, sedatives, and anaesthetics he is, I am told,
unequalled. He is also a chemist of considerable eminence, and I suppose
in the subtle and complex jungle of riddles that centres about the
ganglion cell and the axis fibre there are little cleared places of
his making, little glades of illumination, that, until he sees fit
to publish his results, are still inaccessible to every other living
man. And in the last few years he has been particularly assiduous
upon this question of nervous stimulants, and already, before the
discovery of the New Accelerator, very successful with them. Medical
science has to thank him for at least three distinct and absolutely
safe invigorators of unrivalled value to practising men. In cases
of exhaustion the preparation known as Gibberne's B Syrup has, I suppose,
saved more lives already than any lifeboat round the coast.

{}``But none of these little things begin to satisfy me yet,''\ he
told me nearly a year ago. {}``Either they increase the central energy
without affecting the nerves or they simply increase the available
energy by lowering the nervous conductivity; and all of them are unequal
and local in their operation. One wakes up the heart and viscera and
leaves the brain stupefied, one gets at the brain champagne fashion
and does nothing good for the solar plexus, and what I want\mbox{---}and
what, if it's an earthly possibility, I mean to have\mbox{---} is
a stimulant that stimulates all round, that wakes you up for a time
from the crown of your head to the tip of your great toe, and makes
you go two\mbox{---}or even three\mbox{---}to everybody else's
one. Eh? That's the thing I'm after.''

{}``It would tire a man,''\ I said.

{}``Not a doubt of it. And you'd eat double or treble\mbox{---}and
all that. But just think what the thing would mean. Imagine yourself
with a little phial like this''\mbox{---}he held up a little bottle
of green glass and marked his points with it\mbox{---}{}``and in
this precious phial is the power to think twice as fast, move twice
as quickly, do twice as much work in a given time as you could otherwise
do.''

{}``But is such a thing possible?''

{}``I believe so. If it isn't, I've wasted my time for a year. These
various preparations of the hypophosphites, for example, seem to show
that something of the sort\ldots{}. Even if it was only one and a
half times as fast it would do.''

{}``It \textit{would} do,''\ I said.

{}``If you were a statesman in a corner, for example, time rushing
up against you, something urgent to be done, eh?''

{}``He could dose his private secretary,''\ I said.

{}``And gain\mbox{---}double time. And think if \textit{you}, for
example, wanted to finish a book.''

{}``Usually,''\ I said, {}``I wish I'd never begun 'em.''

{}``Or a doctor, driven to death, wants to sit down and think out
a case. Or a barrister\mbox{---}or a man cramming for an examination.''

{}``Worth a guinea a drop,''\ said I, {}``and more to men like
that.''

{}``And in a duel, again,''\ said Gibberne, {}``where it all depends
on your quickness in pulling the trigger.''

{}``Or in fencing,''\ I echoed.

{}``You see,''\ said Gibberne, {}``if I get it as an all-round
thing it will really do you no harm at all\mbox{---}except perhaps
to an infinitesimal degree it brings you nearer old age. You will
just have lived twice to other people's once\mbox{---}''

{}``I suppose,''\ I meditated, {}``in a duel\mbox{---}it would
be fair?''

{}``That's a question for the seconds,''\ said Gibberne.

I harked back further. {}``And you really think such a thing \textit{is}
possible?''\ I said.

{}``As possible,''\ said Gibberne, and glanced at something that
went throbbing by the window, {}``as a motor-bus. As a matter of
fact\mbox{---}''

He paused and smiled at me deeply, and tapped slowly on the edge of
his desk with the green phial. {}``I think I know the stuff\ldots{}.
Already I've got something coming.'' The nervous smile upon his face
betrayed the gravity of his revelation. He rarely talked of his actual
experimental work unless things were very near the end. {}``And it
may be, it may be\mbox{---}I shouldn't be surprised\mbox{---}it
may even do the thing at a greater rate than twice.''

{}``It will be rather a big thing,''\ I hazarded.

{}``It will be, I think, rather a big thing.''

But I don't think he quite knew what a big thing it was to be, for
all that.

I remember we had several talks about the stuff after that. {}``The
New Accelerator''\ he called it, and his tone about it grew more
confident on each occasion. Sometimes he talked nervously of unexpected
physiological results its use might have, and then he would get a
little unhappy; at others he was frankly mercenary, and we debated
long and anxiously how the preparation might be turned to commercial
account. {}``It's a good thing,''\ said Gibberne, {}``a tremendous
thing. I know I'm giving the world something, and I think it only
reasonable we should expect the world to pay. The dignity of science
is all very well, but I think somehow I must have the monopoly of
the stuff for, say, ten years. I don't see why \textit{all} the fun
in life should go to the dealers in ham.''

My own interest in the coming drug certainly did not wane in the time.
I have always had a queer little twist towards metaphysics in my mind.
I have always been given to paradoxes about space and time, and it
seemed to me that Gibberne was really preparing no less than the absolute
acceleration of life. Suppose a man repeatedly dosed with such a preparation:
he would live an active and record life indeed, but he would be an
adult at eleven, middle-aged at twenty-five, and by thirty well on
the road to senile decay. It seemed to me that so far Gibberne was
only going to do for any one who took his drug exactly what Nature
has done for the Jews and \textit{\emph{Orientals}}, who are men in
their teens and aged by fifty, and quicker in thought and act than
we are all the time. The marvel of drugs has always been great to
my mind; you can madden a man, calm a man, make him incredibly strong
and alert or a helpless log, quicken this passion and allay that,
all by means of drugs, and here was a new miracle to be added to this
strange armoury of phials the doctors use! But Gibberne was far too
eager upon his technical points to enter very keenly into my aspect
of the question.

It was the 7th or 8th of August when he told me the distillation that
would decide his failure or success for a time was going forward as
we talked, and it was on the 10th that he told me the thing was done
and the New Accelerator a tangible reality in the world. I met him
as I was going up the Sandgate Hill towards Folkestone\mbox{---}I
think I was going to get my hair cut, and he came hurrying down to
meet me\mbox{---}I suppose he was coming to my house to tell me
at once of his success. I remember that his eyes were unusually bright
and his face flushed, and I noted even then the swift alacrity of
his step.

{}``It's done,''\ he cried, and gripped my hand, speaking very
fast; {}``it's more than done. Come up to my house and see.''

{}``Really?''

{}``Really!''\ he shouted. {}``Incredibly! Come up and see.''

{}``And it does\mbox{---}twice?

{}``It does more, much more. It scares me. Come up and see the stuff.
Taste it! Try it! It's the most amazing stuff on earth.'' He gripped
my arm and, walking at such a pace that he forced me into a trot,
went shouting with me up the hill. A whole char-a-banc-ful of people
turned and stared at us in unison after the manner of people in chars-a-banc.
It was one of those hot, clear days that Folkestone sees so much of,
every colour incredibly bright and every outline hard. There was a
breeze, of course, but not so much breeze as sufficed under these
conditions to keep me cool and dry. I panted for mercy.

{}``I'm not walking fast, am I?''\ cried Gibberne, and slackened
his pace to a quick march.

{}``You've been taking some of this stuff,''\ I puffed.

{}``No,''\ he said. {}``At the utmost a drop of water that stood
in a beaker from which I had washed out the last traces of the stuff.
I took some last night, you know. But that is ancient history, now.''

{}``And it goes twice?''\ I said, nearing his doorway in a grateful
perspiration.

{}``It goes a thousand times, many thousand times!''\ cried Gibberne,
with a dramatic gesture, flinging open his Early English carved oak
gate.

{}``Phew!''\ said I, and followed him to the door.

{}``I don't know how many times it goes,''\ he said, with his latch-key
in his hand.

{}``And you\mbox{---}''

{}``It throws all sorts of light on nervous physiology, it kicks
the theory of vision into a perfectly new shape!\ldots{} Heaven knows
how many thousand times. We'll try all that after\mbox{---}The thing
is to try the stuff now.''

{}``Try the stuff?''\ I said, as we went along the passage.

{}``Rather,''\ said Gibberne, turning on me in his study. {}``There
it is in that little green phial there! Unless you happen to be afraid?''

I am a careful man by nature, and only theoretically adventurous.
I \textit{was} afraid. But on the other hand there is pride.

{}``Well,''\ I haggled. {}``You say you've tried it?''

{}``I've tried it,''\ he said, {}``and I don't look hurt by it,
do I? I don't even look livery and I \textit{feel}\mbox{---}''

I sat down. {}``Give me the potion,''\ I said. {}``If the worst
comes to the worst it will save having my hair cut, and that I think
is one of the most hateful duties of a civilised man. How do you take
the mixture?''

{}``With water,''\ said Gibberne, whacking down a carafe.

He stood up in front of his desk and regarded me in his easy chair;
his manner was suddenly affected by a touch of the Harley Street specialist.
{}``It's rum stuff, you know,''\ he said.

I made a gesture with my hand.

{}``I must warn you in the first place as soon as you've got it down
to shut your eyes, and open them very cautiously in a minute or so's
time. One still sees. The sense of vision is a question of length
of vibration, and not of multitude of impacts; but there's a kind
of shock to the retina, a nasty giddy confusion just at the time,
if the eyes are open. Keep 'em shut.''

{}``Shut,''\ I said. {}``Good!''

{}``And the next thing is, keep still. Don't begin to whack about.
You may fetch something a nasty rap if you do. Remember you will be
going several thousand times faster than you ever did before, heart,
lungs, muscles, brain\mbox{---}everything\mbox{---}and you will
hit hard without knowing it. You won't know it, you know. You'll feel
just as you do now. Only everything in the world will seem to be going
ever so many thousand times slower than it ever went before. That's
what makes it so deuced queer.''

{}``Lor',''\ I said. {}``And you mean\mbox{---}''

{}``You'll see,''\ said he, and took up a little measure. He glanced
at the material on his desk. {}``Glasses,''\ he said, {}``water.
All here. Mustn't take too much for the first attempt.''

The little phial glucked out its precious contents.

{}``Don't forget what I told you,''\ he said, turning the contents
of the measure into a glass in the manner of an Italian waiter measuring
whisky. {}``Sit with the eyes tightly shut and in absolute stillness
for two minutes,''\ he said. {}``Then you will hear me speak.''

He added an inch or so of water to the little dose in each glass.

{}``By-the-by,''\ he said, {}``don't put your glass down. Keep
it in your hand and rest your hand on your knee. Yes\mbox{---}so.
And now\mbox{---}''

He raised his glass.

{}``The New Accelerator,''\ I said.

{}``The New Accelerator,''\ he answered, and we touched glasses
and drank, and instantly I closed my eyes.

You know that blank non-existence into which one drops when one has
taken {}``gas.'' For an indefinite interval it was like that. Then
I heard Gibberne telling me to wake up, and I stirred and opened my
eyes. There he stood as he had been standing, glass still in hand.
It was empty, that was all the difference.

{}``Well?''\ said I.

{}``Nothing out of the way?''

{}``Nothing. A slight feeling of exhilaration, perhaps. Nothing more.''

{}``Sounds?''

{}``Things are still,''\ I said. {}``By Jove!\ yes! They \textit{are}
still. Except the sort of faint pat, patter, like rain falling on
different things. What is it?''

{}``Analysed sounds,''\ I think he said, but I am not sure. He
glanced at the window. {}``Have you ever seen a curtain before a
window fixed in that way before?''

I followed his eyes, and there was the end of the curtain, frozen,
as it were, corner high, in the act of flapping briskly in the breeze.

{}``No,''\ said I; {}``that's odd.''

{}``And here,''\ he said, and opened the hand that held the glass.
Naturally I winced, expecting the glass to smash. But so far from
smashing it did not even seem to stir; it hung in mid-air\mbox{---}motionless.

{}``Roughly speaking,''\ said Gibberne, {}``an object in these
latitudes falls 16 feet in the first second. This glass is falling
16 feet in a second now. Only, you see, it hasn't been falling yet
for the hundredth part of a second. That gives you some idea of the
pace of my Accelerator.'' And he waved his hand round and round,
over and under the slowly sinking glass. Finally, he took it by the
bottom, pulled it down, and placed it very carefully on the table.
{}``Eh?'' he said to me, and laughed.

{}``That seems all right,''\ I said, and began very gingerly to
raise myself from my chair. I felt perfectly well, very light and
comfortable, and quite confident in my mind. I was going fast all
over. My heart, for example, was beating a thousand times a second,
but that caused me no discomfort at all. I looked out of the window.
An immovable cyclist, head down and with a frozen puff of dust behind
his driving-wheel, scorched to overtake a galloping char-a-banc that
did not stir. I gaped in amazement at this incredible spectacle. {}``Gibberne,''\ I
cried, {}``how long will this confounded stuff last?''

{}``Heaven knows!''\ he answered. {}``Last time I took it I went
to bed and slept it off. I tell you, I was frightened. It must have
lasted some minutes, I think\mbox{---}it seemed like hours. But
after a bit it slows down rather suddenly, I believe.''

I was proud to observe that I did not feel frightened\mbox{---}I
suppose because there were two of us. {}``Why shouldn't we go out?''\ I
asked.

{}``Why not?''

{}``They'll see us.''

{}``Not they. Goodness, no! Why, we shall be going a thousand times
faster than the quickest conjuring trick that was ever done. Come
along! Which way shall we go? Window, or door?''

And out by the window we went.

Assuredly of all the strange experiences that I have ever had, or
imagined, or read of other people having or imagining, that little
raid I made with Gibberne on the Folkestone Leas, under the influence
of the New Accelerator, was the strangest and maddest of all. We went
out by his gate into the road, and there we made a minute examination
of the statuesque passing traffic. The tops of the wheels and some
of the legs of the horses of this char-a-banc, the end of the whip-lash
and the lower jaw of the conductor\mbox{---}who was just beginning
to yawn\mbox{---}were perceptibly in motion, but all the rest of
the lumbering conveyance seemed still. And quite noiseless except
for a faint rattling that came from one man's throat! And as parts
of this frozen edifice there were a driver, you know, and a conductor,
and eleven people! The effect as we walked about the thing began by
being madly queer, and ended by being disagreeable. There they were,
people like ourselves and yet not like ourselves, frozen in careless
attitudes, caught in mid-gesture. A girl and a man smiled at one another,
a leering smile that threatened to last for evermore; a woman in a
floppy capelline rested her arm on the rail and stared at Gibberne's
house with the unwinking stare of eternity; a man stroked his moustache
like a figure of wax, and another stretched a tiresome stiff hand
with extended fingers towards his loosened hat. We stared at them,
we laughed at them, we made faces at them, and then a sort of disgust
of them came upon us, and we turned away and walked round in front
of the cyclist towards the Leas.

{}``Goodness!''\ cried Gibberne, suddenly; {}``look there!''

He pointed, and there at the tip of his finger and sliding down the
air with wings flapping slowly and at the speed of an exceptionally
languid snail\mbox{---}was a bee.

And so we came out upon the Leas. There the thing seemed madder than
ever. The band was playing in the upper stand, though all the sound
it made for us was a low-pitched, wheezy rattle, a sort of prolonged
last sigh that passed at times into a sound like the slow, muffled
ticking of some monstrous clock. Frozen people stood erect, strange,
silent, self-conscious-looking dummies hung unstably in mid-stride,
promenading upon the grass. I passed close to a little poodle dog
suspended in the act of leaping, and watched the slow movement of
his legs as he sank to earth. {}``Lord, look here!''\ cried Gibberne,
and we halted for a moment before a magnificent person in white faint-striped
flannels, white shoes, and a Panama hat, who turned back to wink at
two gaily dressed ladies he had passed. A wink, studied with such
leisurely deliberation as we could afford, is an unattractive thing.
It loses any quality of alert gaiety, and one remarks that the winking
eye does not completely close, that under its drooping lid appears
the lower edge of an eyeball and a little line of white. {}``Heaven
give me memory,''\ said I, {}``and I will never wink again.''

{}``Or smile,''\ said Gibberne, with his eye on the lady's answering
teeth.

{}``It's infernally hot, somehow,''\ said I. {}``Let's go slower.''

{}``Oh, come along!''\ said Gibberne.

We picked our way among the bath-chairs in the path. Many of the people
sitting in the chairs seemed almost natural in their passive poses,
but the contorted scarlet of the bandsmen was not a restful thing
to see. A purple-faced little gentleman was frozen in the midst of
a violent struggle to refold his newspaper against the wind; there
were many evidences that all these people in their sluggish way were
exposed to a considerable breeze, a breeze that had no existence so
far as our sensations went. We came out and walked a little way from
the crowd, and turned and regarded it. To see all that multitude changed,
to a picture, smitten rigid, as it were, into the semblance of realistic
wax, was impossibly wonderful. It was absurd, of course; but it filled
me with an irrational, an exultant sense of superior advantage. Consider
the wonder of it! All that I had said, and thought, and done since
the stuff had begun to work in my veins had happened, so far as those
people, so far as the world in general went, in the twinkling of an
eye. {}``The New Accelerator\mbox{---}''\ I began, but Gibberne
interrupted me.

{}``There's that infernal old woman!''\ he said.

{}``What old woman?''

{}``Lives next door to me,''\ said Gibberne. {}``Has a lapdog
that yaps. Gods! The temptation is strong!''

There is something very boyish and impulsive about Gibberne at times.
Before I could expostulate with him he had dashed forward, snatched
the unfortunate animal out of visible existence, and was running violently
with it towards the cliff of the Leas. It was most extraordinary.
The little brute, you know, didn't bark or wriggle or make the slightest
sign of vitality. It kept quite stiffly in an attitude of somnolent
repose, and Gibberne held it by the neck. It was like running about
with a dog of wood. {}``Gibberne,''\ I cried, {}``put it down!''\ Then
I said something else. {}``If you run like that, Gibberne,''\ I
cried, {}``you'll set your clothes on fire. Your linen trousers are
going brown as it is!''

He clapped his hand on his thigh and stood hesitating on the verge.
{}``Gibberne,''\ I cried, coming up, {}``put it down. This heat
is too much! It's our running so! Two or three miles a second! Friction
of the air!''

{}``What?''\ he said, glancing at the dog.

{}``Friction of the air,''\ I shouted. {}``Friction of the air.
Going too fast. Like meteorites and things. Too hot. And, Gibberne!
Gibberne! I'm all over pricking and a sort of perspiration. You can
see people stirring slightly. I believe the stuff's working off! Put
that dog down.''

{}``Eh?''\ he said.

{}``It's working off,''\ I repeated. {}``We're too hot and the
stuff's working off! I'm wet through.''

He stared at me. Then at the band, the wheezy rattle of whose performance
was certainly going faster. Then with a tremendous sweep of the arm
he hurled the dog away from him and it went spinning upward, still
inanimate, and hung at last over the grouped parasols of a knot of
chattering people. Gibberne was gripping my elbow. {}``By Jove!''\ he
cried. {}``I believe\mbox{---}it is! A sort of hot pricking and\mbox{---}yes.
That man's moving his pocket-handkerchief! Perceptibly. We must get
out of this sharp.''

But we could not get out of it sharply enough. Luckily, perhaps! For
we might have run, and if we had run we should, I believe, have burst
into flames. Almost certainly we should have burst into flames! You
know we had neither of us thought of that\ldots{}.

But before we could even begin to run the action of the drug had ceased.
It was the business of a minute fraction of a second. The effect of
the New Accelerator passed like the drawing of a curtain, vanished
in the movement of a hand. I heard Gibberne's voice in infinite alarm.
{}``Sit down,''\ he said, and flop, down upon the turf at the edge
of the Leas I sat\mbox{---}scorching as I sat. There is a patch
of burnt grass there still where I sat down. The whole stagnation
seemed to wake up as I did so, the disarticulated vibration of the
band rushed together into a blast of music, the promenaders put their
feet down and walked their ways, the papers and flags began flapping,
smiles passed into words, the winker finished his wink and went on
his way complacently, and all the seated people moved and spoke.

The whole world had come alive again, was going as fast as we were,
or rather we were going no faster than the rest of the world. It was
like slowing down as one comes into a railway station. Everything
seemed to spin round for a second or two, I had the most transient
feeling of nausea, and that was all. And the little dog which had
seemed to hang for a moment when the force of Gibberne's arm was expended
fell with a swift acceleration clean through a lady's parasol!

That was the saving of us. Unless it was for one corpulent old gentleman
in a bath-chair, who certainly did start at the sight of us and afterwards
regarded us at intervals with a darkly suspicious eye, and, finally,
I believe, said something to his nurse about us, I doubt if a solitary
person remarked our sudden appearance among them. Plop! We must have
appeared abruptly. We ceased to smoulder almost at once, though the
turf beneath me was uncomfortably hot. The attention of every one\mbox{---}including
even the Amusements'\ Association band, which on this occasion, for
the only time in its history, got out of tune\mbox{---}was arrested
by the amazing fact, and the still more amazing yapping and uproar
caused by the fact that a respectable, over-fed lap-dog sleeping quietly
to the east of the bandstand should suddenly fall through the parasol
of a lady on the west\mbox{---}in a slightly singed condition due
to the extreme velocity of its movements through the air. In these
absurd days, too, when we are all trying to be as psychic, and silly,
and superstitious as possible! People got up and trod on other people,
chairs were overturned, the Leas policeman ran. How the matter settled
itself I do not know\mbox{---}we were much too anxious to disentangle
ourselves from the affair and get out of range of the eye of the old
gentleman in the bath-chair to make minute inquiries. As soon as we
were sufficiently cool and sufficiently recovered from our giddiness
and nausea and confusion of mind to do so we stood up and, skirting
the crowd, directed our steps back along the road below the \textit{\emph{Metropole}}
towards Gibberne's house. But amidst the din I heard very distinctly
the gentleman who had been sitting beside the lady of the ruptured
sunshade using quite unjustifiable threats and language to one of
those chair-attendants who have {}``Inspector''\ written on their
caps. {}``If you didn't throw the dog,''\ he said, {}``who \textit{did}?''

The sudden return of movement and familiar noises, and our natural
anxiety about ourselves (our clothes were still dreadfully hot, and
the fronts of the thighs of Gibberne's white trousers were scorched
a drabbish brown), prevented the minute observations I should have
liked to make on all these things. Indeed, I really made no observations
of any scientific value on that return. The bee, of course, had gone.
I looked for that cyclist, but he was already out of sight as we came
into the Upper Sandgate Road or hidden from us by traffic; the char-a-banc,
however, with its people now all alive and stirring, was clattering
along at a spanking pace almost abreast of the nearer church.

We noted, however, that the window-sill on which we had stepped in
getting out of the house was slightly singed, and that the impressions
of our feet on the gravel of the path were unusually deep.

So it was I had my first experience of the New Accelerator. Practically
we had been running about and saying and doing all sorts of things
in the space of a second or so of time. We had lived half an hour
while the band had played, perhaps, two bars. But the effect it had
upon us was that the whole world had stopped for our convenient inspection.
Considering all things, and particularly considering our rashness
in venturing out of the house, the experience might certainly have
been much more disagreeable than it was. It showed, no doubt, that
Gibberne has still much to learn before his preparation is a manageable
convenience, but its practicability it certainly demonstrated beyond
all cavil.

Since that adventure he has been steadily bringing its use under control,
and I have several times, and without the slightest bad result, taken
measured doses under his direction; though I must confess I have not
yet ventured abroad again while under its influence. I may mention,
for example, that this story has been written at one sitting and without
interruption, except for the nibbling of some chocolate, by its means.
I began at 6.25, and my watch is now very nearly at the minute past
the half-hour. The convenience of securing a long, uninterrupted spell
of work in the midst of a day full of engagements cannot be exaggerated.
Gibberne is now working at the quantitative handling of his preparation,
with especial reference to its distinctive effects upon different
types of constitution. He then hopes to find a Retarder with which
to dilute its present rather excessive potency. The Retarder will,
of course, have the reverse effect to the Accelerator; used alone
it should enable the patient to spread a few seconds over many hours
of ordinary time,\mbox{---}and so to maintain an apathetic inaction,
a glacier-like absence of alacrity, amidst the most animated or irritating
surroundings. The two things together must necessarily work an entire
revolution in civilised existence. It is the beginning of our escape
from that Time Garment of which Carlyle speaks. While this Accelerator
will enable us to concentrate ourselves with tremendous impact upon
any moment or occasion that demands our utmost sense and vigour, the
Retarder will enable us to pass in passive tranquillity through infinite
hardship and tedium. Perhaps I am a little optimistic about the Retarder,
which has indeed still to be discovered, but about the Accelerator
there is no possible sort of doubt whatever. Its appearance upon the
market in a convenient, controllable, and assimilable form is a matter
of the next few months. It will be obtainable of all chemists and
druggists, in small green bottles, at a high but, considering its
extraordinary qualities, by no means excessive price. Gibberne's Nervous
Accelerator it will be called, and he hopes to be able to supply it
in three strengths: one in 200, one in 900, and one in 2000, distinguished
by yellow, pink, and white labels respectively.

No doubt its use renders a great number of very extraordinary things
possible; for, of course, the most remarkable and, possibly, even
criminal proceedings may be effected with impunity by thus dodging,
as it were, into the interstices of time. Like all potent preparations
it will be liable to abuse. We have, however, discussed this aspect
of the question very thoroughly, and we have decided that this is
purely a matter of medical jurisprudence and altogether outside our
province. We shall manufacture and sell the Accelerator, and, as for
the consequences\mbox{---}we shall see.


\chapter*{\raggedright MR.\ LEDBETTER'S VACATION}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{MR. LEDBETTER'S VACATION}

\markboth{TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM}{MR. LEDBETTER'S VACATION}

My friend, Mr.\ Ledbetter, is a round-faced little man, whose natural
mildness of eye is gigantically exaggerated when you catch the beam
through his glasses, and whose deep, deliberate voice irritates irritable
people. A certain elaborate clearness of enunciation has come with
him to his present vicarage from his scholastic days, an elaborate
clearness of enunciation and a certain nervous determination to be
firm and correct upon all issues, important and unimportant alike.
He is a sacerdotalist and a chess player, and suspected by many of
the secret practice of the higher mathematics\mbox{---}creditable
rather than interesting things. His conversation is copious and given
much to needless detail. By many, indeed, his intercourse is condemned,
to put it plainly, as {}``boring,''\ and such have even done me
the compliment to wonder why I countenance him. But, on the other
hand, there is a large faction who marvel at his countenancing such
a dishevelled, discreditable acquaintance as myself. Few appear to
regard our friendship with equanimity. But that is because they do
not know of the link that binds us, of my amiable connection \emph{via}
Jamaica with Mr.\ Ledbetter's past.

About that past he displays an anxious modesty. {}``I do not \textit{know}
what I should do if it became known,''\ he says; and repeats, impressively,
{}``I do not know \textit{what} I should do.'' As a matter of fact,
I doubt if he would do anything except get very red about the ears.
But that will appear later; nor will I tell here of our first encounter,
since, as a general rule\mbox{---}though I am prone to break it\mbox{---}the
end of a story should come after, rather than before, the beginning.
And the beginning of the story goes a long way back; indeed, it is
now nearly twenty years since Fate, by a series of complicated and
startling man\oe{}uvres, brought Mr.\ Ledbetter, so to speak, into
my hands.

In those days I was living in Jamaica, and Mr.\ Ledbetter was a schoolmaster
in England. He was in orders, and already recognisably the same man
that he is to-day: the same rotundity of visage, the same or similar
glasses, and the same faint shadow of surprise in his resting expression.
He was, of course, dishevelled when I saw him, and his collar less
of a collar than a wet bandage, and that may have helped to bridge
the natural gulf between us\mbox{---}but of that, as I say, later.

The business began at Hithergate-on-Sea, and simultaneously with Mr.\ Ledbetter's
summer vacation. Thither he came for a greatly needed rest, with a
bright brown portmanteau marked {}``\emph{F.W.L.}'', a new white-and-black
straw hat, and two pairs of white flannel trousers. He was naturally
exhilarated at his release from school\mbox{---}for he was not very
fond of the boys he taught. After dinner he fell into a discussion
with a talkative person established in the boarding-house to which,
acting on the advice of his aunt, he had resorted. This talkative
person was the only other man in the house. Their discussion concerned
the melancholy disappearance of wonder and adventure in these latter
days, the prevalence of globe-trotting, the abolition of distance
by steam and electricity, the vulgarity of advertisement, the degradation
of men by civilisation, and many such things. Particularly was the
talkative person eloquent on the decay of human courage through security,
a security Mr.\ Ledbetter rather thoughtlessly joined him in deploring.
Mr.\ Ledbetter, in the first delight of emancipation from {}``duty,''\ and
being anxious, perhaps, to establish a reputation for manly conviviality,
partook, rather more freely than was advisable, of the excellent whisky
the talkative person produced. But he did not become intoxicated,
he insists.

He was simply eloquent beyond his sober wont, and with the finer edge
gone from his judgment. And after that long talk of the brave old
days that were past forever, he went out into moonlit Hithergate\mbox{---}alone
and up the cliff road where the villas cluster together.

He had bewailed, and now as he walked up the silent road he still
bewailed, the fate that had called him to such an uneventful life
as a pedagogue's. What a prosaic existence he led, so stagnant, so
colourless! Secure, methodical, year in year out, what call was there
for bravery? He thought enviously of those roving, medi\ae{}val days,
so near and so remote, of quests and spies and \emph{condottieri}
and many a risky blade-drawing business. And suddenly came a doubt,
a strange doubt, springing out of some chance thought of tortures,
and destructive altogether of the position he had assumed that evening.

Was he\mbox{---}Mr.\ Ledbetter\mbox{---}really, after all, so
brave as he assumed? Would he really be so pleased to have railways,
policemen, and security vanish suddenly from the earth?

The talkative man had spoken enviously of crime. {}``The burglar,''
he said, {}``is the only true adventurer left on earth. Think of
his single-handed fight against the whole civilised world!''\ And
Mr. Ledbetter had echoed his envy. {}``They \textit{do} have some
fun out of life,'' Mr.\ Ledbetter had said. {}``And about the only
people who do. Just think how it must feel to wire a lawn!''\ And
he had laughed wickedly. Now, in this franker intimacy of self-communion
he found himself instituting a comparison between his own brand of
courage and that of the habitual criminal. He tried to meet these
insidious questionings with blank assertion. {}``I could do all that,''\ said
Mr.\ Ledbetter. {}``I long to do all that. Only I do not give way
to my criminal impulses. My moral courage restrains me.'' But he
doubted even while he told himself these things.

Mr.\ Ledbetter passed a large villa standing by itself. Conveniently
situated above a quiet, practicable balcony was a window, gaping black,
wide open. At the time he scarcely marked it, but the picture of it
came with him, wove into his thoughts. He figured himself climbing
up that balcony, crouching\mbox{---}plunging into that dark, mysterious
interior. {}``Bah! You would not dare,''\ said the Spirit of Doubt.
{}``My duty to my fellow-men forbids,''\ said Mr.\ Ledbetter's
self-respect.

It was nearly eleven, and the little seaside town was already very
still. The whole world slumbered under the moonlight. Only one warm
oblong of window-blind far down the road spoke of waking life. He
turned and came back slowly towards the villa of the open window.
He stood for a time outside the gate, a battlefield of motives. {}``Let
us put things to the test,''\ said Doubt. {}``For the satisfaction
of these intolerable doubts, show that you dare go into that house.
Commit a burglary in blank. That, at any rate, is no crime.'' Very
softly he opened and shut the gate and slipped into the shadow of
the shrubbery. {}``This is foolish,''\ said Mr.\ Ledbetter's caution.
{}``I expected that,''\ said Doubt. His heart was beating fast,
but he was certainly not afraid. He was \textit{not} afraid. He remained
in that shadow for some considerable time.

The ascent of the balcony, it was evident, would have to be done in
a rush, for it was all in clear moonlight, and visible from the gate
into the avenue. A trellis thinly set with young, ambitious climbing
roses made the ascent ridiculously easy. There, in that black shadow
by the stone vase of flowers, one might crouch and take a closer view
of this gaping breach in the domestic defences, the open window. For
a while Mr.\ Ledbetter was as still as the night, and then that insidious
whisky tipped the balance. He dashed forward. He went up the trellis
with quick, convulsive movements, swung his legs over the parapet
of the balcony, and dropped panting in the shadow even as he had designed.
He was trembling violently, short of breath, and his heart pumped
noisily, but his mood was exultation. He could have shouted to find
he was so little afraid.

A happy line that he had learnt from Wills's {}``Mephistophles''\ came
into his mind as he crouched there. {}``I feel like a cat on the
tiles,'' he whispered to himself. It was far better than he had expected\mbox{---}this
adventurous exhilaration. He was sorry for all poor men to whom burglary
was unknown. Nothing happened. He was quite safe. And he was acting
in the bravest manner!

And now for the window, to make the burglary complete! Must he dare
do that? Its position above the front door defined it as a landing
or passage, and there were no looking-glasses or any bedroom signs
about it, or any other window on the first floor, to suggest the possibility
of a sleeper within. For a time he listened under the ledge, then
raised his eyes above the sill and peered in. Close at hand, on a
pedestal, and a little startling at first, was a nearly life-size
gesticulating bronze. He ducked, and after some time he peered again.
Beyond was a broad landing, faintly gleaming; a flimsy fabric of bead
curtain, very black and sharp, against a further window; a broad staircase,
plunging into a gulf of darkness below; and another ascending to the
second floor. He glanced behind him, but the stillness of the night
was unbroken. {}``Crime,''\ he whispered, {}``crime,'' and scrambled
softly and swiftly over the sill into the house. His feet fell noiselessly
on a mat of skin. He was a burglar indeed!

He crouched for a time, all ears and peering eyes. Outside was a scampering
and rustling, and for a moment he repented of his enterprise. A short
{}``miaow,''\ a spitting, and a rush into silence, spoke reassuringly
of cats. His courage grew. He stood up. Every one was abed, it seemed.
So easy is it to commit a burglary, if one is so minded. He was glad
he had put it to the test. He determined to take some petty trophy,
just to prove his freedom from any abject fear of the law, and depart
the way he had come.

He peered about him, and suddenly the critical spirit arose again.
Burglars did far more than such mere elementary entrance as this:
they went into rooms, they forced safes. Well\mbox{---}he was not
afraid. He could not force safes, because that would be a stupid want
of consideration for his hosts. But he would go into rooms\mbox{---}he
would go upstairs. More: he told himself that he was perfectly secure;
an empty house could not be more reassuringly still. He had to clench
his hands, nevertheless, and summon all his resolution before he began
very softly to ascend the dim staircase, pausing for several seconds
between each step. Above was a square landing with one open and several
closed doors; and all the house was still. For a moment he stood wondering
what would happen if some sleeper woke suddenly and emerged. The open
door showed a moonlit bedroom, the coverlet white and undisturbed.
Into this room he crept in three interminable minutes and took a piece
of soap for his plunder\mbox{---}his trophy. He turned to descend
even more softly than he had ascended. It was as easy as\mbox{---}

Hist!\ldots{}

Footsteps! On the gravel outside the house\mbox{---}and then the
noise of a latchkey, the yawn and bang of a door, and the spitting
of a match in the hall below. Mr.\ Ledbetter stood petrified by the
sudden discovery of the folly upon which he had come. {}``How on
earth am I to get out of this?''\ said Mr.\ Ledbetter.

The hall grew bright with a candle flame, some heavy object bumped
against the umbrella-stand, and feet were ascending the staircase.
In a flash Mr.\ Ledbetter realised that his retreat was closed. He
stood for a moment, a pitiful figure of penitent confusion. {}``My
goodness! What a \textit{fool} I have been!''\ he whispered, and
then darted swiftly across the shadowy landing into the empty bedroom
from which he had just come. He stood listening\mbox{---}quivering.
The footsteps reached the first-floor landing.

Horrible thought! This was possibly the latecomer's room! Not a moment
was to be lost! Mr.\ Ledbetter stooped beside the bed, thanked Heaven
for a valance, and crawled within its protection not ten seconds too
soon. He became motionless on hands and knees. The advancing candle-light
appeared through the thinner stitches of the fabric, the shadows ran
wildly about, and became rigid as the candle was put down.

{}``Lord, what a day!''\ said the newcomer, blowing noisily, and
it seemed he deposited some heavy burthen on what Mr.\ Ledbetter,
judging by the feet, decided to be a writing-table. The unseen then
went to the door and locked it, examined the fastenings of the windows
carefully and pulled down the blinds, and returning sat down upon
the bed with startling ponderosity.

{}``\textit{What} a day!''\ he said. {}``Good Lord!''\ and blew
again, and Mr.\ Ledbetter inclined to believe that the person was
mopping his face. His boots were good stout boots; the shadows of
his legs upon the valance suggested a formidable stoutness of aspect.
After a time he removed some upper garments\mbox{---}a coat and
waistcoat, Mr.\ Ledbetter inferred\mbox{---}and casting them over
the rail of the bed remained breathing less noisily, and as it seemed
cooling from a considerable temperature. At intervals he muttered
to himself, and once he laughed softly. And Mr.\ Ledbetter muttered
to himself, but he did not laugh. {}``Of all the foolish things,''\ said
Mr.\ Ledbetter. {}``What on earth am I to do now?''

His outlook was necessarily limited. The \textit{\emph{minute}} \emph{}\textit{\emph{apertures}}
between the stitches of the fabric of the valance admitted a certain
amount of light, but permitted no peeping. The shadows upon this curtain,
save for those sharply defined legs, were enigmatical, and intermingled
confusingly with the florid patterning of the chintz. Beneath the
edge of the valance a strip of carpet was visible, and, by cautiously
depressing his eye, Mr.\ Ledbetter found that this strip broadened
until the whole area of the floor came into view. The carpet was a
luxurious one, the room spacious, and, to judge by the \textit{\emph{castors}}
and so forth of the furniture, well equipped.

What he should do he found it difficult to imagine. To wait until
this person had gone to bed, and then, when he seemed to be sleeping,
to creep to the door, unlock it, and bolt headlong for that balcony
seemed the only possible thing to do. Would it be possible to jump
from the balcony? The danger of it! When he thought of the chances
against him, Mr.\ Ledbetter despaired. He was within an ace of thrusting
forth his head beside the gentleman's legs, coughing if necessary
to attract his attention, and then, smiling, apologising and explaining
his unfortunate intrusion by a few well-chosen sentences. But he found
these sentences hard to choose. {}``No doubt, sir, my appearance
is peculiar,''\ or, {}``I trust, sir, you will pardon my somewhat
ambiguous appearance from beneath you,''\ was about as much as he
could get.

Grave possibilities forced themselves on his attention. Suppose they
did not believe him, what would they do to him? Would his unblemished
high character count for nothing? Technically he was a burglar, beyond
dispute. Following out this train of thought, he was composing a lucid
apology for {}``this technical crime I have committed,''\ to be
delivered before sentence in the dock, when the stout gentleman got
up and began walking about the room. He locked and unlocked drawers,
and Mr.\ Ledbetter had a transient hope that he might be undressing.
But, no! He seated himself at the writing-table, and began to write
and then tear up documents. Presently the smell of burning cream-laid
paper mingled with the odour of cigars in Mr.\ Ledbetter's nostrils.

{}``The position I had assumed,''\ said Mr.\ Ledbetter when he
told me of these things, {}``was in many respects an ill-advised
one. A transverse bar beneath the bed depressed my head unduly, and
threw a disproportionate share of my weight upon my hands. After a
time, I experienced what is called, I believe, a crick in the neck.
The pressure of my hands on the coarsely-stitched carpet speedily
became painful. My knees, too, were painful, my trousers being drawn
tightly over them. At that time I wore rather higher collars than
I do now\mbox{---}two and a half inches, in fact\mbox{---}and
I discovered what I had not remarked before, that the edge of the
one I wore was frayed slightly under the chin. But much worse than
these things was an itching of my face, which I could only relieve
by violent grimacing\mbox{---}I tried to raise my hand, but the
rustle of the sleeve alarmed me. After a time I had to desist from
this relief also, because\mbox{---}happily in time\mbox{---}I
discovered that my facial contortions were shifting my glasses down
my nose. Their fall would, of course, have exposed me, and as it was
they came to rest in an oblique position of by no means stable equilibrium.
In addition I had a slight cold, and an intermittent desire to sneeze
or sniff caused me inconvenience. In fact, quite apart from the extreme
anxiety of my position, my physical discomfort became in a short time
very considerable indeed. But I had to stay there motionless, nevertheless.''

After an interminable time, there began a chinking sound. This deepened
into a rhythm: chink, chink, chink\mbox{---}twenty-five chinks\mbox{---}a
rap on the writing-table, and a grunt from the owner of the stout
legs. It dawned upon Mr.\ Ledbetter that this chinking was the chinking
of gold. He became incredulously curious as it went on. His curiosity
grew. Already, if that was the case, this extraordinary man must have
counted some hundreds of pounds. At last Mr.\ Ledbetter could resist
it no longer, and he began very cautiously to fold his arms and lower
his head to the level of the floor, in the hope of peeping under the
valance. He moved his feet, and one made a slight scraping on the
floor. Suddenly the chinking ceased. Mr.\ Ledbetter became rigid.
After a while the chinking was resumed. Then it ceased again, and
everything was still, except Mr.\ Ledbetter's heart\mbox{---}that
organ seemed to him to be beating like a drum.

The stillness continued. Mr.\ Ledbetter's head was now on the floor,
and he could see the stout legs as far as the shins. They were quite
still. The feet were resting on the toes and drawn back, as it seemed,
under the chair of the owner. Everything was quite still, everything
continued still. A wild hope came to Mr.\ Ledbetter that the unknown
was in a fit or suddenly dead, with his head upon the writing-table\ldots{}.

The stillness continued. What had happened? The desire to peep became
irresistible. Very cautiously Mr.\ Ledbetter shifted his hand forward,
projected a pioneer finger, and began to lift the valance immediately
next his eye. Nothing broke the stillness. He saw now the stranger's
knees, saw the back of the writing-table, and then\mbox{---}he was
staring at the barrel of a heavy revolver pointed over the writing-table
at his head.

{}``Come out of that, you scoundrel!''\ said the voice of the stout
gentleman in a tone of quiet concentration. {}``Come out. This side,
and now. None of your hanky-panky\mbox{---}come right out, now.''

Mr.\ Ledbetter came right out, a little reluctantly perhaps, but
without any hanky-panky, and at once, even as he was told.

{}``Kneel,''\ said the stout gentleman, {}``and hold up your hands.''

The valance dropped again behind Mr.\ Ledbetter, and he rose from
all-fours and held up his hands. {}``Dressed like a parson,''\ said
the stout gentleman. {}``I'm blest if he isn't! A little chap, too!
You \textit{scoundrel}! What the deuce possessed you to come here
to-night? What the deuce possessed you to get under my bed?''

He did not appear to require an answer, but proceeded at once to several
very objectionable remarks upon Mr.\ Ledbetter's personal appearance.
He was not a very big man, but he looked strong to Mr. Ledbetter:
he was as stout as his legs had promised, he had rather delicately-chiselled
small features distributed over a considerable area of whitish face,
and quite a number of chins. And the note of his voice had a sort
of whispering undertone.

{}``What the deuce, I say, possessed you to get under my bed?''

Mr.\ Ledbetter, by an effort, smiled a wan propitiatory smile. He
coughed. {}``I can quite understand\mbox{---}''\ he said.

{}``Why! What on earth? It's \textit{soap}! No!\mbox{---}you scoundrel.
Don't you move that hand.''

{}``It's soap,''\ said Mr.\ Ledbetter. {}``From your washstand.
No doubt it\mbox{---}''

{}``Don't talk,''\ said the stout man. {}``I see it's soap. Of
all incredible things.''

{}``If I might explain\mbox{---}''

{}``Don't explain. It's sure to be a lie, and there's no time for
explanations. What was I going to ask you? Ah! Have you any mates?''

{}``In a few minutes, if you\mbox{---}''

{}``Have you any mates? Curse you. If you start any soapy palaver
I'll shoot. Have you any mates?''

{}``No,''\ said Mr.\ Ledbetter.

{}``I suppose it's a lie,''\ said the stout man. {}``But you'll
pay for it if it is. Why the deuce didn't you floor me when I came
upstairs? You won't get a chance to now, anyhow. Fancy getting under
the bed! I reckon it's a fair cop, anyhow, so far as you are concerned.''

{}``I don't see how I could prove an alibi,''\ remarked Mr.\ Ledbetter,
trying to show by his conversation that he was an educated man. There
was a pause. Mr.\ Ledbetter perceived that on a chair beside his
captor was a large black bag on a heap of crumpled papers, and that
there were torn and burnt papers on the table. And in front of these,
and arranged methodically along the edge were rows and rows of little
yellow \emph{rouleaux}\mbox{---}a hundred times more gold than Mr.
Ledbetter had seen in all his life before. The light of two candles,
in silver candlesticks, fell upon these. The pause continued. {}``It
is rather fatiguing holding up my hands like this,''\ said Mr.\ Ledbetter,
with a deprecatory smile.

{}``That's all right,''\ said the fat man. {}``But what to do
with you I don't exactly know.''

{}``I know my position is ambiguous.''

{}``Lord!''\ said the fat man, {}``ambiguous! And goes about with
his own soap, and wears a thundering great clerical collar. You \textit{are}
a blooming burglar, you are\mbox{---}if ever there was one!''

{}``To be strictly accurate,''\ said Mr.\ Ledbetter, and suddenly
his glasses slipped off and clattered against his vest buttons.

The fat man changed countenance, a flash of savage resolution crossed
his face, and something in the revolver clicked. He put his other
hand to the weapon. And then he looked at Mr.\ Ledbetter, and his
eye went down to the dropped \textit{pince}-\textit{nez}.

{}``Full-cock now, anyhow,''\ said the fat man, after a pause,
and his breath seemed to catch. {}``But I'll tell you, you've never
been so near death before. Lord! \textit{I'm} almost glad. If it hadn't
been that the revolver wasn't cocked you'd be lying dead there now.''

Mr.\ Ledbetter said nothing, but he felt that the room was swaying.

{}``A miss is as good as a mile. It's lucky for both of us it wasn't.
Lord!''\ He blew noisily. {}``There's no need for you to go pale-green
for a little thing like that.''

{}``If I can assure you, sir\mbox{---}''\ said Mr.\ Ledbetter,
with an effort.

{}``There's only one thing to do. If I call in the police, I'm bust\mbox{---}a
little game I've got on is bust. That won't do. If I tie you up and
leave you again, the thing may be out to-morrow. Tomorrow's Sunday,
and Monday's Bank Holiday\mbox{---}I've counted on three clear days.
Shooting you's murder\mbox{---}and hanging; and besides, it will
bust the whole blooming kernooze. I'm hanged if I can think what to
do\mbox{---}I'm hanged if I can.''

{}``Will you permit me\mbox{---}''

{}``You gas as much as if you were a real parson, I'm blessed if
you don't. Of all the burglars you are the\mbox{---}Well! No!\mbox{---}I
\textit{won't} permit you. There isn't time. If you start off jawing
again, I'll shoot right in your stomach. See? But I know now\mbox{---}I
know now! What we're going to do first, my man, is an examination
for concealed arms\mbox{---}an examination for concealed arms. And
look here! When I tell you to do a thing, don't start off at a gabble\mbox{---}do
it brisk.''

And with many elaborate precautions, and always pointing the pistol
at Mr.\ Ledbetter's head, the stout man stood him up and searched
him for weapons. {}``Why, you \textit{are} a burglar!''\ he said
{}``You're a perfect amateur. You haven't even a pistol-pocket in
the back of your breeches. No, you don't! Shut up, now.''

So soon as the issue was decided, the stout man made Mr.\ Ledbetter
take off his coat and roll up his shirt-sleeves, and, with the revolver
at one ear, proceed with the packing his appearance had interrupted.
From the stout man's point of view that was evidently the only possible
arrangement, for if he had packed, he would have had to put down the
revolver. So that even the gold on the table was handled by Mr.\ Ledbetter.
This nocturnal packing was peculiar. The stout man's idea was evidently
to distribute the weight of the gold as unostentatiously as possible
through his luggage. It was by no means an inconsiderable weight.
There was, Mr.\ Ledbetter says, altogether nearly \pounds{}18,000
in gold in the black bag and on the table. There were also many little
rolls of \pounds{}5 bank-notes. Each \emph{rouleau} of \pounds{}25
was wrapped by Mr.\ Ledbetter in paper. These \emph{rouleaux} were
then put neatly in cigar boxes and distributed between a travelling
trunk, a Gladstone bag, and a hatbox. About \pounds{}600 went in
a tobacco tin in a dressing-bag. \pounds{}10 in gold and a number
of \pounds{}5 notes the stout man pocketed. Occasionally he objurgated
Mr.\ Ledbetter's clumsiness, and urged him to hurry, and several
times he appealed to Mr. Ledbetter's watch for information.

Mr.\ Ledbetter strapped the trunk and bag, and returned the stout
man the keys. It was then ten minutes to twelve, and until the stroke
of midnight the stout man made him sit on the Gladstone bag, while
he sat at a reasonably safe distance on the trunk and held the revolver
handy and waited. He appeared to be now in a less aggressive mood,
and having watched Mr.\ Ledbetter for some time, he offered a few
remarks.

{}``From your accent I judge you are a man of some education,''\ he
said, lighting a cigar. {}``No\mbox{---}\textit{don't} begin that
explanation of yours. I know it will be long-winded from your face,
and I am much too old a liar to be interested in other men's lying.
You are, I say, a person of education. You do well to dress as a curate.
Even among educated people you might pass as a curate.''

{}``I \textit{am} a curate,''\ said Mr.\ Ledbetter, {}``or, at
least\mbox{---}''

{}``You are trying to be. I know. But you didn't ought to burgle.
You are not the man to burgle. You are, if I may say it\mbox{---}the
thing will have been pointed out to you before\mbox{---}a coward.''

{}``Do you know,''\ said Mr.\ Ledbetter, trying to get a final
opening, {}``it was that very question\mbox{---}''

The stout man waved him into silence.

{}``You waste your education in burglary. You should do one of two
things. Either you should forge or you should embezzle. For my own
part, I embezzle. Yes; I embezzle. What do you think a man could be
doing with all this gold but that? Ah! Listen! Midnight!\ldots{}
Ten. Eleven. Twelve. There is something very impressive to me in that
slow beating of the hours. Time\mbox{---}space; what mysteries they
are! What mysteries\ldots{}. It's time for us to be moving. Stand
up!''

And then kindly, but firmly, he induced Mr.\ Ledbetter to sling the
dressing bag over his back by a string across his chest, to shoulder
the trunk, and, overruling a gasping protest, to take the Gladstone
bag in his disengaged hand. So encumbered, Mr.\ Ledbetter struggled
perilously downstairs. The stout gentleman followed with an overcoat,
the hatbox, and the revolver, making derogatory remarks about Mr.
Ledbetter's strength, and assisting him at the turnings of the stairs.

{}``The back door,''\ he directed, and Mr.\ Ledbetter staggered
through a conservatory, leaving a wake of smashed flower-pots behind
him. {}``Never mind the crockery,''\ said the stout man; {}``it's
good for trade. We wait here until a quarter past. You can put those
things down. You have!''

Mr.\ Ledbetter collapsed panting on the trunk. {}``Last night,''\ he
gasped, {}``I was asleep in my little room, and I no more dreamt\mbox{---}''

{}``There's no need for you to incriminate yourself,''\ said the
stout gentleman, looking at the lock of the revolver. He began to
hum. Mr.\ Ledbetter made to speak, and thought better of it.

There presently came the sound of a bell, and Mr.\ Ledbetter was
taken to the back door and instructed to open it. A fair-haired man
in yachting costume entered. At the sight of Mr.\ Ledbetter he started
violently and clapped his hand behind him. Then he saw the stout man.
{}``Bingham!''\ he cried, {}``who's this?''

{}``Only a little philanthropic do of mine\mbox{---}burglar I'm
trying to reform. Caught him under my bed just now. He's all right.
He's a frightful ass. He'll be useful to carry some of our things.''

The newcomer seemed inclined to resent Mr.\ Ledbetter's presence
at first, but the stout man reassured him.

{}``He's quite alone. There's not a gang in the world would own him.
No!\mbox{---}don't start talking, for goodness'\ sake.''

They went out into the darkness of the garden with the trunk still
bowing Mr.\ Ledbetter's shoulders. The man in the yachting costume
walked in front with the Gladstone bag and a pistol; then came Mr.\ Ledbetter
like Atlas; Mr.\ Bingham followed with the hat-box, coat, and revolver
as before. The house was one of those that have their gardens right
up to the cliff. At the cliff was a steep wooden stairway, descending
to a bathing tent dimly visible on the beach. Below was a boat pulled
up, and a silent little man with a black face stood beside it. {}``A
few moments'\ explanation,''\ said Mr.\ Ledbetter; {}``I can
assure you\mbox{---}''\ Somebody kicked him, and he said no more.

They made him wade to the boat, carrying the trunk, they pulled him
aboard by the shoulders and hair, they called him no better name than
{}``scoundrel''\ and {}``burglar''\ all that night. But they
spoke in undertones so that the general public was happily unaware
of his ignominy. They hauled him aboard a yacht manned by strange,
unsympathetic \textit{\emph{Orientals}}, and partly they thrust him
and partly he fell down a gangway into a noisome, dark place, where
he was to remain many days\mbox{---}how many he does not know, because
he lost count among other things when he was seasick. They fed him
on biscuits and incomprehensible words; they gave him water to drink
mixed with unwished-for rum. And there were cockroaches where they
put him, night and day there were cockroaches, and in the night-time
there were rats. The \textit{\emph{Orientals}} emptied his pockets
and took his watch\mbox{---}but Mr.\ Bingham, being appealed to,
took that himself. And five or six times the five Lascars\mbox{---}if
they were Lascars\mbox{---}and the Chinaman and the \textit{\emph{negro}}
who constituted the crew, fished him out and took him aft to Bingham
and his friend to play cribbage and euchre and three-anded whist,
and to listen to their stories and boastings in an interested manner.

Then these principals would talk to him as men talk to those who have
lived a life of crime. Explanations they would never permit, though
they made it abundantly clear to him that he was the rummiest burglar
they had ever set eyes on. They said as much again and again. The
fair man was of a taciturn disposition and irascible at play; but
Mr.\ Bingham, now that the evident anxiety of his departure from
England was assuaged, displayed a vein of genial philosophy. He enlarged
upon the mystery of space and time, and quoted Kant and Hegel\mbox{---}or,
at least, he said he did. Several times Mr.\ Ledbetter got as far
as: {}``My position under your bed, you know\mbox{---},''\ but
then he always had to cut, or pass the whisky, or do some such intervening
thing. After his third failure, the fair man got quite to look for
this opening, and whenever Mr.\ Ledbetter began after that, he would
roar with laughter and hit him violently on the back. {}``Same old
start, same old story; good old burglar!''\ the fair-haired man
would say.

So Mr.\ Ledbetter suffered for many days, twenty perhaps; and one
evening he was taken, together with some tinned provisions, over the
side and put ashore on a rocky little island with a spring. Mr.\ Bingham
came in the boat with him, giving him good advice all the way, and
waving his last attempts at an explanation aside.

{}``I am really \textit{not} a burglar,''\ said Mr.\ Ledbetter.

{}``You never will be,''\ said Mr.\ Bingham. {}``You'll never
make a burglar. I'm glad you are beginning to see it. In choosing
a profession a man must study his temperament. If you don't, sooner
or later you will fail. Compare myself, for example. All my life I
have been in banks\mbox{---}I have got on in banks. I have even
been a bank manager. But was I happy? No. Why wasn't I happy? Because
it did not suit my temperament. I am too adventurous\mbox{---}too
versatile. Practically I have thrown it over. I do not suppose I shall
ever manage a bank again. They would be glad to get me, no doubt;
but I have learnt the lesson of my temperament\mbox{---}at last\ldots{}.
No! I shall never manage a bank again.

{}``Now, your temperament unfits you for crime\mbox{---}just as
mine unfits me for respectability. I know you better than I did, and
now I do not even recommend forgery. Go back to respectable courses,
my man. \textit{Your} lay is the philanthropic lay\mbox{---}that
is your lay. With that voice\mbox{---}the Association for the Promotion
of Snivelling among the Young\mbox{---} something in that line.
You think it over.

{}``The island we are approaching has no name apparently\mbox{---}at
least, there is none on the chart. You might think out a name for
it while you are there\mbox{---}while you are thinking about all
these things. It has quite drinkable water, I understand. It is one
of the Grenadines\mbox{---}one of the Windward Islands. Yonder,
dim and blue, are others of the Grenadines. There are quantities of
Grenadines, but the majority are out of sight. I have often wondered
what these islands are for\mbox{---}now, you see, I am wiser. This
one at least is for you. Sooner or later some simple native will come
along and take you off. Say what you like about us then\mbox{---}abuse
us, if you like\mbox{---}we shan't care a solitary Grenadine! And
here\mbox{---}here is half a sovereign's worth of silver. Do not
waste that in foolish dissipation when you return to civilisation.
Properly used, it may give you a fresh start in life. And do not\mbox{---}Don't
beach her, you beggars, he can wade!\mbox{---}Do not waste the precious
solitude before you in foolish thoughts. Properly used, it may be
a turning-point in your career. Waste neither money nor time. You
will die rich. I'm sorry, but I must ask you to carry your tucker
to land in your arms. No; it's not deep. Curse that explanation of
yours! There's not time. No, no, no! I won't listen. Overboard you
go!''

And the falling night found Mr.\ Ledbetter\mbox{---}the Mr.\ Ledbetter
who had complained that adventure was dead\mbox{---}sitting beside
his cans of food, his chin resting upon his drawn-up knees, staring
through his glasses in dismal mildness over the shining, vacant sea.

He was picked up in the course of three days by a \textit{\emph{negro}}
fisherman and taken to St.\ Vincent's, and from St.\ Vincent's he
got, by the expenditure of his last coins, to Kingston, in Jamaica.
And there he might have foundered. Even nowadays he is not a man of
affairs, and then he was a singularly helpless person. He had not
the remotest idea what he ought to do. The only thing he seems to
have done was to visit all the ministers of religion he could find
in the place to borrow a passage home. But he was much too dirty and
incoherent\mbox{---}and his story far too incredible for them. I
met him quite by chance. It was close upon sunset, and I was walking
out after my siesta on the road to Dunn's Battery, when I met him\mbox{---}I
was rather bored, and with a whole evening on my hands\mbox{---}luckily
for him. He was trudging dismally towards the town. His woebegone
face and the quasi-clerical cut of his dust-stained, filthy costume
caught my humour. Our eyes met. He hesitated. {}``Sir,''\ he said,
with a catching of the breath, {}``could you spare a few minutes
for what I fear will seem an incredible story?''

{}``Incredible!''\ I said.

{}``Quite,''\ he answered eagerly. {}``No one will believe it,
alter it though I may. Yet I can assure you, sir\mbox{---}''

He stopped hopelessly. The man's tone tickled me. He seemed an odd
character. {}``I am,''\ he said, {}``one of the most unfortunate
beings alive.''

{}``Among other things, you haven't dined?''\ I said, struck with
an idea.

{}``I have not,''\ he said solemnly, {}``for many days.''

{}``You'll tell it better after that,''\ I said; and without more
ado led the way to a low place I knew, where such a costume as his
was unlikely to give offence. And there\mbox{---}with certain omissions
which he subsequently supplied\mbox{---}I got his story. At first
I was incredulous, but as the wine warmed him, and the faint suggestion
of cringing which his misfortunes had added to his manner disappeared,
I began to believe. At last, I was so far convinced of his sincerity
that I got him a bed for the night, and next day verified the banker's
reference he gave me through my Jamaica banker. And that done, I took
him shopping for underwear and such like equipments of a gentleman
at large. Presently came the verified reference. His astonishing story
was true. I will not amplify our subsequent proceedings. He started
for England in three days'\ time.

{}``I do not know how I can possibly thank you enough,''\ began
the letter he wrote me from England, {}``for all your kindness to
a total stranger,'' and proceeded for some time in a similar strain.
{}``Had it not been for your generous assistance, I could certainly
never have returned in time for the resumption of my scholastic duties,
and my few minutes of reckless folly would, perhaps, have proved my
ruin. As it is, I am entangled in a tissue of lies and evasions, of
the most complicated sort, to account for my sunburnt appearance and
my whereabouts. I have rather carelessly told two or three different
stories, not realising the trouble this would mean for me in the end.
The truth I dare not tell. I have consulted a number of law-books
in the British Museum, and there is not the slightest doubt that I
have connived at and abetted and aided a felony. That scoundrel Bingham
was the Hithergate bank manager, I find, and guilty of the most flagrant
embezzlement. Please, please burn this letter when read\mbox{---}I
trust you implicitly. The worst of it is, neither my aunt nor her
friend who kept the boarding-house at which I was staying seem altogether
to believe a guarded statement I have made them practically of what
actually happened. They suspect me of some discreditable adventure,
but what sort of discreditable adventure they suspect me of, I do
not know. My aunt says she would forgive me if I told her everything.
I have\mbox{---}I have told her \textit{more} than everything, and
still she is not satisfied. It would never do to let them know the
truth of the case, of course, and so I represent myself as having
been waylaid and gagged upon the beach. My aunt wants to know \textit{why}
they waylaid and gagged me, why they took me away in their yacht.
I do not know. Can you suggest any reason? I can think of nothing.
If, when you wrote, you could write on \textit{two} sheets so that
I could show her one, and on that one if you could show clearly that
I really \textit{was} in Jamaica this summer, and had come there by
being removed from a ship, it would be of great service to me. It
would certainly add to the load of my obligation to you\mbox{---}a
load that I fear I can never fully repay. Although if gratitude\ldots{}.''
And so forth. At the end he repeated his request for me to burn the
letter.

So the remarkable story of Mr.\ Ledbetter's Vacation ends. That breach
with his aunt was not of long duration. The old lady had forgiven
him before she died.


\chapter*{\raggedright THE STOLEN BODY}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{THE STOLEN BODY}

\markboth{TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM}{THE STOLEN BODY}

Mr.\ Bessel was the senior partner in the firm of Bessel, Hart, and
Brown, of St.\ Paul's Churchyard, and for many years he was well
known among those interested in psychical research as a liberal-minded
and conscientious investigator. He was an unmarried man, and instead
of living in the suburbs, after the fashion of his class, he occupied
rooms in the Albany, near Piccadilly. He was particularly interested
in the questions of thought transference and of apparitions of the
living, and in November, 1896, he commenced a series of experiments
in conjunction with Mr.\ Vincey, of Staple Inn, in order to test
the alleged possibility of projecting an apparition of one's self
by force of will through space.

Their experiments were conducted in the following manner: At a pre-arranged
hour Mr.\ Bessel shut himself in one of his rooms in the Albany and
Mr.\ Vincey in his sitting-room in Staple Inn, and each then fixed
his mind as resolutely as possible on the other. Mr.\ Bessel had
acquired the art of self-hypnotism, and, so far as he could, he attempted
first to hypnotise himself and then to project himself as a {}``phantom
of the living''\ across the intervening space of nearly two miles
into Mr.\ Vincey's apartment. On several evenings this was tried
without any satisfactory result, but on the fifth or sixth occasion
Mr.\ Vincey did actually see or imagine he saw an apparition of Mr.\ Bessel
standing in his room. He states that the appearance, although brief,
was very vivid and real. He noticed that Mr.\ Bessel's face was white
and his expression anxious, and, moreover, that his hair was disordered.
For a moment Mr.\ Vincey, in spite of his state of expectation, was
too surprised to speak or move, and in that moment it seemed to him
as though the figure glanced over its shoulder and incontinently vanished.

It had been arranged that an attempt should be made to photograph
any phantasm seen, but Mr.\ Vincey had not the instant presence of
mind to snap the camera that lay ready on the table beside him, and
when he did so he was too late. Greatly elated, however, even by this
partial success, he made a note of the exact time, and at once took
a cab to the Albany to inform Mr.\ Bessel of this result.

He was surprised to find Mr.\ Bessel's outer door standing open to
the night, and the inner apartments lit and in an extraordinary disorder.
An empty champagne magnum lay smashed upon the floor; its neck had
been broken off against the inkpot on the bureau and lay beside it.
An octagonal occasional table, which carried a bronze statuette and
a number of choice books, had been rudely overturned, and down the
primrose paper of the wall inky fingers had been drawn, as it seemed
for the mere pleasure of defilement. One of the delicate chintz curtains
had been violently torn from its rings and thrust upon the fire, so
that the smell of its smouldering filled the room. Indeed the whole
place was disarranged in the strangest fashion. For a few minutes
Mr.\ Vincey, who had entered sure of finding Mr.\ Bessel in his
easy chair awaiting him, could scarcely believe his eyes, and stood
staring helplessly at these unanticipated things.

Then, full of a vague sense of calamity, he sought the porter at the
entrance lodge. {}``Where is Mr.\ Bessel?''\ he asked. {}``Do
you know that all the furniture is broken in Mr.\ Bessel's room?''\ The
porter said nothing, but, obeying his gestures, came at once to Mr.\ Bessel's
apartment to see the state of affairs. {}``This settles it,''\ he
said, surveying the lunatic confusion. {}``I didn't know of this.
Mr.\ Bessel's gone off. He's mad!''

He then proceeded to tell Mr.\ Vincey that about half an hour previously,
that is to say, at about the time of Mr.\ Bessel's apparition in
Mr.\ Vincey's rooms, the missing gentleman had rushed out of the
gates of the Albany into Vigo Street, hatless and with disordered
hair, and had vanished into the direction of Bond Street. {}``And
as he went past me,''\ said the porter, {}``he laughed\mbox{---}a
sort of gasping laugh, with his mouth open and his eyes glaring\mbox{---}I
tell you, sir, he fair scared me!\mbox{---}like this.''

According to his imitation it was anything but a pleasant laugh. {}``He
waved his hand, with all his fingers crooked and clawing\mbox{---}like
that. And he said, in a sort of fierce whisper, `\textit{life}!'\ Just
that one word, `\textit{life}!'''

{}``Dear me,''\ said Mr.\ Vincey. {}``Tut, tut,''\ and {}``Dear
me!''\ He could think of nothing else to say. He was naturally very
much surprised. He turned from the room to the porter and from the
porter to the room in the gravest perplexity. Beyond his suggestion
that probably Mr.\ Bessel would come back presently and explain what
had happened, their conversation was unable to proceed. {}``It might
be a sudden toothache,''\ said the porter, {}``a very sudden and
violent toothache, jumping on him suddenly-like and driving him wild.
I've broken things myself before now in such a case\ldots{}.'' He
thought. {}``If it was, why should he say `\textit{life}'\ to me
as he went past?''

Mr.\ Vincey did not know. Mr.\ Bessel did not return, and at last
Mr.\ Vincey, having done some more helpless staring, and having addressed
a note of brief inquiry and left it in a conspicuous position on the
bureau, returned in a very perplexed frame of mind to his own premises
in Staple Inn. This affair had given him a shock. He was at a loss
to account for Mr.\ Bessel's conduct on any sane hypothesis. He tried
to read, but he could not do so; he went for a short walk, and was
so preoccupied that he narrowly escaped a cab at the top of Chancery
Lane; and at last\mbox{---}a full hour before his usual time\mbox{---}he
went to bed. For a considerable time he could not sleep because of
his memory of the silent confusion of Mr.\ Bessel's apartment, and
when at length he did attain an uneasy slumber it was at once disturbed
by a very vivid and distressing dream of Mr.\ Bessel.

He saw Mr.\ Bessel gesticulating wildly, and with his face white
and contorted. And, inexplicably mingled with his appearance, suggested
perhaps by his gestures, was an intense fear, an urgency to act. He
even believes that he heard the voice of his fellow experimenter calling
distressfully to him, though at the time he considered this to be
an illusion. The vivid impression remained though Mr.\ Vincey awoke.
For a space he lay awake and trembling in the darkness, possessed
with that vague, unaccountable terror of unknown possibilities that
comes out of dreams upon even the bravest men. But at last he roused
himself, and turned over and went to sleep again, only for the dream
to return with enhanced vividness.

He awoke with such a strong conviction that Mr.\ Bessel was in overwhelming
distress and need of help that sleep was no longer possible. He was
persuaded that his friend had rushed out to some dire calamity. For
a time he lay reasoning vainly against this belief, but at last he
gave way to it. He arose, against all reason, lit his gas, and dressed,
and set out through the deserted streets\mbox{---}deserted, save
for a noiseless policeman or so and the early news carts\mbox{---}towards
Vigo Street to inquire if Mr.\ Bessel had returned.

But he never got there. As he was going down Long Acre some unaccountable
impulse turned him aside out of that street towards Covent Garden,
which was just waking to its nocturnal activities. He saw the market
in front of him\mbox{---}a queer effect of glowing yellow lights
and busy black figures. He became aware of a shouting, and perceived
a figure turn the corner by the hotel and run swiftly towards him.
He knew at once that it was Mr.\ Bessel. But it was Mr.\ Bessel
transfigured. He was hatless and dishevelled, his collar was torn
open, he grasped a bone-handled walking-cane near the ferrule end,
and his mouth was pulled awry. And he ran, with agile strides, very
rapidly. Their encounter was the affair of an instant. {}``Bessel!''\ cried
Vincey.

The running man gave no sign of recognition either of Mr.\ Vincey
or of his own name. Instead, he cut at his friend savagely with the
stick, hitting him in the face within an inch of the eye. Mr.\ Vincey,
stunned and astonished, staggered back, lost his footing, and fell
heavily on the pavement. It seemed to him that Mr.\ Bessel leapt
over him as he fell. When he looked again Mr.\ Bessel had vanished,
and a policeman and a number of garden porters and salesmen were rushing
past towards Long Acre in hot pursuit.

With the assistance of several passers-by\mbox{---}for the whole
street was speedily alive with running people\mbox{---}Mr.\ Vincey
struggled to his feet. He at once became the centre of a crowd greedy
to see his injury. A multitude of voices competed to reassure him
of his safety, and then to tell him of the behaviour of the madman,
as they regarded Mr.\ Bessel. He had suddenly appeared in the middle
of the market screaming {}``\textit{Life}! \textit{Life}!''\ striking
left and right with a blood-stained walking-stick, and dancing and
shouting with laughter at each successful blow. A lad and two women
had broken heads, and he had smashed a man's wrist; a little child
had been knocked insensible, and for a time he had driven every one
before him, so furious and resolute had his behaviour been. Then he
made a raid upon a coffee stall, hurled its paraffin flare through
the window of the post office, and fled laughing, after stunning the
foremost of the two policemen who had the pluck to charge him.

Mr.\ Vincey's first impulse was naturally to join in the pursuit
of his friend, in order if possible to save him from the violence
of the indignant people. But his action was slow, the blow had half
stunned him, and while this was still no more than a resolution came
the news, shouted through the crowd, that Mr.\ Bessel had eluded
his pursuers. At first Mr.\ Vincey could scarcely credit this, but
the universality of the report, and presently the dignified return
of two futile policemen, convinced him. After some aimless inquiries
he returned towards Staple Inn, padding a handkerchief to a now very
painful nose.

He was angry and astonished and perplexed. It appeared to him indisputable
that Mr.\ Bessel must have gone violently mad in the midst of his
experiment in thought transference, but why that should make him appear
with a sad white face in Mr.\ Vincey's dreams seemed a problem beyond
solution. He racked his brains in vain to explain this. It seemed
to him at last that not simply Mr.\ Bessel, but the order of things
must be insane. But he could think of nothing to do. He shut himself
carefully into his room, lit his fire\mbox{---}it was a gas fire
with asbestos bricks\mbox{---}and, fearing fresh dreams if he went
to bed, remained bathing his injured face, or holding up books in
a vain attempt to read, until dawn. Throughout that vigil he had a
curious persuasion that Mr.\ Bessel was endeavouring to speak to
him, but he would not let himself attend to any such belief.

About dawn, his physical fatigue asserted itself, and he went to bed
and slept at last in spite of dreaming. He rose late, unrested and
anxious, and in considerable facial pain. The morning papers had no
news of Mr.\ Bessel's aberration\mbox{---}it had come too late
for them. Mr.\ Vincey's perplexities, to which the fever of his bruise
added fresh irritation, became at last intolerable, and, after a fruitless
visit to the Albany, he went down to St.\ Paul's Churchyard to Mr.\ Hart,
Mr.\ Bessel's partner, and, so far as Mr.\ Vincey knew, his nearest
friend.

He was surprised to learn that Mr.\ Hart, although he knew nothing
of the outbreak, had also been disturbed by a vision, the very vision
that Mr.\ Vincey had seen\mbox{---}Mr.\ Bessel, white and dishevelled,
pleading earnestly by his gestures for help. That was his impression
of the import of his signs. {}``I was just going to look him up in
the Albany when you arrived,''\ said Mr.\ Hart. {}``I was so sure
of something being wrong with him.''

As the outcome of their consultation the two gentlemen decided to
inquire at Scotland Yard for news of their missing friend. {}``He
is bound to be laid by the heels,''\ said Mr.\ Hart. {}``He can't
go on at that pace for long.'' But the police authorities had not
laid Mr.\ Bessel by the heels. They confirmed Mr.\ Vincey's overnight
experiences and added fresh circumstances, some of an even graver
character than those he knew\mbox{---}a list of smashed glass along
the upper half of Tottenham Court Road, an attack upon a policeman
in Hampstead Road, and an atrocious assault upon a woman. All these
outrages were committed between half-past twelve and a quarter to
two in the morning, and between those hours\mbox{---}and, indeed,
from the very moment of Mr. Bessel's first rush from his rooms at
half-past nine in the evening\mbox{---}they could trace the deepening
violence of his fantastic career. For the last hour, at least from
before one, that is, until a quarter to two, he had run amuck through
London, eluding with amazing agility every effort to stop or capture
him.

But after a quarter to two he had vanished. Up to that hour witnesses
were multitudinous. Dozens of people had seen him, fled from him or
pursued him, and then things suddenly came to an end. At a quarter
to two he had been seen running down the Euston Road towards Baker
Street, flourishing a can of burning colza oil and jerking splashes
of flame therefrom at the windows of the houses he passed. But none
of the policemen on Euston Road beyond the Waxwork Exhibition, nor
any of those in the side streets down which he must have passed had
he left the Euston Road, had seen anything of him. Abruptly he disappeared.
Nothing of his subsequent doings came to light in spite of the keenest
inquiry.

Here was a fresh astonishment for Mr.\ Vincey. He had found considerable
comfort in Mr.\ Hart's conviction: {}``He is bound to be laid by
the heels before long,''\ and in that assurance he had been able
to suspend his mental perplexities. But any fresh development seemed
destined to add new impossibilities to a pile already heaped beyond
the powers of his acceptance. He found himself doubting whether his
memory might not have played him some grotesque trick, debating whether
any of these things could possibly have happened; and in the afternoon
he hunted up Mr.\ Hart again to share the intolerable weight on his
mind. He found Mr.\ Hart engaged with a well-known private detective,
but as that gentleman accomplished nothing in this case, we need not
enlarge upon his proceedings.

All that day Mr.\ Bessel's whereabouts eluded an unceasingly active
inquiry, and all that night. And all that day there was a persuasion
in the back of Vincey's mind that Mr.\ Bessel sought his attention,
and all through the night Mr.\ Bessel with a tear-stained face of
anguish pursued him through his dreams. And whenever he saw Mr.\ Bessel
in his dreams he also saw a number of other faces, vague but malignant,
that seemed to be pursuing Mr.\ Bessel.

It was on the following day, Sunday, that Mr.\ Vincey recalled certain
remarkable stories of Mrs.\ Bullock, the medium, who was then attracting
attention for the first time in London. He determined to consult her.
She was staying at the house of that well-known inquirer, Dr.\ Wilson
Paget, and Mr.\ Vincey, although he had never met that gentleman
before, repaired to him forthwith with the intention of invoking her
help. But scarcely had he mentioned the name of Bessel when Doctor
Paget interrupted him. {}``Last night\mbox{---}just at the end,''\ he
said, {}``we had a communication.''

He left the room, and returned with a slate on which were certain
words written in a handwriting, shaky indeed, but indisputably the
handwriting of Mr.\ Bessel!

{}``How did you get this?''\ said Mr.\ Vincey. {}``Do you mean\mbox{---}?''

{}``We got it last night,''\ said Doctor Paget. With numerous interruptions
from Mr.\ Vincey, he proceeded to explain how the writing had been
obtained. It appears that in her \textit{\emph{s\'{e}ances}}, Mrs.\ Bullock
passes into a condition of trance, her eyes rolling up in a strange
way under her eyelids, and her body becoming rigid. She then begins
to talk very rapidly, usually in voices other than her own. At the
same time one or both of her hands may become active, and if slates
and pencils are provided they will then write messages simultaneously
with and quite independently of the flow of words from her mouth.
By many she is considered an even more remarkable medium than the
celebrated Mrs.\ Piper. It was one of these messages, the one written
by her left hand, that Mr.\ Vincey now had before him. It consisted
of eight words written disconnectedly: {}``George Bessel \ldots{}\ trial
excavn\ldots{}. Baker Street \ldots{}\ help \ldots{}\ starvation.''
Curiously enough, neither Doctor Paget nor the two other inquirers
who were present had heard of the disappearance of Mr.\ Bessel\mbox{---}the
news of it appeared only in the evening papers of Saturday\mbox{---}and
they had put the message aside with many others of a vague and enigmatical
sort that Mrs.\ Bullock has from time to time delivered.

When Doctor Paget heard Mr.\ Vincey's story, he gave himself at once
with great energy to the pursuit of this clue to the discovery of
Mr.\ Bessel. It would serve no useful purpose here to describe the
inquiries of Mr.\ Vincey and himself; suffice it that the clue was
a genuine one, and that Mr.\ Bessel was actually discovered by its
aid.

He was found at the bottom of a detached shaft which had been sunk
and abandoned at the commencement of the work for the new electric
railway near Baker Street Station. His arm and leg and two ribs were
broken. The shaft is protected by a hoarding nearly 20 feet high,
and over this, incredible as it seems, Mr.\ Bessel, a stout, middle-aged
gentleman, must have scrambled in order to fall down the shaft. He
was saturated in colza oil, and the smashed tin lay beside him, but
luckily the flame had been extinguished by his fall. And his madness
had passed from him altogether. But he was, of course, terribly enfeebled,
and at the sight of his rescuers he gave way to hysterical weeping.

In view of the deplorable state of his flat, he was taken to the house
of Dr.\ Hatton in Upper Baker Street. Here he was subjected to a
sedative treatment, and anything that might recall the violent crisis
through which he had passed was carefully avoided. But on the second
day he volunteered a statement.

Since that occasion Mr.\ Bessel has several times repeated this statement\mbox{---}to
myself among other people\mbox{---}varying the details as the narrator
of real experiences always does, but never by any chance contradicting
himself in any particular. And the statement he makes is in substance
as follows.

In order to understand it clearly it is necessary to go back to his
experiments with Mr.\ Vincey before his remarkable attack. Mr.\ Bessel's
first attempts at self-projection, in his experiments with Mr.\ Vincey,
were, as the reader will remember, unsuccessful. But through all of
them he was concentrating all his power and will upon getting out
of the body\mbox{---}{}``willing it with all my might,''\ he
says. At last, almost against expectation, came success. And Mr.\ Bessel
asserts that he, being alive, did actually, by an effort of will,
leave his body and pass into some place or state outside this world.

The release was, he asserts, instantaneous. {}``At one moment I was
seated in my chair, with my eyes tightly shut, my hands gripping the
arms of the chair, doing all I could to concentrate my mind on Vincey,
and then I perceived myself outside my body\mbox{---}saw my body
near me, but certainly not containing me, with the hands relaxing
and the head drooping forward on the breast.''

Nothing shakes him in his assurance of that release. He describes
in a quiet, matter-of-fact way the new sensation he experienced. He
felt he had become impalpable\mbox{---}so much he had expected,
but he had not expected to find himself enormously large. So, however,
it would seem he became. {}``I was a great cloud\mbox{---}if I
may express it that way\mbox{---}anchored to my body. It appeared
to me, at first, as if I had discovered a greater self of which the
conscious being in my brain was only a little part. I saw the Albany
and Piccadilly and Regent Street and all the rooms and places in the
houses, very minute and very bright and distinct, spread out below
me like a little city seen from a balloon. Every now and then vague
shapes like drifting wreaths of smoke made the vision a little indistinct,
but at first I paid little heed to them. The thing that astonished
me most, and which astonishes me still, is that I saw quite distinctly
the insides of the houses as well as the streets, saw little people
dining and talking in the private houses, men and women dining, playing
billiards, and drinking in restaurants and hotels, and several places
of entertainment crammed with people. It was like watching the affairs
of a glass hive.''

Such were Mr.\ Bessel's exact words as I took them down when he told
me the story. Quite forgetful of Mr.\ Vincey, he remained for a space
observing these things. Impelled by curiosity, he says, he stooped
down, and, with the shadowy arm he found himself possessed of, attempted
to touch a man walking along Vigo Street. But he could not do so,
though his finger seemed to pass through the man. Something prevented
his doing this, but what it was he finds it hard to describe. He compares
the obstacle to a sheet of glass.

{}``I felt as a kitten may feel,''\ he said, {}``when it goes
for the first time to pat its reflection in a mirror.'' Again and
again, on the occasion when I heard him tell this story, Mr.\ Bessel
returned to that comparison of the sheet of glass. Yet it was not
altogether a precise comparison, because, as the reader will speedily
see, there were interruptions of this generally impermeable resistance,
means of getting through the barrier to the material world again.
But, naturally, there is a very great difficulty in expressing these
unprecedented impressions in the language of everyday experience.

A thing that impressed him instantly, and which weighed upon him throughout
all this experience, was the stillness of this place\mbox{---}he
was in a world without sound.

At first Mr.\ Bessel's mental state was an unemotional wonder. His
thought chiefly concerned itself with where he might be. He was out
of the body\mbox{---}out of his material body, at any rate\mbox{---}but
that was not all. He believes, and I for one believe also, that he
was somewhere out of space, as we understand it, altogether. By a
strenuous effort of will he had passed out of his body into a world
beyond this world, a world undreamt of, yet lying so close to it and
so strangely situated with regard to it that all things on this earth
are clearly visible both from without and from within in this other
world about us. For a long time, as it seemed to him, this realisation
occupied his mind to the exclusion of all other matters, and then
he recalled the engagement with Mr.\ Vincey, to which this astonishing
experience was, after all, but a prelude.

He turned his mind to locomotion in this new body in which he found
himself. For a time he was unable to shift himself from his attachment
to his earthly carcass. For a time this new strange cloud body of
his simply swayed, contracted, expanded, coiled, and writhed with
his efforts to free himself, and then quite suddenly the link that
bound him snapped. For a moment everything was hidden by what appeared
to be whirling spheres of dark vapour, and then through a momentary
gap he saw his drooping body collapse limply, saw his lifeless head
drop sideways, and found he was driving along like a huge cloud in
a strange place of shadowy clouds that had the luminous intricacy
of London spread like a model below.

But now he was aware that the fluctuating vapour about him was something
more than vapour, and the temerarious excitement of his first essay
was shot with fear. For he perceived, at first indistinctly, and then
suddenly very clearly, that he was surrounded by \textit{faces}! that
each roll and coil of the seeming cloud-stuff was a face. And such
faces! Faces of thin shadow, faces of gaseous tenuity. Faces like
those faces that glare with intolerable strangeness upon the sleeper
in the evil hours of his dreams. Evil, greedy eyes that were full
of a covetous curiosity, faces with knit brows and snarling, smiling
lips; their vague hands clutched at Mr.\ Bessel as he passed, and
the rest of their bodies was but an elusive streak of trailing darkness.
Never a word they said, never a sound from the mouths that seemed
to gibber. All about him they pressed in that dreamy silence, passing
freely through the dim mistiness that was his body, gathering ever
more numerously about him. And the shadowy Mr.\ Bessel, now suddenly
fear-stricken, drove through the silent, active multitude of eyes
and clutching hands.

So inhuman were these faces, so malignant their staring eyes, and
shadowy, clawing gestures, that it did not occur to Mr.\ Bessel to
attempt intercourse with these drifting creatures. Idiot phantoms,
they seemed, children of vain desire, beings unborn and forbidden
the boon of being, whose only expressions and gestures told of the
envy and craving for life that was their one link with existence.

It says much for his resolution that, amidst the swarming cloud of
these noiseless spirits of evil, he could still think of Mr.\ Vincey.
He made a violent effort of will and found himself, he knew not how,
stooping towards Staple Inn, saw Vincey sitting attentive and alert
in his arm-chair by the fire.

And clustering also about him, as they clustered ever about all that
lives and breathes, was another multitude of these vain voiceless
shadows, longing, desiring, seeking some loophole into life.

For a space Mr.\ Bessel sought ineffectually to attract his friend's
attention. He tried to get in front of his eyes, to move the objects
in his room, to touch him. But Mr.\ Vincey remained unaffected, ignorant
of the being that was so close to his own. The strange something that
Mr.\ Bessel has compared to a sheet of glass separated them impermeably.

And at last Mr.\ Bessel did a desperate thing. I have told how that
in some strange way he could see not only the outside of a man as
we see him, but within. He extended his shadowy hand and thrust his
vague black fingers, as it seemed, through the heedless brain.

Then, suddenly, Mr.\ Vincey started like a man who recalls his attention
from wandering thoughts, and it seemed to Mr.\ Bessel that a little
dark-red body situated in the middle of Mr.\ Vincey's brain swelled
and glowed as he did so. Since that experience he has been shown anatomical
figures of the brain, and he knows now that this is that useless structure,
as doctors call it, the pineal eye. For, strange as it will seem to
many, we have, deep in our brains\mbox{---}where it cannot possibly
see any earthly light\mbox{---}an eye! At the time this, with the
rest of the internal anatomy of the brain, was quite new to him. At
the sight of its changed appearance, however, he thrust forth his
finger, and, rather fearful still of the consequences, touched this
little spot. And instantly Mr.\ Vincey started, and Mr.\ Bessel
knew that he was seen.

And at that instant it came to Mr.\ Bessel that evil had happened
to his body, and behold!\ a great wind blew through all that world
of shadows and tore him away. So strong was this persuasion that he
thought no more of Mr.\ Vincey, but turned about forthwith, and all
the countless faces drove back with him like leaves before a gale.
But he returned too late. In an instant he saw the body that he had
left inert and collapsed\mbox{---}lying, indeed, like the body of
a man just dead\mbox{---}had arisen, had arisen by virtue of some
strength and will beyond his own. It stood with staring eyes, stretching
its limbs in dubious fashion.

For a moment he watched it in wild dismay, and then he stooped towards
it. But the pane of glass had closed against him again, and he was
foiled. He beat himself passionately against this, and all about him
the spirits of evil grinned and pointed and mocked. He gave way to
furious anger. He compares himself to a bird that has fluttered heedlessly
into a room and is beating at the window-pane that holds it back from
freedom.

And behold!\ the little body that had once been his was now dancing
with delight. He saw it shouting, though he could not hear its shouts;
he saw the violence of its movements grow. He watched it fling his
cherished furniture about in the mad delight of existence, rend his
books apart, smash bottles, drink heedlessly from the jagged fragments,
leap and smite in a passionate acceptance of living. He watched these
actions in paralysed astonishment. Then once more he hurled himself
against the impassable barrier, and then with all that crew of mocking
ghosts about him, hurried back in dire confusion to Vincey to tell
him of the outrage that had come upon him.

But the brain of Vincey was now closed against apparitions, and the
disembodied Mr.\ Bessel pursued him in vain as he hurried out into
Holborn to call a cab. Foiled and terror-stricken, Mr.\ Bessel swept
back again, to find his desecrated body whooping in a glorious frenzy
down the Burlington Arcade\ldots{}.

And now the attentive reader begins to understand Mr.\ Bessel's interpretation
of the first part of this strange story. The being whose frantic rush
through London had inflicted so much injury and disaster had indeed
Mr.\ Bessel's body, but it was not Mr.\ Bessel. It was an evil spirit
out of that strange world beyond existence, into which Mr.\ Bessel
had so rashly ventured. For twenty hours it held possession of him,
and for all those twenty hours the dispossessed spirit-body of Mr.\ Bessel
was going to and fro in that unheard-of middle world of shadows seeking
help in vain. He spent many hours beating at the minds of Mr.\ Vincey
and of his friend Mr.\ Hart. Each, as we know, he roused by his efforts.
But the language that might convey his situation to these helpers
across the gulf he did not know; his feeble fingers groped vainly
and powerlessly in their brains. Once, indeed, as we have already
told, he was able to turn Mr.\ Vincey aside from his path so that
he encountered the stolen body in its career, but he could not make
him understand the thing that had happened: he was unable to draw
any help from that encounter\ldots{}.

All through those hours the persuasion was overwhelming in Mr.\ Bessel's
mind that presently his body would be killed by its furious tenant,
and he would have to remain in this shadow-land for evermore. So that
those long hours were a growing agony of fear. And ever as he hurried
to and fro in his ineffectual excitement, innumerable spirits of that
world about him mobbed him and confused his mind. And ever an envious
applauding multitude poured after their successful fellow as he went
upon his glorious career.

For that, it would seem, must be the life of these bodiless things
of this world that is the shadow of our world. Ever they watch, coveting
a way into a mortal body, in order that they may descend, as furies
and frenzies, as violent lusts and mad, strange impulses, rejoicing
in the body they have won. For Mr.\ Bessel was not the only human
soul in that place. Witness the fact that he met first one, and afterwards
several shadows of men, men like himself, it seemed, who had lost
their bodies even it may be as he had lost his, and wandered, despairingly,
in that lost world that is neither life nor death. They could not
speak because that world is silent, yet he knew them for men because
of their dim human bodies, and because of the sadness of their faces.

But how they had come into that world he could not tell, nor where
the bodies they had lost might be, whether they still raved about
the earth, or whether they were closed forever in death against return.
That they were the spirits of the dead neither he nor I believe. But
Doctor Wilson Paget thinks they are the rational souls of men who
are lost in madness on the earth.

At last Mr.\ Bessel chanced upon a place where a little crowd of
such disembodied silent creatures was gathered, and thrusting through
them he saw below a brightly-lit room, and four or five quiet gentlemen
and a woman, a stoutish woman dressed in black bombazine and sitting
awkwardly in a chair with her head thrown back. He knew her from her
portraits to be Mrs.\ Bullock, the medium. And he perceived that
tracts and structures in her brain glowed and stirred as he had seen
the pineal eye in the brain of Mr.\ Vincey glow. The light was very
fitful; sometimes it was a broad illumination, and sometimes merely
a faint twilight spot, and it shifted slowly about her brain. She
kept on talking and writing with one hand. And Mr.\ Bessel saw that
the crowding shadows of men about him, and a great multitude of the
shadow spirits of that shadowland, were all striving and thrusting
to touch the lighted regions of her brain. As one gained her brain
or another was thrust away, her voice and the writing of her hand
changed. So that what she said was disorderly and confused for the
most part; now a fragment of one soul's message, and now a fragment
of another's, and now she babbled the insane fancies of the spirits
of vain desire. Then Mr.\ Bessel understood that she spoke for the
spirit that had touch of her, and he began to struggle very furiously
towards her. But he was on the outside of the crowd and at that time
he could not reach her, and at last, growing anxious, he went away
to find what had happened meanwhile to his body. For a long time he
went to and fro seeking it in vain and fearing that it must have been
killed, and then he found it at the bottom of the shaft in Baker Street,
writhing furiously and cursing with pain. Its leg and an arm and two
ribs had been broken by its fall. Moreover, the evil spirit was angry
because his time had been so short and because of the painmaking violent
movements and casting his body about.

And at that Mr.\ Bessel returned with redoubled earnestness to the
room where the \textit{\emph{s\'{e}ance}} was going on, and so soon
as he had thrust himself within sight of the place he saw one of the
men who stood about the medium looking at his watch as if he meant
that the \textit{\emph{s\'{e}ance}} should presently end. At that
a great number of the shadows who had been striving turned away with
gestures of despair. But the thought that the \textit{\emph{s\'{e}ance}}
was almost over only made Mr.\ Bessel the more earnest, and he struggled
so stoutly with his will against the others that presently he gained
the woman's brain. It chanced that just at that moment it glowed very
brightly, and in that instant she wrote the message that Doctor Wilson
Paget preserved. And then the other shadows and the cloud of evil
spirits about him had thrust Mr.\ Bessel away from her, and for all
the rest of the \textit{\emph{s\'{e}ance}} he could regain her no
more.

So he went back and watched through the long hours at the bottom of
the shaft where the evil spirit lay in the stolen body it had maimed,
writhing and cursing, and weeping and groaning, and learning the lesson
of pain. And towards dawn the thing he had waited for happened, the
brain glowed brightly and the evil spirit came out, and Mr.\ Bessel
entered the body he had feared he should never enter again. As he
did so, the silence\mbox{---}the brooding silence\mbox{---}ended;
he heard the tumult of traffic and the voices of people overhead,
and that strange world that is the shadow of our world\mbox{---}the
dark and silent shadows of ineffectual desire and the shadows of lost
men\mbox{---}vanished clean away.

He lay there for the space of about three hours before he was found.
And in spite of the pain and suffering of his wounds, and of the dim
damp place in which he lay; in spite of the tears\mbox{---}wrung
from him by his physical distress\mbox{---}his heart was full of
gladness to know that he was nevertheless back once more in the kindly
world of men.


\chapter*{\raggedright MR.\ BRISHER'S TREASURE}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{MR. BRISHER'S TREASURE}

\markboth{TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM}{MR. BRISHER'S TREASURE}

{}``You can't be \textit{too} careful \textit{who} you marry,''\ said
Mr.\ Brisher, and pulled thoughtfully with a fat-wristed hand at
the lank moustache that hides his want of chin.

{}``That's why\mbox{---}''\ I ventured.

{}``Yes,''\ said Mr.\ Brisher, with a solemn light in his bleary,
blue-grey eyes, moving his head expressively and breathing alcohol
\textit{intimately} at me. {}``There's lots as \emph{'}\textit{\emph{ave}}
\emph{'}\textit{\emph{ad}} a try at me\mbox{---}many as I could
name in this town\mbox{---}but none \emph{'}\textit{\emph{ave}}
done it\mbox{---}none.''

I surveyed the flushed countenance, the equatorial expansion, the
masterly carelessness of his attire, and heaved a sigh to think that
by reason of the unworthiness of women he must needs be the last of
his race.

{}``I was a smart young chap when I was younger,''\ said Mr.\ Brisher.
{}``I 'ad my work cut out. But I was very careful\mbox{---}very.
And I got through\ldots{}.''

He leant over the taproom table and thought visibly on the subject
of my trustworthiness. I was relieved at last by his confidence.

{}``I was engaged once,''\ he said at last, with a reminiscent
eye on the shuv-a'penny board.

{}``So near as that?''

He looked at me. {}``So near as that. Fact is\mbox{---}''\ He
looked about him, brought his face close to mine, lowered his voice,
and fenced off an unsympathetic world with a grimy hand. {}``If she
ain't dead or married to some one else or anything\mbox{---}I'm
engaged still. Now.'' He confirmed this statement with nods and facial
contortions. {}``\textit{Still},''\ he said, ending the pantomime,
and broke into a reckless smile at my surprise. {}``\textit{Me}!''

{}``Run away,''\ he explained further, with coruscating eyebrows.
{}``Come 'ome.

{}``That ain't all.

{}``You'd 'ardly believe it,''\ he said, {}``but I found a treasure.
Found a regular treasure.''

I fancied this was irony, and did not, perhaps, greet it with proper
surprise. {}``Yes,''\ he said, {}``I found a treasure. And come
'ome. I tell you I could surprise you with things that has happened
to me.'' And for some time he was content to repeat that he had found
a treasure\mbox{---}and left it.

I made no vulgar clamour for a story, but I became attentive to Mr.\ Brisher's
bodily needs, and presently I led him back to the deserted lady.

{}``She was a nice girl,''\ he said\mbox{---}a little sadly,
I thought. {}``\textit{And} respectable.''

He raised his eyebrows and tightened his mouth to express extreme
respectability\mbox{---}beyond the likes of us elderly men.

{}``It was a long way from 'ere. Essex, in fact. Near Colchester.
It was when I was up in London\mbox{---}in the buildin'\ trade.
I was a smart young chap then, I can tell you. Slim. 'Ad best clo'es
's good as anybody. 'At\mbox{---}\textit{silk} 'at, mind you.''
Mr.\ Brisher's hand shot above his head towards the infinite to indicate
it silk hat of the highest. {}``Umbrella\mbox{---}nice umbrella
with a 'orn 'andle. Savin's. Very careful I was\ldots{}.''

He was pensive for a little while, thinking, as we must all come to
think sooner or later, of the vanished brightness of youth. But he
refrained, as one may do in taprooms, from the obvious moral.

{}``I got to know \emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}} through a chap what
was engaged to \emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}} sister. She was stopping
in London for a bit with an aunt that 'ad a 'am an'\ beef shop. This
aunt was very particular\mbox{---}they was all very particular people,
all \emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}} people was\mbox{---}and wouldn't
let \emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}} sister go out with this feller except
\emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}} other sister, \textit{my} girl that is,
went with them. So 'e brought me into it, sort of to ease the crowding.
We used to go walks in Battersea Park of a Sunday afternoon. Me in
my topper, and 'im in 'is; and the girls\mbox{---}well\mbox{---}stylish.
There wasn't many in Battersea Park 'ad the larf of us. She wasn't
what you'd call pretty, but a nicer girl I never met. \textit{I} liked
\emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}} from the start, and, well\mbox{---}though
I say it who shouldn't\mbox{---}she liked me. You know 'ow it is,
I dessay?''

I pretended I did.

{}``And when this chap married \emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}} sister\mbox{---}'im
and me was great friends\mbox{---}what must 'e do but arst me down
to Colchester, close by where she lived. Naturally I was introjuced
to \emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}} people, and well, very soon, her and
me was engaged.''

He repeated {}``engaged.''

{}``She lived at 'ome with \emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}} father and
mother, quite the lady, in a very nice little 'ouse with a garden\mbox{---}and
remarkable respectable people they was. Rich you might call 'em a'most.
They owned their own 'ouse\mbox{---}got it out of the Building Society,
and cheap because the chap who had it before was a burglar and in
prison\mbox{---}and they 'ad a bit of free'old land, and some cottages
and money 'nvested\mbox{---}all nice and tight: they was what you'd
call snug and warm. I tell you, I was On. Furniture too. Why! They
'ad a pianner. Jane\mbox{---}'\textit{\emph{er}} name was Jane\mbox{---}used
to play it Sundays, and very nice she played too. There wasn't 'ardly
a 'im toon in the book she \textit{couldn't} play\ldots{}.

{}``Many's the evenin'\ we've met and sung 'ims there, me and \emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}}
and the family.

{}```\textit{\emph{Er}} father was quite a leadin'\ man in chapel.
You should ha'\ seen him Sundays, interruptin'\ the minister and
givin'\ out 'ims. He had gold spectacles, I remember, and used to
look over 'em at you while he sang hearty\mbox{---}he was always
great on singing 'earty to the Lord\mbox{---}and when \textit{he}
got out o'\ toon 'arf the people went after 'im\mbox{---}always.
'E was that sort of man. And to walk be'ind 'im in 'is nice black
clo'es\mbox{---}'is 'at was a brimmer\mbox{---}made one regular
proud to be engaged to such a father-in-law. And when the summer came
I went down there and stopped a fortnight.

{}``Now, you know there was a sort of 'itch,''\ said Mr.\ Brisher.
{}``We wanted to marry, me and Jane did, and get things settled.
But '\emph{e} said I 'ad to get a proper position first. Consequently
there was a 'itch. Consequently, when I went down there, I was anxious
to show that I was a good useful sort of chap like. Show I could do
pretty nearly everything like. See?''

I made a sympathetic noise.

{}``And down at the bottom of their garden was a bit of wild part
like. So I says to 'im, `Why don't you \emph{'}\textit{\emph{ave}}
a rockery 'ere?'\ I says. `It 'ud look nice.'

{}```Too much expense,'\ he says.

{}```Not a penny,'\ says I. `I'm a dab at rockeries. Lemme make
you one.' You see, I'd 'elped my brother make a rockery in the beer
garden be'ind 'is tap, so I knew 'ow to do it to rights. `Lemme make
you one,'\ I says. `It's 'olidays, but I'm that sort of chap, I 'ate
doing nothing,'\ I says. `I'll make you one to rights.' And the long
and the short of it was, he said I might.

{}``And that's 'ow I come on the treasure.''

{}``What treasure?''\ I asked.

{}``Why!''\ said Mr.\ Brisher, {}``the treasure I'm telling you
about, what's the reason why I never married.''

{}``What!\mbox{---}a treasure\mbox{---}dug up?''

{}``Yes\mbox{---}buried wealth\mbox{---}treasure trove. Come
out of the ground. What I kept on saying\mbox{---}regular treasure\ldots{}.''
He looked at me with unusual disrespect.

{}``It wasn't more than a foot deep, not the top of it,''\ he said.
{}``I'd 'ardly got thirsty like, before I come on the corner.''

{}``Go on,''\ I said. {}``I didn't understand.''

{}``Why! Directly I 'it the box I knew it was treasure. A sort of
instinct told me. Something seemed to shout inside of me\mbox{---}`Now's
your chance\mbox{---}lie low.' It's lucky I knew the laws of treasure
trove or I'd \emph{'}\textit{\emph{ave}} been shoutin'\ there and
then. I daresay you know\mbox{---}''

{}``Crown bags it,''\ I said, {}``all but one per cent. Go on.
It's a shame. What did you do?''

{}``Uncovered the top of the box. There wasn't anybody in the garden
or about like. Jane was 'elping \emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}} mother
do the 'ouse. I \textit{was} excited\mbox{---}I tell you. I tried
the lock and then gave a whack at the hinges. Open it came. Silver
coins\mbox{---}full! Shining. It made me tremble to see 'em. And
jest then\mbox{---}I'm blessed if the dustman didn't come round
the back of the 'ouse. It pretty nearly gave me 'eart disease to think
what a fool I was to \emph{'}\textit{\emph{ave}} that money showing.
And directly after I 'eard the chap next door\mbox{---}'e was 'olidaying,
too\mbox{---} I 'eard him watering 'is beans. If only 'e'd looked
over the fence!''

{}``What did you do?''

{}``Kicked the lid on again and covered it up like a shot, and went
on digging about a yard away from it\mbox{---}like mad. And my face,
so to speak, was laughing on its own account till I had it hid. I
tell you I was regular scared like at my luck. I jest thought that
it 'ad to be kep' close and that was all. `Treasure,'\ I kep'\ whisperin'
to myself, `Treasure'\ and `'undreds of pounds, 'undreds, 'undreds
of pounds.' Whispering to myself like, and digging like blazes. It
seemed to me the box was regular sticking out and showing, like your
legs do under the sheets in bed, and I went and put all the earth
I'd got out of my \emph{'}\textit{\emph{ole}} for the rockery slap
on top of it. I \textit{was} in a sweat. And in the midst of it all
out toddles \emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}} father. He didn't say anything
to me, jest stood behind me and stared, but Jane tole me afterwards
when he went indoors, 'e says, `That there jackanapes of yours, Jane'\mbox{---}he
always called me a jackanapes some'ow\mbox{---}`knows 'ow to put
'is back into it after all.' Seemed quite impressed by it, 'e did.''

{}``How long was the box?''\ I asked, suddenly.

{}``'Ow long?''\ said Mr.\ Brisher.

{}``Yes\mbox{---}in length?''

{}``Oh!\ 'bout so-by-so.'' Mr.\ Brisher indicated a moderate-sized
trunk.

{}``\textit{Full}?''\ said I.

{}``Full up of silver coins\mbox{---}'arf-crowns, I believe.''

{}``Why!''\ I cried, {}``that would mean\mbox{---}hun\-dreds
of pounds.''

{}``Thousands,''\ said Mr.\ Brisher, in a sort of sad calm. {}``I
calc'lated it out.''

{}``But how did they get there?''

{}``All I know is what I found. What I thought at the time was this.
The chap who'd owned the 'ouse before \emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}} father
'd been a regular slap-up burglar. What you'd call a 'igh-class criminal.
Used to drive 'is trap\mbox{---}like Peace did.'' Mr.\ Brisher
meditated on the difficulties of narration and embarked on a complicated
parenthesis. {}``I don't know if I told you it'd been a burglar's
'ouse before it was my girl's father's, and I knew 'e'd robbed a mail
train once, I did know that. It seemed to me\mbox{---}''

{}``That's very likely,''\ I said. {}``But what did you do?''

{}``Sweated,''\ said Mr.\ Brisher. {}``Regular run orf me. All
that morning,'' said Mr.\ Brisher, {}``I was at it, pretending
to make that rockery and wondering what I should do. I'd \emph{'}\textit{\emph{ave}}
told \emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}} father p'r'aps, only I was doubtful
of 'is honesty\mbox{---}I was afraid he might rob me of it like,
and give it up to the authorities\mbox{---}and besides, considering
I was marrying into the family, I thought it would be nicer like if
it came through me. Put me on a better footing, so to speak. Well,
I 'ad three days before me left of my 'olidays, so there wasn't no
hurry, so I covered it up and went on digging, and tried to puzzle
out 'ow I was to make sure of it. Only I couldn't.

{}``I thought,''\ said Mr.\ Brisher, {}``\textit{And} I thought.
Once I got regular doubtful whether I'd seen it or not, and went down
to it and 'ad it uncovered again, just as her ma came out to 'ang
up a bit of washin' she'd done. Jumps again! Afterwards I was just
thinking I'd \emph{'}\textit{\emph{ave}} another go at it, when Jane
comes to tell me dinner was ready. `You'll want it,'\ she said, `seeing
all the \textit{\emph{'ole}} you've dug.'

{}``I was in a regular daze all dinner, wondering whether that chap
next door wasn't over the fence and filling 'is pockets. But in the
afternoon I got easier in my mind\mbox{---}it seemed to me it must
\emph{'}\textit{\emph{ave}} been there so long it was pretty sure
to stop a bit longer\mbox{---}and I tried to get up a bit of a discussion
to dror out the old man and see what \emph{'e} thought of treasure
trove.''

Mr.\ Brisher paused, and affected amusement at the memory.

{}``The old man was a scorcher,''\ he said; {}``a regular scorcher.''

{}``What!''\ said I; {}``did he\mbox{---}?''

{}``It was like this,''\ explained Mr.\ Brisher, laying a friendly
hand on my arm and breathing into my face to calm me. {}``Just to
dror 'im out, I told a story of a chap I said I knew\mbox{---}pretendin',
you know\mbox{---}who'd found a sovring in an overcoat 'e'd borrowed.
I said 'e stuck to it, but I said I wasn't sure whether that was right
or not. And then the old man began. Lor'!\ 'e \textit{did} let me
\emph{'}\textit{\emph{ave}} it!'' Mr.\ Brisher affected an insincere
amusement.\ {}``'E was, well\mbox{---}what you might call a rare
'and at Snacks. Said that was the sort of friend 'e'd naturally expect
me to \emph{'}\textit{\emph{ave}}. Said 'e'd naturally expect that
from the friend of a out-of-work loafer who took up with daughters
who didn't belong to 'im. There! I couldn't tell you '\textit{arf}
'e said. 'E went on most outrageous. I stood up to 'im about it, just
to dror 'im out. `Wouldn't you stick to a 'arf-sov', not if you found
it in the street?'\ I says. `Certainly not,'\ 'e says; `certainly
I wouldn't.' `What!\ not if you found it as a sort of treasure?'\ `Young
man,' 'e says, 'there's 'i'er 'thority than mine\mbox{---}Render
unto Caesar'\mbox{---}what is it? Yes. Well, he fetched up that.
A rare 'and at 'itting you over the 'ed with the Bible, was the old
man. And so he went on. 'E got to such Snacks about me at last I couldn't
stand it. I'd promised Jane not to answer 'im back, but it got a bit
\textit{too} thick. I\mbox{---}I give it 'im\ldots{}.''

Mr.\ Brisher, by means of enigmatical facework, tried to make me
think he had had the best of that argument, but I knew better.

{}``I went out in a 'uff at last. But not before I was pretty sure
I 'ad to lift that treasure by myself. The only thing that kep'\ me
up was thinking 'ow I'd take it out of 'im when I 'ad the cash.''

There was a lengthy pause.

{}``Now, you'd 'ardly believe it, but all them three days I never
'ad a chance at the blessed treasure, never got out not even a 'arf-crown.
There was always a Somethink\mbox{---}always.

{}``'Stonishing thing it isn't thought of more,''\ said Mr.\ Brisher.
{}``Finding treasure's no great shakes. It's gettin'\ it. I don't
suppose I slep'\ a wink any of those nights, thinking where I was
to take it, what I was to do with it, 'ow I was to explain it. It
made me regular ill. And days I was that dull, it made Jane regular
'uffy. `You ain't the same chap you was in London,'\ she says, several
times. I tried to lay it on \emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}} father and
'is Snacks, but bless you, she knew better. What must she \emph{'}\textit{\emph{ave}}
but that I'd got another girl on my mind! Said I wasn't True. Well,
we had a bit of a row. But I was that set on the Treasure, I didn't
seem to mind a bit anything she said.

{}``Well, at last I got a sort of plan. I was always a bit good at
planning, though carrying out isn't so much in my line. I thought
it all out and settled on a plan. First, I was going to take all my
pockets full of these 'ere 'arf-crowns\mbox{---}see?\mbox{---}and
afterwards as I shall tell.

{}``Well, I got to that state I couldn't think of getting at the
Treasure again in the daytime, so I waited until the night before
I had to go, and then, when everything was still, up I gets and slips
down to the back door, meaning to get my pockets full. What must I
do in the scullery but fall over a pail! Up gets \emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}}
father with a gun\mbox{---}'e was a light sleeper was \emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}}
father, and very suspicious and there was me: 'ad to explain I'd come
down to the pump for a drink because my water-bottle was bad. 'E didn't
let me off a Snack or two over that bit, you lay a bob.''

{}``And you mean to say\mbox{---}''\ I began.

{}``Wait a bit,''\ said Mr.\ Brisher. {}``I say, I'd made my
plan. That put the kybosh on one bit, but it didn't 'urt the general
scheme not a bit. I went and I finished that rockery next day, as
though there wasn't a Snack in the world; cemented over the stones,
I did, dabbed it green and everythink. I put a dab of green just to
show where the box was. They all came and looked at it, and \textit{\emph{sa\"{\i}'}}
'ow nice it was\mbox{---}even 'e was a bit softer like to see it,
and all he said was, {}``It's a pity you can't always work like that,
then you might get something definite to do,''\ he says.

{}```Yes,'\ I says\mbox{---}I couldn't 'elp it\mbox{---}`I put
a lot in that rockery,' I says, like that. See? `I put a lot in that
rockery'\mbox{---}meaning\mbox{---}''

{}``I see,''\ said I\mbox{---}for Mr.\ Brisher is apt to overelaborate
his jokes.

{}``\textit{'E}\ didn't,''\ said Mr.\ Brisher. {}``Not then,
anyhow.

{}``Ar'ever\mbox{---}after all that was over, off I set for London\ldots{}.
Orf I set for London.''

Pause.

{}``On'y I wasn't going to no London,''\ said Mr.\ Brisher, with
sudden animation, and thrusting his face into mine. {}``No fear!
What do \textit{you} think?

{}``I didn't go no further than Colchester\mbox{---}not a yard.

{}``I'd left the spade just where I could find it. I'd got everything
planned and right. I 'ired a little trap in Colchester, and pretended
I wanted to go to Ipswich and stop the night, and come back next day,
and the chap I 'ired it from made me leave two sovrings on it right
away, and off I set.

{}``I didn't go to no Ipswich neither.

{}``Midnight the \emph{'}\textit{\emph{orse}} and trap was 'itched
by the little road that ran by the cottage where 'e lived\mbox{---}not
sixty yards off, it wasn't\mbox{---}and I was at it like a good
'un. It was jest the night for such games\mbox{---}overcast\mbox{---}but
a trifle too 'ot, and all round the sky there was summer lightning
and presently a thunderstorm. Down it came. First big drops in a sort
of fizzle, then 'ail. I kep'on. I whacked at it\mbox{---}I didn't
dream the old man would 'ear. I didn't even trouble to go quiet with
the spade, and the thunder and lightning and 'ail seemed to excite
me like. I shouldn't wonder if I was singing. I got so 'ard at it
I clean forgot the thunder and the \emph{'}\textit{\emph{orse}} and
trap. I precious soon got the box showing, and started to lift it\ldots{}.''

{}``Heavy?''\ I said.

{}``I couldn't no more lift it than fly. I \textit{was} sick. I'd
never thought of that. I got regular wild\mbox{---}I tell you, I
cursed. I got sort of outrageous. I didn't think of dividing it like
for the minute, and even then I couldn't \emph{'}\textit{\emph{ave}}
took money about loose in a trap. I hoisted one end sort of wild like,
and over the whole show went with a tremenjous noise. Perfeck smash
of silver. And then right on the heels of that, Flash! Lightning like
the day!\ and there was the back door open and the old man coming
down the garden with 'is blooming old gun. He wasn't not a 'undred
yards away!

{}``I tell you I was that upset\mbox{---}I didn't think what I
was doing. I never stopped\mbox{---}not even to fill my pockets.
I went over the fence like a shot, and ran like one o'clock for the
trap, cussing and swearing as I went. I \textit{was} in a state\ldots{}.

{}``And will you believe me, when I got to the place where I'd left
the \emph{'}\textit{\emph{orse}} and trap, they'd gone. Orf! When
I saw that I 'adn't a cuss left for it. I jest danced on the grass,
and when I'd danced enough I started off to London\ldots{}. I was
done.''

Mr.\ Brisher was pensive for an interval. {}``I was done,''\ he
repeated, very bitterly.

{}``Well?''\ I said.

{}``That's all,''\ said Mr.\ Brisher.

{}``You didn't go back?''

{}``No fear. I'd 'ad enough of \textit{that} blooming treasure, any'ow
for a bit. Besides, I didn't know what was done to chaps who tried
to collar a treasure trove. I started off for London there and then\ldots{}.''

{}``And you never went back?''

{}``Never.''

{}``But about Jane? Did you write?''

{}``Three times, fishing like. And no answer. We'd parted in a bit
of a 'uff on account of \emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}} being jealous.
So that I couldn't make out for certain what it meant.

{}``I didn't know what to do. I didn't even know whether the old
man knew it was me. I sort of kep'\ an eye open on papers to see
when he'd give up that treasure to the Crown, as I hadn't a doubt
'e would, considering 'ow respectable he'd always been.''

{}``And did he?''

Mr.\ Brisher pursed his mouth and moved his head slowly from side
to side. {}``Not '\textit{im},''\ he said.

{}``Jane was a nice girl,''\ he said, {}``a thorough nice girl
mind you, if jealous, and there's no knowing I mightn't \emph{'}\textit{\emph{ave}}
gone back to \emph{'}\textit{\emph{er}} after a bit. I thought if
he didn't give up the treasure I might \emph{'}\textit{\emph{ave}}
a sort of 'old on 'im\ldots{}. Well, one day I looks as usual under
Colchester\mbox{---}and there I saw 'is name. What for, d'yer think?''

I could not guess.

Mr.\ Brisher's voice sank to a whisper, and once more he spoke behind
his hand. His manner was suddenly suffused with a positive joy. {}``Issuing
counterfeit coins,''\ he said. {}``Counterfeit coins!''

{}``You don't mean to say\mbox{---}?''

{}``Yes. Quite a long case they made of it. But they got 'im, though
he dodged tremenjous. Traced 'is 'aving passed, oh!\mbox{---}nearly
a dozen bad 'arf-crowns.''

{}``And you didn't\mbox{---}?''

{}``No fear. And it didn't do \emph{'}\textit{im} much good to say
it was treasure trove.''


\chapter*{\raggedright MISS WINCHELSEA'S HEART}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{MISS WINCHELSEA'S HEART}

\markboth{TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM}{MISS WINCHELSEA'S HEART}

Miss Winchelsea was going to Rome. The matter had filled her mind
for a month or more, and had overflowed so abundantly into her conversation
that quite a number of people who were not going to Rome, and who
were not likely to go to Rome, had made it a personal grievance against
her. Some indeed had attempted quite unavailingly to convince her
that Rome was not nearly such a desirable place as it was reported
to be, and others had gone so far as to suggest behind her back that
she was dreadfully {}``stuck up''\ about {}``that Rome of hers.''
And little Lily Hardhurst had told her friend Mr.\ Binns that so
far as she was concerned Miss Winchelsea might {}``go to her old
Rome and stop there; \textit{she} (Miss Lily Hardhurst)\ wouldn't
grieve.'' And the way in which Miss Winchelsea put herself upon terms
of personal tenderness with Horace and Benvenuto Cellini and Raphael
and Shelley and Keats\mbox{---}if she had been Shelley's widow she
could not have professed a keener interest in his grave\mbox{---}was
a matter of universal astonishment. Her dress was a triumph of tactful
discretion, sensible, but not too {}``touristy''\mbox{---}Miss
Winchelsea, had a great dread of being {}``touristy''\mbox{---}and
her Baedeker was carried in a cover of grey to hide its glaring red.
She made a prim and pleasant little figure on the Charing Cross platform,
in spite of her swelling pride, when at last the great day dawned,
and she could start for Rome. The day was bright, the Channel passage
would be pleasant, and all the omens promised well. There was the
gayest sense of adventure in this unprecedented departure.

She was going with two friends who had been fellow-students with her
at the training college, nice honest girls both, though not so good
at history and literature as Miss Winchelsea. They both looked up
to her immensely, though physically they had to look down, and she
anticipated some pleasant times to be spent in {}``stirring them
up'' to her own pitch of \ae{}sthetic and historical enthusiasm.
They had secured seats already, and welcomed her effusively at the
carriage door. In the instant criticism of the encounter she noted
that Fanny had a slightly {}``touristy''\ leather strap, and that
Helen had succumbed to a serge jacket with side pockets, into which
her hands were thrust. But they were much too happy with themselves
and the expedition for their friend to attempt any hint at the moment
about these things. As soon as the first ecstasies were over\mbox{---}Fanny's
enthusiasm was a little noisy and crude, and consisted mainly in emphatic
repetitions of {}``Just \textit{fancy}!\ we're going to Rome, my
dear!\mbox{---}Rome!''\mbox{---}they gave their attention to
their fellow-travellers. Helen was anxious to secure a compartment
to themselves, and, in order to discourage intruders, got out and
planted herself firmly on the step. Miss Winchelsea peeped out over
her shoulder, and made sly little remarks about the accumulating people
on the platform, at which Fanny laughed gleefully.

They were travelling with one of Mr.\ Thomas Gunn's parties\mbox{---}fourteen
days in Rome for fourteen pounds. They did not belong to the personally
conducted party of course\mbox{---}Miss Winchelsea had seen to that\mbox{---}but
they travelled with it because of the convenience of that arrangement.
The people were the oddest mixture, and wonderfully amusing. There
was a vociferous red-faced polyglot personal conductor in a pepper-and-salt
suit, very long in the arms and legs and very active. He shouted proclamations.
When he wanted to speak to people he stretched out an arm and held
them until his purpose was accomplished. One hand was full of papers,
tickets, counterfoils of tourists. The people of the personally conducted
party were, it seemed, of two sorts; people the conductor wanted and
could not find, and people he did not want and who followed him in
a steadily growing tail up and down the platform. These people seemed,
indeed, to think that their one chance of reaching Rome lay in keeping
close to him. Three little old ladies were particularly energetic
in his pursuit, and at last maddened him to the pitch of clapping
them into a carriage and daring them to emerge again. For the rest
of the time, one, two, or three of their heads protruded from the
window wailing enquiries about {}``a little wickerwork box'' whenever
he drew near. There was a very stout man with a very stout wife in
shiny black; there was a little old man like an aged hostler.

{}``What \textit{can} such people want in Rome?''\ asked Miss Winchelsea.
{}``What can it mean to them?''\ There was a very tall curate in
a very small straw hat, and a very short curate encumbered by a long
camera stand. The contrast amused Fanny very much. Once they heard
some one calling for {}``Snooks.'' {}``I always thought that name
was invented by novelists,''\ said Miss Winchelsea. {}``Fancy!
Snooks. I wonder which \textit{is} Mr.\ Snooks.'' Finally they picked
out a very stout and resolute little man in a large check suit. {}``If
he isn't Snooks, he ought to be,''\ said Miss Winchelsea.

Presently the conductor discovered Helen's attempt at a corner in
carriages. {}``Room for five,''\ he bawled with a parallel translation
on his fingers. A party of four together\mbox{---}mother, father,
and two daughters\mbox{---}blundered in, all greatly excited. {}``It's
all right, Ma, you let me,''\ said one of the daughters, hitting
her mother's bonnet with a handbag she struggled to put in the rack.
Miss Winchelsea detested people who banged about and called their
mother {}``Ma.'' A young man travelling alone followed. He was not
at all {}``touristy'' in his costume, Miss Winchelsea observed;
his Gladstone bag was of good pleasant leather with labels reminiscent
of Luxembourg and Ostend, and his boots, though brown, were not vulgar.
He carried an overcoat on his arm. Before these people had properly
settled in their places, came an inspection of tickets and a slamming
of doors, and behold!\ they were gliding out of Charing Cross station
on their way to Rome.

{}``Fancy!''\ cried Fanny, {}``we are going to Rome, my dear!
Rome! I don't seem to believe it, even now.''

Miss Winchelsea suppressed Fanny's emotions with a little smile, and
the lady who was called {}``Ma''\ explained to people in general
why they had {}``cut it so close''\ at the station. The two daughters
called her {}``Ma''\ several times, toned her down in a tactless
effective way, and drove her at last to the muttered inventory of
a basket of travelling requisites. Presently she looked up. {}``Lor'!''\ she
said, {}``I didn't bring \textit{them}!''\ Both the daughters said
{}``Oh, Ma!''\ but what {}``them''\ was did not appear. Presently
Fanny produced Hare's \emph{Walks in Rome}, a sort of mitigated guide-book
very popular among Roman visitors; and the father of the two daughters
began to examine his books of tickets minutely, apparently in a search
after English words. When he had looked at the tickets for a long
time right way up, he turned them upside down. Then he produced a
fountain pen and dated them with considerable care. The young man,
having completed an unostentatious survey of his fellow travellers,
produced a book and fell to reading. When Helen and Fanny were looking
out of the window at Chiselhurst\mbox{---}the place interested Fanny
because the poor dear Empress of the French used to live there\mbox{---}Miss
Winchelsea took the opportunity to observe the book the young man
held. It was not a guide-book, but a little thin volume of poetry\mbox{---}\textit{bound}.
She glanced at his face\mbox{---}it seemed a refined pleasant face
to her hasty glance. He wore a little gilt \textit{pince}-\textit{nez}.
{}``Do you think she lives there now?''\ said Fanny, and Miss Winchelsea's
inspection came to an end.

For the rest of the journey Miss Winchelsea talked little, and what
she said was as pleasant and as stamped with refinement as she could
make it. Her voice was always low and clear and pleasant, and she
took care that on this occasion it was particularly low and clear
and pleasant. As they came under the white cliffs the young man put
his book of poetry away, and when at last the train stopped beside
the boat, he displayed a graceful alacrity with the impedimenta of
Miss Winchelsea and her friends. Miss Winchelsea hated nonsense, but
she was pleased to see the young man perceived at once that they were
ladies, and helped them without any violent geniality; and how nicely
he showed that his civilities were to be no excuse for further intrusions.
None of her little party had been out of England before, and they
were all excited and a little nervous at the Channel passage. They
stood in a little group in a good place near the middle of the boat\mbox{---}the
young man had taken Miss Winchelsea's carry-all there and had told
her it was a good place\mbox{---}and they watched the white shores
of Albion recede and quoted Shakespeare and made quiet fun of their
fellow travellers in the English way.

They were particularly amused at the precautions the bigger-sized
people had taken against the little waves\mbox{---}cut lemons and
flasks prevailed, one lady lay full-length in a deck chair with a
handkerchief over her face, and a very broad resolute man in a bright
brown {}``touristy''\ suit walked all the way from England to France
along the deck, with his legs as widely apart as Providence permitted.
These were all excellent precautions, and, nobody was ill. The personally
conducted party pursued the conductor about the deck with enquiries
in a manner that suggested to Helen's mind the rather vulgar image
of hens with a piece of bacon peel, until at last he went into hiding
below. And the young man with the thin volume of poetry stood at the
stern watching England receding, looking rather lonely and sad to
Miss Winchelsea's eye.

And then came Calais and tumultuous novelties, and the young man had
not forgotten Miss Winchelsea's hold-all and the other little things.
All three girls, though they had passed government examinations in
French to any extent, were stricken with a dumb shame of their accents,
and the young man was very useful. And he did not intrude. He put
them in a comfortable carriage and raised his hat and went away. Miss
Winchelsea thanked him in her best manner\mbox{---}a pleasing, cultivated
manner\mbox{---}and Fanny said he was {}``nice''\ almost before
he was out of earshot. {}``I wonder what he can be,''\ said Helen.
{}``He's going to Italy, because I noticed green tickets in his book.''
Miss Winchelsea almost told them of the poetry, and decided not to
do so. And presently the carriage windows seized hold upon them and
the young man was forgotten. It made them feel that they were doing
an educated sort of thing to travel through a country whose commonest
advertisements were in idiomatic French, and Miss Winchelsea made
unpatriotic comparisons because there were weedy little sign-board
advertisements by the rail side instead of the broad hoardings that
deface the landscape in our land. But the north of France is really
uninteresting country, and after a time Fanny reverted to Hare's \emph{Walks}
and Helen initiated lunch. Miss Winchelsea awoke out of a happy reverie;
she had been trying to realise, she said, that she was actually going
to Rome, but she perceived at Helen's suggestion that she was hungry,
and they lunched out of their baskets very cheerfully. In the afternoon
they were tired and silent until Helen made tea. Miss Winchelsea might
have dozed, only she knew Fanny slept with her mouth open; and as
their fellow passengers were two rather nice critical-looking ladies
of uncertain age\mbox{---}who knew French well enough to talk it\mbox{---}she
employed herself in keeping Fanny awake. The rhythm of the train became
insistent, and the streaming landscape outside became at last quite
painful to the eye. They were already dreadfully tired of travelling
before their night's stoppage came.

The stoppage for the night was brightened by the appearance of the
young man, and his manners were all that could be desired and his
French quite serviceable. His coupons availed for the same hotel as
theirs, and by chance as it seemed he sat next Miss Winchelsea at
the \emph{table d'hote}. In spite of her enthusiasm for Rome, she
had thought out some such possibility very thoroughly, and when he
ventured to make a remark upon the tediousness of travelling\mbox{---}he
let the soup and fish go by before he did this\mbox{---}she did
not simply assent to his proposition, but responded with another.
They were soon comparing their journeys, and Helen and Fanny were
cruelly overlooked in the conversation. It was to be the same journey,
they found; one day for the galleries at Florence\mbox{---}{}``from
what I hear,''\ said the young man, {}``it is barely enough,''\mbox{---}and
the rest at Rome. He talked of Rome very pleasantly; he was evidently
quite well read, and he quoted Horace about Soracte. Miss Winchelsea
had {}``done''\ that book of Horace for her matriculation, and
was delighted to cap his quotation. It gave a sort of tone to things,
this incident\mbox{---}a touch of refinement to mere chatting. Fanny
expressed a few emotions, and Helen interpolated a few sensible remarks,
but the bulk of the talk on the girls'\ side naturally fell to Miss
Winchelsea.

Before they reached Rome this young man was tacitly of their party.
They did not know his name nor what he was, but it seemed he taught,
and Miss Winchelsea had a shrewd idea he was an extension lecturer.
At any rate he was something of that sort, something gentlemanly and
refined without being opulent and impossible. She tried once or twice
to ascertain whether he came from Oxford or Cambridge, but he missed
her timid importunities. She tried to get him to make remarks about
those places to see if he would say {}``come up''\ to them instead
of {}``go down''\mbox{---}she knew that was how you told a 'Varsity
man. He used the word {}``'Varsity''\mbox{---}not university\mbox{---}in
quite the proper way.

They saw as much of Mr.\ Ruskin's Florence as the brief time permitted;
he met them in the Pitti Gallery and went round with them, chatting
brightly, and evidently very grateful for their recognition. He knew
a great deal about art, and all four enjoyed the morning immensely.
It was fine to go round recognising old favourites and finding new
beauties, especially while so many people fumbled helplessly with
Baedeker. Nor was he a bit of a prig, Miss Winchelsea said, and indeed
she detested prigs. He had a distinct undertone of humour, and was
funny, for example, without being vulgar, at the expense of the quaint
work of Beato Angelico. He had a grave seriousness beneath it all,
and was quick to seize the moral lessons of the pictures. Fanny went
softly among these masterpieces; she admitted {}``she knew so little
about them,''\ and she confessed that to her they were {}``all
beautiful.'' Fanny's {}``beautiful''\ inclined to be a little
monotonous, Miss Winchelsea thought. She had been quite glad when
the last sunny Alp had vanished, because of the staccato of Fanny's
admiration. Helen said little, but Miss Winchelsea had found her a
little wanting on the \ae{}sthetic side in the old days and was not
surprised; sometimes she laughed at the young man's hesitating delicate
little jests and sometimes she didn't, and sometimes she seemed quite
lost to the art about them in the contemplation of the dresses of
the other visitors.

At Rome the young man was with them intermittently. A rather {}``touristy''\ friend
of his took him away at times. He complained comically to Miss Winchelsea.
{}``I have only two short weeks in Rome,'' he said, {}``and my
friend Leonard wants to spend a whole day at Tivoli, looking at a
waterfall.''

{}``What is your friend Leonard?''\ asked Miss Winchelsea abruptly.

{}``He's the most enthusiastic pedestrian I ever met,''\ the young
man replied, amusingly, but a little unsatisfactorily, Miss Winchelsea
thought. They had some glorious times, and Fanny could not think what
they would have done without him. Miss Winchelsea's interest and Fanny's
enormous capacity for admiration were insatiable. They never flagged\mbox{---}through
pictures and sculpture galleries, immense crowded churches, ruins
and museums, Judas trees and prickly pears, wine carts and palaces,
they admired their way unflinchingly. They never saw a stone pine
or a eucalyptus but they named and admired it; they never glimpsed
Soracte but they exclaimed. Their common ways were made wonderful
by imaginative play. {}``Here Caesar may have walked,''\ they would
say. {}``Raphael may have seen Soracte from this very point.'' They
happened on the tomb of Bibulus. {}``Old Bibulus,'' said the young
man. {}``The oldest monument of Republican Rome!'' said Miss Winchelsea.

{}``I'm dreadfully stupid,''\ said Fanny, {}``but who \textit{was}
Bibulus?''

There was a curious little pause.

{}``Wasn't he the person who built the wall?''\ said Helen.

The young man glanced quickly at her and laughed. {}``That was \textit{Balbus},''
he said. Helen reddened, but neither he nor Miss Winchelsea threw
any light upon Fanny's ignorance about Bibulus.

Helen was more taciturn than the other three, but then she was always
taciturn, and usually she took care of the tram tickets and things
like that, or kept her eye on them if the young man took them, and
told him where they were when he wanted them. Glorious times they
had, these young people, in that pale brown cleanly city of memories
that was once the world. Their only sorrow was the shortness of the
time. They said indeed that the electric trams and the '70 buildings,
and that criminal advertisement that glares upon the Forum, outraged
their \ae{}sthetic feelings unspeakably; but that was only part of
the fun. And indeed Rome is such a wonderful place that it made Miss
Winchelsea forget some of her most carefully prepared enthusiasms
at times, and Helen, taken unawares, would suddenly admit the beauty
of unexpected things. Yet Fanny and Helen would have liked a shop
window or so in the English quarter if Miss Winchelsea's uncompromising
hostility to all other English visitors had not rendered that district
impossible.

The intellectual and \ae{}sthetic fellowship of Miss Winchelsea and
the scholarly young man passed insensibly towards a deeper feeling.
The exuberant Fanny did her best to keep pace with their recondite
admiration by playing her {}``beautiful,''\ with vigour, and saying
{}``Oh! \textit{Let's} go,''\ with enormous appetite whenever a
new place of interest was mentioned. But Helen developed a certain
want of sympathy towards the end, that disappointed Miss Winchelsea
a little. She refused to {}``see anything''\ in the face of Beatrice
Cenci\mbox{---}Shelley's Beatrice Cenci!\mbox{---}in the Barberini
gallery; and one day, when they were deploring the electric trams,
she said rather snappishly that {}``people must get about somehow,
and it's better than torturing horses up these horrid little hills.''
She spoke of the Seven Hills of Rome as {}``horrid little hills!''

And the day they went on the Palatine\mbox{---}though Miss Winchelsea
did not know of this\mbox{---}she remarked suddenly to Fanny, {}``Don't
hurry like that, my dear; \textit{they} don't want us to overtake
them. And we don't say the right things for them when we \textit{do}
get near.''

{}``I wasn't trying to overtake them,''\ said Fanny, slackening
her excessive pace; {}``I wasn't indeed.'' And for a minute she
was short of breath.

But Miss Winchelsea had come upon happiness. It was only when she
came to look back across an intervening tragedy that she quite realised
how happy she had been, pacing among the cypress-shadowed ruins, and
exchanging the very highest class of information the human mind can
possess, the most refined impressions it is possible to convey. Insensibly
emotion crept into their intercourse, sunning itself openly and pleasantly
at last when Helen's modernity was not too near. Insensibly their
interest drifted from the wonderful associations about them to their
more intimate and personal feelings. In a tentative way information
was supplied; she spoke allusively of her school, of her examination
successes, of her gladness that the days of {}``Cram''\ were over.
He made it quite clear that he also was a teacher. They spoke of the
greatness of their calling, of the necessity of sympathy to face its
irksome details, of a certain loneliness they sometimes felt.

That was in the Colosseum, and it was as far as they got that day,
because Helen returned with Fanny\mbox{---}she had taken her into
the upper galleries. Yet the private dreams of Miss Winchelsea, already
vivid and concrete enough, became now realistic in the highest degree.
She figured that pleasant young man, lecturing in the most edifying
way to his students, herself modestly prominent as his intellectual
mate and helper; she figured a refined little home, with two bureaus,
with white shelves of high-class books, and autotypes of the pictures
of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, with Morris's wall papers and flowers
in pots of beaten copper. Indeed she figured many things. On the Pincio
the two had a few precious moments together, while Helen marched Fanny
off to see the \textit{muro} \textit{Torto}, and he spoke at once
plainly. He said he hoped their friendship was only beginning, that
he already found her company very precious to him, that indeed it
was more than that.

He became nervous, thrusting at his glasses with trembling fingers
as though he fancied his emotions made them unstable. {}``I should
of course,''\ he said, {}``tell you things about myself. I know
it is rather unusual my speaking to you like this. Only our meeting
has been so accidental\mbox{---}or providential\mbox{---}and I
am snatching at things. I came to Rome expecting a lonely tour \ldots{}\ and
I have been so very happy, so very happy. Quite recently I found myself
in a position\mbox{---}I have dared to think\mbox{---}. And\mbox{---}''

He glanced over his shoulder and stopped. He said {}``Damn!''\ quite
distinctly\mbox{---}and she did not condemn him for that manly lapse
into profanity. She looked and saw his friend Leonard advancing. He
drew nearer; he raised his hat to Miss Winchelsea, and his smile was
almost a grin. {}``I've been looking for you everywhere, Snooks,''\ he
said. {}``You promised to be on the Piazza steps half an hour ago.''

Snooks! The name struck Miss Winchelsea like a blow in the face. She
did not hear his reply. She thought afterwards that Leonard must have
considered her the vaguest-minded person. To this day she is not sure
whether she was introduced to Leonard or not, nor what she said to
him. A sort of mental paralysis was upon her. Of all offensive surnames\mbox{---}Snooks!

Helen and Fanny were returning, there were civilities, and the young
men were receding. By a great effort she controlled herself to face
the enquiring eyes of her friends. All that afternoon she lived the
life of a heroine under the indescribable outrage of that name, chatting,
observing, with {}``Snooks''\ gnawing at her heart. From the moment
that it first rang upon her ears, the dream of her happiness was prostrate
in the dust. All the refinement she had figured was ruined and defaced
by that cognomen's unavoidable vulgarity.

What was that refined little home to her now, spite of autotypes,
Morris papers, and bureaus? Athwart it in letters of fire ran an incredible
inscription: {}``Mrs.\ Snooks.'' That may seem a little thing to
the reader, but consider the delicate refinement of Miss Winchelsea's
mind. Be as refined as you can and then think of writing yourself
down:\mbox{---}{}``Snooks.'' She conceived herself being addressed
as Mrs.\ Snooks by all the people she liked least, conceived the
patronymic touched with a vague quality of insult. She figured a card
of grey and silver bearing {}``Winchelsea,''\ triumphantly effaced
by an arrow, Cupid's arrow, in favour of {}``Snooks.'' Degrading
confession of feminine weakness! She imagined the terrible rejoicings
of certain girl friends, of certain grocer cousins from whom her growing
refinement had long since estranged her. How they would make it sprawl
across the envelope that would bring their sarcastic congratulations.
Would even his pleasant company compensate her for that? {}``It is
impossible,'' she muttered; {}``impossible! \textit{Snooks}!''

She was sorry for him, but not so sorry as she was for herself. For
him she had a touch of indignation. To be so nice, so refined, while
all the time he was {}``Snooks,''\ to hide under a pretentious
gentility of demeanour the badge sinister of his surname seemed a
sort of treachery. To put it in the language of sentimental science
she felt he had {}``led her on.''

There were of course moments of terrible vacillation, a period even
when something almost like passion bid her throw refinement to the
winds. And there was something in her, an unexpurgated vestige of
vulgarity, that made a strenuous attempt at proving that Snooks was
not so very bad a name after all. Any hovering hesitation flew before
Fanny's manner, when Fanny came with an air of catastrophe to tell
that she also knew the horror. Fanny's voice fell to a whisper when
she said \textit{Snooks}. Miss Winchelsea would not give him any answer
when at last, in the Borghese, she could have a minute with him; but
she promised him a note.

She handed him that note in the little book of poetry he had lent
her, the little book that had first drawn them together. Her refusal
was ambiguous, allusive. She could no more tell him why she rejected
him than she could have told a cripple of his hump. He too must feel
something of the unspeakable quality of his name. Indeed he had avoided
a dozen chances of telling it, she now perceived. So she spoke of
{}``obstacles she could not reveal''\mbox{---}{}``reasons why
the thing he spoke of was impossible.'' She addressed the note with
a shiver, {}``E. K. Snooks.''

Things were worse than she had dreaded; he asked her to explain. How
\textit{could} she explain? Those last two days in Rome were dreadful.
She was haunted by his air of astonished perplexity. She knew she
had given him intimate hopes, she had not the courage to examine her
mind thoroughly for the extent of her encouragement. She knew he must
think her the most changeable of beings. Now that she was in full
retreat, she would not even perceive his hints of a possible correspondence.
But in that matter he did a thing that seemed to her at once delicate
and romantic. He made a go-between of Fanny. Fanny could not keep
the secret, and came and told her that night under a transparent pretext
of needed advice. {}``Mr.\ Snooks,''\ said Fanny, {}``wants to
write to me. Fancy! I had no idea. But should I let him?''\ They
talked it over long and earnestly, and Miss Winchelsea was careful
to keep the veil over her heart. She was already repenting his disregarded
hints. Why should she not hear of him sometimes\mbox{---}painful
though his name must be to her? Miss Winchelsea decided it might be
permitted, and Fanny kissed her good-night with unusual emotion. After
she had gone Miss Winchelsea sat for a long time at the window of
her little room. It was moonlight, and down the street a man sang
{}``Santa Lucia''\ with almost heart-dissolving tenderness\ldots{}.
She sat very still.

She breathed a word very softly to herself. The word was {}``\textit{Snooks}.''
Then she got up with a profound sigh, and went to bed. The next morning
he said to her meaningly, {}``I shall hear of you through your friend.''

Mr.\ Snooks saw them off from Rome with that pathetic interrogative
perplexity still on his face, and if it had not been for Helen he
would have retained Miss Winchelsea's hold-all in his hand as a sort
of encyclop\ae{}dic keepsake. On their way back to England Miss Winchelsea
on six separate occasions made Fanny promise to write to her the longest
of long letters. Fanny, it seemed, would be quite near Mr.\ Snooks.
Her new school\mbox{---}she was always going to new schools\mbox{---}would
be only five miles from Steely Bank, and it was in the Steely Bank
Polytechnic, and one or two first-class schools, that Mr.\ Snooks
did his teaching. He might even see her at times. They could not talk
much of him\mbox{---}she and Fanny always spoke of {}``him,''\ never
of Mr.\ Snooks,\mbox{---}because Helen was apt to say unsympathetic
things about him. Her nature had coarsened very much, Miss Winchelsea
perceived, since the old Training College days; she had become hard
and cynical. She thought he had a weak face, mistaking refinement
for weakness as people of her stamp are apt to do, and when she heard
his name was Snooks, she said she had expected something of the sort.
Miss Winchelsea was careful to spare her own feelings after that,
but Fanny was less circumspect.

The girls parted in London, and Miss Winchelsea returned, with a new
interest in life, to the Girls'\ High School in which she had been
an increasingly valuable assistant for the last three years. Her new
interest in life was Fanny as a correspondent, and to give her a lead
she wrote her a lengthy descriptive letter within a fortnight of her
return. Fanny answered, very disappointingly. Fanny indeed had no
literary gift, but it was new to Miss Winchelsea to find herself deploring
the want of gifts in a friend. That letter was even criticised aloud
in the safe solitude of Miss Winchelsea's study, and her criticism,
spoken with great bitterness, was {}``Twaddle!'' It was full of
just the things Miss Winchelsea's letter had been full of, particulars
of the school. And of Mr.\ Snooks, only this much: {}``I have had
a letter from Mr.\ Snooks, and he has been over to see me on two
Saturday afternoons running. He talked about Rome and you; we both
talked about you. Your ears must have burnt, my dear\ldots{}.''

Miss Winchelsea repressed a desire to demand more explicit information,
and wrote the sweetest long letter again. {}``Tell me all about yourself,
dear. That journey has quite refreshed our ancient friendship, and
I do so want to keep in touch with you.'' About Mr.\ Snooks she
simply wrote on the fifth page that she was glad Fanny had seen him,
and that if he \textit{should} ask after her, she was to be remembered
to him \textit{very} \textit{kindly} (underlined). And Fanny replied
most obtusely in the key of that {}``ancient friendship,''\ reminding
Miss Winchelsea of a dozen foolish things of those old schoolgirl
days at the training college, and saying not a word about Mr.\ Snooks!

For nearly a week Miss Winchelsea was so angry at the failure of Fanny
as a go-between that she could not write to her. And then she wrote
less effusively, and in her letter she asked point-blank, {}``Have
you seen Mr.\ Snooks?''\ Fanny's letter was unexpectedly satisfactory.
{}``I \textit{have} seen Mr.\ Snooks,''\ she wrote, and having
once named him she kept on about him; it was all Snooks\mbox{---}Snooks
this and Snooks that. He was to give a public lecture, said Fanny,
among other things. Yet Miss Winchelsea, after the first glow of gratification,
still found this letter a little unsatisfactory. Fanny did not report
Mr.\ Snooks as saying anything about Miss Winchelsea, nor as looking
a little white and worn, as he ought to have been doing. And behold!
before she had replied, came a second letter from Fanny on the same
theme, quite a gushing letter, and covering six sheets with her loose
feminine hand.

And about this second letter was a rather odd little thing that Miss
Winchelsea only noticed as she re-read it the third time. Fanny's
natural femininity had prevailed even against the round and clear
traditions of the training college; she was one of those she-creatures
born to make all her \emph{m}'s and \emph{n}'s and \emph{u}'s and
\emph{r}'s and \emph{e}'s alike, and to leave her \emph{o}'s and \textit{a}\textit{\emph{'s}}
\emph{}\textit{\emph{open}} and her \emph{i}'s undotted. So that it
was only after an elaborate comparison of word with word that Miss
Winchelsea felt assured Mr.\ Snooks was not really {}``Mr.\ Snooks''
at all! In Fanny's first letter of gush he was Mr.\ {}``Snooks,''\ in
her second the spelling was changed to Mr.\ {}``Senoks.'' Miss
Winchelsea's hand positively trembled as she turned the sheet over\mbox{---}it
meant so much to her. For it had already begun to seem to her that
even the name of Mrs.\ Snooks might be avoided at too great a price,
and suddenly\mbox{---}this possibility! She turned over the six
sheets, all dappled with that critical name, and everywhere the first
letter had the form of an \emph{e}! For a time she walked the room
with a hand pressed upon her heart.

She spent a whole day pondering this change, weighing a letter of
inquiry that should be at once discreet and effectual, weighing too
what action she should take after the answer came. She was resolved
that if this altered spelling was anything more than a quaint fancy
of Fanny's, she would write forthwith to Mr.\ Snooks. She had now
reached a stage when the minor refinements of behaviour disappear.
Her excuse remained uninvented, but she had the subject of her letter
clear in her mind, even to the hint that {}``circumstances in my
life have changed very greatly since we talked together.'' But she
never gave that hint. There came a third letter from that fitful correspondent
Fanny. The first line proclaimed her {}``the happiest girl alive.''

Miss Winchelsea crushed the letter in her hand\mbox{---}the rest
unread\mbox{---}and sat with her face suddenly very still. She had
received it just before morning school, and had opened it when the
junior mathematicians were well under way. Presently she resumed reading
with an appearance of great calm. But after the first sheet she went
on reading the third without discovering the error:\mbox{---}{}``told
him frankly I did not like his name,''\ the third sheet began. {}``He
told me he did not like it himself\mbox{---}you know that sort of
sudden frank way he has''\mbox{---}Miss Winchelsea did know. {}``So
I said `Couldn't you change it?'\ He didn't see it at first. Well,
you know, dear, he had told me what it really meant; it means Sevenoaks,
only it has got down to Snooks\mbox{---}both Snooks and Noaks, dreadfully
vulgar surnames though they be, are really worn forms of Sevenoaks.
So I said\mbox{---}even I have my bright ideas at times\mbox{---}`if
it got down from Sevenoaks to Snooks, why not get it back from Snooks
to Sevenoaks?'\ And the long and the short of it is, dear, he couldn't
refuse me, and he changed his spelling there and then to Senoks for
the bills of the new lecture. And afterwards, when we are married,
we shall put in the apostrophe and make it Se'noks. Wasn't it kind
of him to mind that fancy of mine, when many men would have taken
offence? But it is just like him all over; he is as kind as he is
clever. Because he knew as well as I did that I would have had him
in spite of it, had he been ten times Snooks. But he did it all the
same.''

The class was startled by the sound of paper being viciously torn,
and looked up to see Miss Winchelsea white in the face, and with some
very small pieces of paper clenched in one hand. For a few seconds
they stared at her stare, and then her expression changed back to
a more familiar one. {}``Has any one finished number three?''\ she
asked in an even tone. She remained calm after that. But impositions
ruled high that day. And she spent two laborious evenings writing
letters of various sorts to Fanny, before she found a decent congratulatory
vein. Her reason struggled hopelessly against the persuasion that
Fanny had behaved in an exceedingly treacherous manner.

One may be extremely refined and still capable of a very sore heart.
Certainly Miss Winchelsea's heart was very sore. She had moods of
sexual hostility, in which she generalised uncharitably about mankind.
{}``He forgot himself with me,''\ she said. {}``But Fanny is pink
and pretty and soft and a fool\mbox{---}a very excellent match for
a Man.'' And by way of a wedding present she sent Fanny a gracefully
bound volume of poetry by George Meredith, and Fanny wrote back a
grossly happy letter to say that it was {}``\textit{All} beautiful.''
Miss Winchelsea hoped that some day Mr.\ Senoks might take up that
slim book and think for a moment of the donor. Fanny wrote several
times before and about her marriage, pursuing that fond legend of
their {}``ancient friendship,''\ and giving her happiness in the
fullest detail. And Miss Winchelsea wrote to Helen for the first time
after the Roman journey, saying nothing about the marriage, but expressing
very cordial feelings.

They had been in Rome at Easter, and Fanny was married in the August
vacation. She wrote a garrulous letter to Miss Winchelsea, describing
her home-coming, and the astonishing arrangements of their {}``teeny
weeny''\ little house. Mr.\ Se'noks was now beginning to assume
a refinement in Miss Winchelsea's memory out of all proportion to
the facts of the case, and she tried in vain to imagine his cultured
greatness in a {}``teeny weeny''\ little house. {}``Am busy enamelling
a cosey corner,''\ said Fanny, sprawling to the end of her third
sheet, {}``so excuse more.'' Miss Winchelsea answered in her best
style, gently poking fun at Fanny's arrangements and hoping intensely
that Mr.\ Sen'oks might see the letter. Only this hope enabled her
to write at all, answering not only that letter but one in November
and one at Christmas.

The two latter communications contained urgent invitations for her
to come to Steely Bank on a visit during the Christmas holidays. She
tried to think that \textit{he} had told her to ask that, but it was
too much like Fanny's opulent good-nature. She could not but believe
that he must be sick of his blunder by this time; and she had more
than a hope that he would presently write her a letter beginning {}``Dear
Friend.'' Something subtly tragic in the separation was a great support
to her, a sad misunderstanding. To have been jilted would have been
intolerable. But he never wrote that letter beginning {}``Dear Friend.''

For two years Miss Winchelsea could not go to see her friends, in
spite of the reiterated invitations of Mrs.\ Sevenoaks\mbox{---}it
became full Sevenoaks in the second year. Then one day near the Easter
rest she felt lonely and without a soul to understand her in the world,
and her mind ran once more on what is called Platonic friendship.
Fanny was clearly happy and busy in her new sphere of domesticity,
but no doubt \textit{he} had his lonely hours. Did he ever think of
those days in Rome\mbox{---}gone now beyond recalling? No one had
understood her as he had done; no one in all the world. It would be
a sort of melancholy pleasure to talk to him again, and what harm
could it do? Why should she deny herself? That night she wrote a sonnet,
all but the last two lines of the octave\mbox{---}which would not
come, and the next day she composed a graceful little note to tell
Fanny she was coming down.

And so she saw him again.

Even at the first encounter it was evident he had changed; he seemed
stouter and less nervous, and it speedily appeared that his conversation
had already lost much of its old delicacy. There even seemed a justification
for Helen's description of weakness in his face\mbox{---}in certain
lights it \textit{was} weak. He seemed busy and preoccupied about
his affairs, and almost under the impression that Miss Winchelsea
had come for the sake of Fanny. He discussed his dinner with Fanny
in an intelligent way. They only had one good long talk together,
and that came to nothing. He did not refer to Rome, and spent some
time abusing a man who had stolen an idea he had had for a text-book.
It did not seem a very wonderful idea to Miss Winchelsea. She discovered
he had forgotten the names of more than half the painters whose work
they had rejoiced over in Florence.

It was a sadly disappointing week, and Miss Winchelsea was glad when
it came to an end. Under various excuses she avoided visiting them
again. After a time the visitor's room was occupied by their two little
boys, and Fanny's invitations ceased. The intimacy of her letters
had long since faded away.


\chapter*{\raggedright A DREAM OF ARMAGEDDON}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{A DREAM OF ARMAGEDDON}

\markboth{TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM}{A DREAM OF ARMAGEDDON}

The man with the white face entered the carriage at Rugby. He moved
slowly in spite of the urgency of his porter, and even while he was
still on the platform I noted how ill he seemed. He dropped into the
corner over against me with a sigh, made an incomplete attempt to
arrange his travelling shawl, and became motionless, with his eyes
staring vacantly. Presently he was moved by a sense of my observation,
looked up at me, and put out a spiritless hand for his newspaper.
Then he glanced again in my direction.

I feigned to read. I feared I had unwittingly embarrassed him, and
in a moment I was surprised to find him speaking.

{}``I beg your pardon?''\ said I.

{}``That book,''\ he repeated, pointing a lean finger, {}``is
about dreams.''

{}``Obviously,''\ I answered, for it was Fortnum-Roscoe's \emph{Dream
States}, and the title was on the cover. He hung silent for a space
as if he sought words. {}``Yes,''\ he said at last, {}``but they
tell you nothing.'' I did not catch his meaning for a second.

{}``They don't know,''\ he added.

I looked a little more attentively at his face.

{}``There are dreams,''\ he said, {}``and dreams.''

That sort of proposition I never dispute.

{}``I suppose\mbox{---}''\ he hesitated. {}``Do you ever dream?
I mean vividly.''

{}``I dream very little,''\ I answered. {}``I doubt if I have
three vivid dreams in a year.''

{}``Ah!''\ he said, and seemed for a moment to collect his thoughts.

{}``Your dreams don't mix with your memories?''\ he asked abruptly.
{}``You don't find yourself in doubt; did this happen or did it not?''

{}``Hardly ever. Except just for a momentary hesitation now and then.
I suppose few people do.''

{}``Does \textit{he} say\mbox{---}''\ he indicated the book.

{}``Says it happens at times and gives the usual explanation about
intensity of impression and the like to account for its not happening
as a rule. I suppose you know something of these theories\mbox{---}''

{}``Very little\mbox{---}except that they are wrong.''

His emaciated hand played with the strap of the window for a time.
I prepared to resume reading, and that seemed to precipitate his next
remark. He leant forward almost as though he would touch me.

{}``Isn't there something called consecutive dreaming\mbox{---}that
goes on night after night?''

{}``I believe there is. There are cases given in most books on mental
trouble.''

{}``Mental trouble! Yes. I dare say there are. It's the right place
for them. But what I mean\mbox{---}''\ He looked at his bony knuckles.
{}``Is that sort of thing always dreaming? \textit{Is} it dreaming?
Or is it something else? Mightn't it be something else?''

I should have snubbed his persistent conversation but for the drawn
anxiety of his face. I remember now the look of his faded eyes and
the lids red-stained\mbox{---}perhaps you know that look.

{}``I'm not just arguing about a matter of opinion,''\ he said.
{}``The thing's killing me.''

{}``Dreams?''

{}``If you call them dreams. Night after night. Vivid!\mbox{---}so
vivid \ldots{}\ this\mbox{---}''\ (he indicated the landscape
that went streaming by the window)\ {}``seems unreal in comparison!
I can scarcely remember who I am, what business I am on\ldots{}.''

He paused. {}``Even now\mbox{---}''

{}``The dream is always the same\mbox{---}do you mean?''\ I asked.

{}``It's over.''

{}``You mean?''

{}``I died.''

{}``Died?''

{}``Smashed and killed, and now, so much of me as that dream was,
is dead. Dead for ever. I dreamt I was another man, you know, living
in a different part of the world and in a different time. I dreamt
that night after night. Night after night I woke into that other life.
Fresh scenes and fresh happenings\mbox{---}until I came upon the
last\mbox{---}''

{}``When you died?''

{}``When I died.''

{}``And since then\mbox{---}''

{}``No,''\ he said. {}``Thank God! That was the end of the dream\ldots{}.''

It was clear I was in for this dream. And after all, I had an hour
before me, the light was fading fast, and Fortnum-Roscoe has a dreary
way with him. {}``Living in a different time,''\ I said: {}``do
you mean in some different age?''

{}``Yes.''

{}``Past?''

{}``No, to come\mbox{---}to come.''

{}``The year three thousand, for example?''

{}``I don't know what year it was. I did when I was asleep, when
I was dreaming, that is, but not now\mbox{---}not now that I am
awake. There's a lot of things I have forgotten since I woke out of
these dreams, though I knew them at the time when I was\mbox{---}I
suppose it was dreaming. They called the year differently from our
way of calling the year\ldots{}. What \textit{did} they call it?''\ He
put his hand to his forehead. {}``No,''\ said he, {}``I forget.''

He sat smiling weakly. For a moment I feared he did not mean to tell
me his dream. As a rule I hate people who tell their dreams, but this
struck me differently. I proffered assistance even. {}``It began\mbox{---}''
I suggested.

{}``It was vivid from the first. I seemed to wake up in it suddenly.
And it's curious that in these dreams I am speaking of I never remembered
this life I am living now. It seemed as if the dream life was enough
while it lasted. Perhaps\mbox{---}But I will tell you how I find
myself when I do my best to recall it all. I don't remember anything
clearly until I found myself sitting in a sort of loggia looking out
over the sea. I had been dozing, and suddenly I woke up\mbox{---}fresh
and vivid\mbox{---}not a bit dream-like\mbox{---}because the girl
had stopped fanning me.''

{}``The girl?''

{}``Yes, the girl. You must not interrupt or you will put me out.''

He stopped abruptly. {}``You won't think I'm mad?''\ he said.

{}``No,''\ I answered; {}``you've been dreaming. Tell me your
dream.''

{}``I woke up, I say, because the girl had stopped fanning me. I
was not surprised to find myself there or anything of that sort, you
understand. I did not feel I had fallen into it suddenly. I simply
took it up at that point. Whatever memory I had of \textit{this} life,
this nineteenth-century life, faded as I woke, vanished like a dream.
I knew all about myself, knew that my name was no longer Cooper but
Hedon, and all about my position in the world. I've forgotten a lot
since I woke\mbox{---}there's a want of connection\mbox{---}but
it was all quite clear and matter of fact then.''

He hesitated again, gripping the window strap, putting his face forward
and looking up at me appealingly.

{}``This seems bosh to you?''

{}``No, no!''\ I cried. {}``Go on. Tell me what this loggia was
like.''

{}``It was not really a loggia\mbox{---}I don't know what to call
it. It faced south. It was small. It was all in shadow except the
semicircle above the balcony that showed the sky and sea and the corner
where the girl stood. I was on a couch\mbox{---}it was a metal couch
with light striped cushions-and the girl was leaning over the balcony
with her back to me. The light of the sunrise fell on her ear and
cheek. Her pretty white neck and the little curls that nestled there,
and her white shoulder were in the sun, and all the grace of her body
was in the cool blue shadow. She was dressed\mbox{---}how can I
describe it? It was easy and flowing. And altogether there she stood,
so that it came to me how beautiful and desirable she was, as though
I had never seen her before. And when at last I sighed and raised
myself upon my arm she turned her face to me\mbox{---}''

He stopped.

{}``I have lived three-and-fifty years in this world. I have had
mother, sisters, friends, wife, and daughters\mbox{---}all their
faces, the play of their faces, I know. But the face of this girl\mbox{---}it
is much more real to me. I can bring it back into memory so that I
see it again\mbox{---}I could draw it or paint it. And after all\mbox{---}''

He stopped\mbox{---}but I said nothing.

{}``The face of a dream\mbox{---}the face of a dream. She was beautiful.
Not that beauty which is terrible, cold, and worshipful, like the
beauty of a saint; nor that beauty that stirs fierce passions; but
a sort of radiation, sweet lips that softened into smiles, and grave
grey eyes. And she moved gracefully, she seemed to have part with
all pleasant and gracious things\mbox{---}''

He stopped, and his face was downcast and hidden. Then he looked up
at me and went on, making no further attempt to disguise his absolute
belief in the reality of his story.

{}``You see, I had thrown up my plans and ambitions, thrown up all
I had ever worked for or desired for her sake. I had been a master
man away there in the north, with influence and property and a great
reputation, but none of it had seemed worth having beside her. I had
come to the place, this city of sunny pleasures, with her, and left
all those things to wreck and ruin just to save a remnant at least
of my life. While I had been in love with her before I knew that she
had any care for me, before I had imagined that she would dare\mbox{---}that
we should dare, all my life had seemed vain and hollow, dust and ashes.
It \textit{was} dust and ashes. Night after night and through the
long days I had longed and desired\mbox{---}my soul had beaten against
the thing forbidden!

{}``But it is impossible for one man to tell another just these things.
It's emotion, it's a tint, a light that comes and goes. Only while
it's there, everything changes, everything. The thing is I came away
and left them in their Crisis to do what they could.''

{}``Left whom?''\ I asked, puzzled.

{}``The people up in the north there. You see\mbox{---}in this
dream, anyhow\mbox{---}I had been a big man, the sort of man men
come to trust in, to group themselves about. Millions of men who had
never seen me were ready to do things and risk things because of their
confidence in me. I had been playing that game for years, that big
laborious game, that vague, monstrous political game amidst intrigues
and betrayals, speech and agitation. It was a vast weltering world,
and at last I had a sort of leadership against the Gang\mbox{---}you
know it was called the Gang\mbox{---}a sort of compromise of scoundrelly
projects and base ambitions and vast public emotional stupidities
and catchwords\mbox{---}the Gang that kept the world noisy and blind
year by year, and all the while that it was drifting, drifting towards
infinite disaster. But I can't expect you to understand the shades
and complications of the year\mbox{---}the year something or other
ahead. I had it all down to the smallest details\mbox{---}in my
dream. I suppose I had been dreaming of it before I awoke, and the
fading outline of some queer new development I had imagined still
hung about me as I rubbed my eyes. It was some grubby affair that
made me thank God for the sunlight. I sat up on the couch and remained
looking at the woman and rejoicing\mbox{---} rejoicing that I had
come away out of all that tumult and folly and violence before it
was too late. After all, I thought, this is life\mbox{---}love and
beauty, desire and delight, are they not worth all those dismal struggles
for vague, gigantic ends? And I blamed myself for having ever sought
to be a leader when I might have given my days to love. But then,
thought I, if I had not spent my early days sternly and austerely,
I might have wasted myself upon vain and worthless women, and at the
thought all my being went out in love and tenderness to my dear mistress,
my dear lady, who had come at last and compelled me\mbox{---}compelled
me by her invincible charm for me\mbox{---}to lay that life aside.

{}```You are worth it,'\ I said, speaking without intending her
to hear; `you are worth it, my dearest one; worth pride and praise
and all things. Love!\ to have \textit{you} is worth them all together.'
And at the murmur of my voice she turned about.

{}```Come and see,'\ she cried\mbox{---}I can hear her now\mbox{---}`come
and see the sunrise upon Monte Solaro.'

{}``I remember how I sprang to my feet and joined her at the balcony.
She put a white hand upon my shoulder and pointed towards great masses
of limestone, flushing, as it were, into life. I looked. But first
I noted the sunlight on her face caressing the lines of her cheeks
and neck. How can I describe to you the scene we had before us? We
were at Capri\mbox{---}''

{}``I have been there,''\ I said. {}``I have clambered up Monte
Solaro and drunk \textit{vero} \textit{Capri}\mbox{---}muddy stuff
like cider\mbox{---}at the summit.''

{}``Ah!''\ said the man with the white face; {}``then perhaps
you can tell me\mbox{---}you will know if this was indeed Capri.
For in this life I have never been there. Let me describe it. We were
in a little room, one of a vast multitude of little rooms, very cool
and sunny, hollowed out of the limestone of a sort of cape, very high
above the sea. The whole island, you know, was one enormous hotel,
complex beyond explaining, and on the other side there were miles
of floating hotels, and huge floating stages to which the flying machines
came. They called it a pleasure city. Of course, there was none of
that in your time rather, I should say, \textit{is} none of that \textit{now}.
Of course. Now!\mbox{---}yes.

{}``Well, this room of ours was at the extremity of the cape, so
that one could see east and west. Eastward was a great cliff\mbox{---}a
thousand feet high perhaps\mbox{---}coldly grey except for one bright
edge of gold, and beyond it the Isle of the Sirens, and a falling
coast that faded and passed into the hot sunrise. And when one turned
to the west, distinct and near was a little bay, a little beach still
in shadow. And out of that shadow rose Solaro straight and tall, flushed
and golden crested, like a beauty throned, and the white moon was
floating behind her in the sky. And before us from east to west stretched
the many-tinted sea all dotted with little sailing boats.

{}``To the eastward, of course, these little boats were grey and
very minute and clear, but to the westward they were little boats
of gold\mbox{---}shining gold\mbox{---}almost like little flames.
And just below us was a rock with an arch worn through it. The blue
sea-water broke to green and foam all round the rock, and a galley
came gliding out of the arch.''

{}``I know that rock,''\ I said. {}``I was nearly drowned there.
It is called the Faraglioni.''

{}``I Faraglioni? Yes, she called it that,''\ answered the man
with the white face. {}``There was some story\mbox{---}but that\mbox{---}''

He put his hand to his forehead again. {}``No,''\ he said, {}``I
forget that story.''

{}``Well, that is the first thing I remember, the first dream I had,
that little shaded room and the beautiful air and sky and that dear
lady of mine, with her shining arms and her graceful robe, and how
we sat and talked in half whispers to one another. We talked in whispers
not because there was any one to hear, but because there was still
such a freshness of mind between us that our thoughts were a little
frightened, I think, to find themselves at last in words. And so they
went softly.

{}``Presently we were hungry and we went from our apartment, going
by a strange passage with a moving floor, until we came to the great
breakfast room\mbox{---}there was a fountain and music. A pleasant
and joyful place it was, with its sunlight and splashing, and the
murmur of plucked strings. And we sat and ate and smiled at one another,
and I would not heed a man who was watching me from a table near by.

{}``And afterwards we went on to the dancing-hall. But I cannot describe
that hall. The place was enormous\mbox{---}larger than any building
you have ever seen\mbox{---}and in one place there was the old gate
of Capri, caught into the wall of a gallery high overhead. Light girders,
stems and threads of gold, burst from the pillars like fountains,
streamed like an Aurora across the roof and interlaced, like\mbox{---}
like conjuring tricks. All about the great circle for the dancers
there were beautiful figures, strange dragons, and intricate and wonderful
\textit{\emph{grotesques}} bearing lights. The place was inundated
with artificial light that shamed the newborn day. And as we went
through the throng the people turned about and looked at us, for all
through the world my name and face were known, and how I had suddenly
thrown up pride and struggle to come to this place. And they looked
also at the lady beside me, though half the story of how at last she
had come to me was unknown or mistold. And few of the men who were
there, I know, but judged me a happy man, in spite of all the shame
and dishonour that had come upon my name.

{}``The air was full of music, full of harmonious scents, full of
the rhythm of beautiful motions. Thousands of beautiful people swarmed
about the hall, crowded the galleries, sat in a myriad recesses; they
were dressed in splendid colours and crowned with flowers; thousands
danced about the great circle beneath the white images of the ancient
gods, and glorious \textit{\emph{processions}} of youths and maidens
came and went. We two danced, not the dreary \textit{\emph{monotonies}}
of your days\mbox{---}of this time, I mean\mbox{---}but dances
that were beautiful, intoxicating. And even now I can see my lady
dancing\mbox{---}dancing joyously. She danced, you know, with a
serious face; she danced with a serious dignity, and yet she was smiling
at me and caressing me\mbox{---}smiling and caressing with her eyes.

{}``The music was different,''\ he murmured. {}``It went\mbox{---}I
cannot describe it; but it was infinitely richer and more varied than
any music that has ever come to me awake.

{}``And then\mbox{---}it was when we had done dancing\mbox{---}a
man came to speak to me. He was a lean, resolute man, very soberly
clad for that place, and already I had marked his face watching me
in the breakfasting hall, and afterwards as we went along the passage
I had avoided his eye. But now, as we sat in a little alcove, smiling
at the pleasure of all the people who went to and fro across the shining
floor, he came and touched me, and spoke to me so that I was forced
to listen. And he asked that he might speak to me for a little time
apart.

{}```No,'\ I said. `I have no secrets from this lady. What do you
want to tell me?'

{}``He said it was a trivial matter, or at least a dry matter, for
a lady to hear.

{}```Perhaps for me to hear,'\ said I.

{}``He glanced at her, as though almost he would appeal to her. Then
he asked me suddenly if I had heard of a great and avenging declaration
that Evesham had made. Now, Evesham had always before been the man
next to myself in the leadership of that great party in the north.
He was a forcible, hard and tactless man, and only I had been able
to control and soften him. It was on his account even more than my
own, I think, that the others had been so dismayed at my retreat.
So this question about what he had done reawakened my old interest
in the life I had put aside just for a moment.

{}```I have taken no heed of any news for many days,'\ I said. `What
has Evesham been saying?'

{}``And with that the man began, nothing loath, and I must confess
even I was struck by Evesham's reckless folly in the wild and threatening
words he had used. And this messenger they had sent to me not only
told me of Evesham's speech, but went on to ask counsel and to point
out what need they had of me. While he talked, my lady sat a little
forward and watched his face and mine.

{}``My old habits of scheming and organising reasserted themselves.
I could even see myself suddenly returning to the north, and all the
dramatic effect of it. All that this man said witnessed to the disorder
of the party indeed, but not to its damage. I should go back stronger
than I had come. And then I thought of my lady. You see\mbox{---}how
can I tell you? There were certain peculiarities of our relationship\mbox{---}as
things are I need not tell you about that\mbox{---}which would render
her presence with me impossible. I should have had to leave her; indeed,
I should have had to renounce her clearly and openly, if I was to
do all that I could do in the north. And the man knew \textit{that},
even as he talked to her and me, knew it as well as she did, that
my steps to duty were\mbox{---}first, separation, then abandonment.
At the touch of that thought my dream of a return was shattered. I
turned on the man suddenly, as he was imagining his eloquence was
gaining ground with me.

{}```What have I to do with these things now?'\ I said. `I have
done with them. Do you think I am coquetting with your people in coming
here?'

{}```No,'\ he said; `but\mbox{---}'

{}```Why cannot you leave me alone? I have done with these things.
I have ceased to be anything but a private man.'

{}```Yes,'\ he answered. `But have you thought?\mbox{---}this
talk of war, these reckless challenges, these wild aggressions\mbox{---}'

{}``I stood up.

{}```No,'\ I cried. `I won't hear you. I took count of all those
things, I weighed them\mbox{---}and I have come away.'

{}``He seemed to consider the possibility of persistence. He looked
from me to where the lady sat regarding us.

{}```War,'\ he said, as if he were speaking to himself, and then
turned slowly from me and walked away. I stood, caught in the whirl
of thoughts his appeal had set going.

{}``I heard my lady's voice.

{}```Dear,'\ she said; `but if they have need of you\mbox{---}'

{}``She did not finish her sentence, she let it rest there. I turned
to her sweet face, and the balance of my mood swayed and reeled.

{}```They want me only to do the thing they dare not do themselves,'\ I
said. `If they distrust Evesham they must settle with him themselves.'

{}``She looked at me doubtfully.

{}```But war\mbox{---}'\ she said.

{}``I saw a doubt on her face that I had seen before, a doubt of
herself and me, the first shadow of the discovery that, seen strongly
and completely, must drive us apart for ever.

{}``Now, I was an older mind than hers, and I could sway her to this
belief or that.

{}```My dear one,'\ I said, `you must not trouble over these things.
There will be no war. Certainly there will be no war. The age of wars
is past. Trust me to know the justice of this case. They have no right
upon me, dearest, and no one has a right upon me. I have been free
to choose my life, and I have chosen this.'

{}```But \textit{war}\mbox{---}'\ she said.

{}``I sat down beside her. I put an arm behind her and took her hand
in mine. I set myself to drive that doubt away\mbox{---}I set myself
to fill her mind with pleasant things again. I lied to her, and in
lying to her I lied also to myself. And she was only too ready to
believe me, only too ready to forget.

{}``Very soon the shadow had gone again, and we were hastening to
our bathing-place in the \textit{\emph{Grotta}} \emph{}\textit{\emph{del}}
\emph{}\textit{\emph{Bovo}} Marino, where it was our custom to bathe
every day. We swam and splashed one another, and in that buoyant water
I seemed to become something lighter and stronger than a man. And
at last we came out dripping and rejoicing and raced among the rocks.
And then I put on a dry bathing-dress, and we sat to bask in the sun,
and presently I nodded, resting my head against her knee, and she
put her hand upon my hair and stroked it softly and I dozed. And behold!\ as
it were with the snapping of the string of a violin, I was awakening,
and I was in my own bed in Liverpool, in the life of to-day.

{}``Only for a time I could not believe that all these vivid moments
had been no more than the substance of a dream.

{}``In truth, I could not believe it a dream for all the sobering
reality of things about me. I bathed and dressed as it were by habit,
and as I shaved I argued why I of all men should leave the woman I
loved to go back to fantastic politics in the hard and strenuous north.
Even if Evesham did force the world back to war, what was that to
me? I was a man, with the heart of a man, and why should I feel the
responsibility of a deity for the way the world might go?

{}``You know that is not quite the way I think about affairs, about
my real affairs. I am a solicitor, you know, with a point of view.

{}``The vision was so real, you must understand, so utterly unlike
a dream that I kept perpetually recalling little irrelevant details;
even the ornament of a book-cover that lay on my wife's sewing-machine
in the breakfast-room recalled with the utmost vividness the gilt
line that ran about the seat in the alcove where I had talked with
the messenger from my deserted party. Have you ever heard of a dream
that had a quality like that?''

{}``Like\mbox{---}?''

{}``So that afterwards you remembered little details you had forgotten.''

I thought. I had never noticed the point before, but he was right.

{}``Never,''\ I said. {}``That is what you never seem to do with
dreams.''

{}``No,''\ he answered. {}``But that is just what I did. I am
a solicitor, you must understand, in Liverpool, and I could not help
wondering what the clients and business people I found myself talking
to in my office would think if I told them suddenly I was in love
with a girl who would be born a couple of hundred years or so hence,
and worried about the politics of my great-great-great-grandchildren.
I was chiefly busy that day negotiating a ninety-nine-year building
lease. It was a private builder in a hurry, and we wanted to tie him
in every possible way. I had an interview with him, and he showed
a certain want of temper that sent me to bed still irritated. That
night I had no dream. Nor did I dream the next night, at least, to
remember.

{}``Something of that intense reality of conviction vanished. I began
to feel sure it \textit{was} a dream. And then it came again.

{}``When the dream came again, nearly four days later, it was very
different. I think it certain that four days had also elapsed in the
dream. Many things had happened in the north, and the shadow of them
was back again between us, and this time it was not so easily dispelled.
I began, I know, with moody musings. Why, inspite of all, should I
go back, go back for all the rest of my days to toil and stress, insults
and perpetual dissatisfaction, simply to save hundreds of millions
of common people, whom I did not love, whom too often I could do no
other than despise, from the stress and anguish of war and infinite
misrule? And after all I might fail. \textit{They} all sought their
own narrow ends, and why should not I\mbox{---}why should not I
also live as a man? And out of such thoughts her voice summoned me,
and I lifted my eyes.

{}``I found myself awake and walking. We had come out above the Pleasure
City, we were near the summit of Monte Solaro and looking towards
the bay. It was the late afternoon and very clear. Far away to the
left Ischia hung in a golden haze between sea and sky, and Naples
was coldly white against the hills, and before us was Vesuvius with
a tall and slender streamer feathering at last towards the south,
and the ruins of Torre dell'\ Annunziata and Castellamare glittering
and near.''

I interrupted suddenly: {}``You have been to Capri, of course?''

{}``Only in this dream,''\ he said, {}``only in this dream. All
across the bay beyond Sorrento were the floating palaces of the Pleasure
City moored and chained. And northward were the broad floating stages
that received the aeroplanes. Aeroplanes fell out of the sky every
afternoon, each bringing its thousands of pleasure-seekers from the
uttermost parts of the earth to Capri and its delights. All these
things, I say, stretched below.

{}``But we noticed them only incidentally because of an unusual sight
that evening had to show. Five war aeroplanes that had long slumbered
useless in the distant arsenals of the Rhinemouth were man\oe{}uvring
now in the eastward sky. Evesham had astonished the world by producing
them and others, and sending them to circle here and there. It was
the threat material in the great game of bluff he was playing, and
it had taken even me by surprise. He was one of those incredibly stupid
energetic people who seem sent by Heaven to create disasters. His
energy to the first glance seemed so wonderfully like capacity! But
he had no imagination, no invention, only a stupid, vast, driving
force of will, and a mad faith in his stupid idiot `luck'\ to pull
him through. I remember how we stood out upon the headland watching
the squadron circling far away, and how I weighed the full meaning
of the sight, seeing clearly the way things must go. And then even
it was not too late. I might have gone back, I think, and saved the
world. The people of the north would follow me, I knew, granted only
that in one thing I respected their moral standards. The east and
south would trust me as they would trust no other northern man. And
I knew I had only to put it to her and she would have let me go\ldots{}.
Not because she did not love me!

{}``Only I did not want to go; my will was all the other way about.
I had so newly thrown off the incubus of responsibility: I was still
so fresh a renegade from duty that the daylight clearness of what
I \textit{ought} to do had no power at all to touch my will. My will
was to live, to gather pleasures and make my dear lady happy. But
though this sense of vast neglected duties had no power to draw me,
it could make me silent and preoccupied, it robbed the days I had
spent of half their brightness and roused me into dark meditations
in the silence of the night. And as I stood and watched Evesham's
aeroplanes sweep to and fro\mbox{---}those birds of infinite ill
omen\mbox{---}she stood beside me watching me, perceiving the trouble
indeed, but not perceiving it clearly, her eyes questioning my face,
her expression shaded with perplexity. Her face was grey because the
sunset was fading out of the sky. It was no fault of hers that she
held me. She had asked me to go from her, and again in the night time
and with tears she had asked me to go.

{}``At last it was the sense of her that roused me from my mood.
I turned upon her suddenly and challenged her to race down the mountain
slopes. `No,'\ she said, as if I jarred with her gravity, but I was
resolved to end that gravity, and made her run\mbox{---}no one can
be very grey and sad who is out of breath\mbox{---}and when she
stumbled I ran with my hand beneath her arm. We ran down past a couple
of men, who turned back staring in astonishment at my behaviour\mbox{---}they
must have recognised my face. And halfway down the slope came a tumult
in the air, clang-clank, clang-clank, and we stopped, and presently
over the hill-crest those war things came flying one behind the other.''

The man seemed hesitating on the verge of a description.

{}``What were they like?''\ I asked.

{}``They had never fought,''\ he said. {}``They were just like
our ironclads are nowadays; they had never fought. No one knew what
they might do, with excited men inside them; few even cared to speculate.
They were great driving things shaped like spearheads without a shaft,
with a propeller in the place of the shaft.''

{}``Steel?''

{}``Not steel.''

{}``Aluminium?''

{}``No, no, nothing of that sort. An alloy that was very common\mbox{---}as
common as brass, for example. It was called\mbox{---}let me see\mbox{---}.''
He squeezed his forehead with the fingers of one hand. {}``I am forgetting
everything,''\ he said.

{}``And they carried guns?''

{}``Little guns, firing high explosive shells. They fired the guns
backwards, out of the base of the leaf, so to speak, and rammed with
the beak. That was the theory, you know, but they had never been fought.
No one could tell exactly what was going to happen. And meanwhile
I suppose it was very fine to go whirling through the air like a flight
of young swallows, swift and easy. I guess the captains tried not
to think too clearly what the real thing would be like. And these
flying war machines, you know, were only one sort of the endless war
contrivances that had been invented and had fallen into abeyance during
the long peace. There were all sorts of these things that people were
routing out and furbishing up; infernal things, silly things; things
that had never been tried; big engines, terrible explosives, great
guns. You know the silly way of these ingenious sort of men who make
these things; they turn 'em out as beavers build dams, and with no
more sense of the rivers they're going to divert and the lands they're
going to flood!

{}``As we went down the winding stepway to our hotel again, in the
twilight, I foresaw it all: I saw how clearly and inevitably things
were driving for war in Evesham's silly, violent hands, and I had
some inkling of what war was bound to be under these new conditions.
And even then, though I knew it was drawing near the limit of my opportunity,
I could find no will to go back.''

He sighed.

{}``That was my last chance.

{}``We didn't go into the city until the sky was full of stars, so
we walked out upon the high terrace, to and fro, and\mbox{---}she
counselled me to go back.

{}```My dearest,'\ she said, and her sweet face looked up to me,
`this is Death. This life you lead is Death. Go back to them, go back
to your duty\mbox{---}.'

{}``She began to weep, saying, between her sobs, and clinging to
my arm as she said it, `Go back\mbox{---}Go back.'

{}``Then suddenly she fell mute, and, glancing down at her face,
I read in an instant the thing she had thought to do. It was one of
those moments when one \textit{sees}.

{}```No!'\ I said.

{}```No?'\ she asked, in surprise, and I think a little fearful
at the answer to her thought.

{}```Nothing,'\ I said, `shall send me back. Nothing! I have chosen.
Love, I have chosen, and the world must go. Whatever happens I will
live this life\mbox{---}I will live for \textit{you}! It\mbox{---}nothing
shall turn me aside; nothing, my dear one. Even if you died\mbox{---}even
if you died\mbox{---}'

{}```Yes,'\ she murmured, softly.

{}```Then\mbox{---}I also would die.'

{}``And before she could speak again I began to talk, talking eloquently\mbox{---}as
I \textit{could} do in that life\mbox{---}talking to exalt love,
to make the life we were living seem heroic and glorious; and the
thing I was deserting something hard and enormously ignoble that it
was a fine thing to set aside. I bent all my mind to throw that glamour
upon it, seeking not only to convert her but myself to that. We talked,
and she clung to me, torn too between all that she deemed noble and
all that she knew was sweet. And at last I did make it heroic, made
all the thickening disaster of the world only a sort of glorious setting
to our unparalleled love, and we two poor foolish souls strutted there
at last, clad in that splendid delusion, drunken rather with that
glorious delusion, under the still stars.

{}``And so my moment passed.

{}``It was my last chance. Even as we went to and fro there, the
leaders of the south and east were gathering their resolve, and the
hot answer that shattered Evesham's bluffing for ever, took shape
and waited. And all over Asia, and the ocean, and the south, the air
and the wires were throbbing with their warnings to prepare\mbox{---}prepare.

{}``No one living, you know, knew what war was; no one could imagine,
with all these new inventions, what horror war might bring. I believe
most people still believed it would be a matter of bright uniforms
and shouting charges and triumphs and flags and bands\mbox{---}in
a time when half the world drew its food supply from regions ten thousand
miles away\mbox{---}.''

The man with the white face paused. I glanced at him, and his face
was intent on the floor of the carriage. A little railway station,
a string of loaded trucks, a signal-box, and the back of a cottage,
shot by the carriage window, and a bridge passed with a clap of noise,
echoing the tumult of the train.

{}``After that,''\ he said, {}``I dreamt often. For three weeks
of nights that dream was my life. And the worst of it was there were
nights when I could not dream, when I lay tossing on a bed in \textit{this}
accursed life; and \textit{there}\mbox{---}somewhere lost to me\mbox{---}things
were happening\mbox{---}momentous, terrible things\ldots{}. I lived
at nights\mbox{---}my days, my waking days, this life I am living
now, became a faded, far-away dream, a drab setting, the cover of
the book.''

He thought.

{}``I could tell you all, tell you every little thing in the dream,
but as to what I did in the daytime\mbox{---}no. I could not tell\mbox{---}I
do not remember. My memory\mbox{---}my memory has gone. The business
of life slips from me\mbox{---}''

He leant forward, and pressed his hands upon his eyes. For a long
time he said nothing.

{}``And then?''\ said I.

{}``The war burst like a hurricane.''

He stared before him at unspeakable things.

{}``And then?''\ I urged again.

{}``One touch of unreality,''\ he said, in the low tone of a man
who speaks to himself, {}``and they would have been nightmares. But
they were not nightmares\mbox{---}they were not nightmares. \textit{No}!''

He was silent for so long that it dawned upon me that there was a
danger of losing the rest of the story. But he went on talking again
in the same tone of questioning self-communion.

{}``What was there to do but flight? I had not thought the war would
touch Capri\mbox{---}I had seemed to see Capri as being out of it
all, as the contrast to it all; but two nights after the whole place
was shouting and bawling, every woman almost and every other man wore
a badge\mbox{---}Evesham's badge\mbox{---}and there was no music
but a jangling war-song over and over again, and everywhere men enlisting,
and in the dancing halls they were drilling. The whole island was
awhirl with rumours; it was said, again and again, that fighting had
begun. I had not expected this. I had seen so little of the life of
pleasure that I had failed to reckon with this violence of the amateurs.
And as for me, I was out of it. I was like a man who might have prevented
the firing of a magazine. The time had gone. I was no one; the vainest
stripling with a badge counted for more than I. The crowd jostled
us and bawled in our ears; that accursed song deafened us; a woman
shrieked at my lady because no badge was on her, and we two went back
to our own place again, ruffled and insulted\mbox{---}my lady white
and silent, and I aquiver with rage. So furious was I, I could have
quarrelled with her if I could have found one shade of accusation
in her eyes.

{}``All my magnificence had gone from me. I walked up and down our
rock cell, and outside was the darkling sea and a light to the southward
that flared and passed and came again.

{}```We must get out of this place,'\ I said over and over. `I have
made my choice, and I will have no hand in these troubles. I will
have nothing of this war. We have taken our lives out of all these
things. This is no refuge for us. Let us go.'

{}``And the next day we were already in flight from the war that
covered the world.

{}``And all the rest was Flight\mbox{---}all the rest was Flight.''

He mused darkly.

{}``How much was there of it?''

He made no answer.

{}``How many days?''

His face was white and drawn and his hands were clenched. He took
no heed of my curiosity.

I tried to draw him back to his story with questions.

{}``Where did you go?''\ I said.

{}``When?''

{}``When you left Capri.''

{}``Southwest,''\ he said, and glanced at me for a second. {}``We
went in a boat.''

{}``But I should have thought an aeroplane?''

{}``They had been seized.''

I questioned him no more. Presently I thought he was beginning again.
He broke out in an argumentative monotone:\ 

{}``But why should it be? If, indeed, this battle, this slaughter
and stress \textit{is} life, why have we this craving for pleasure
and beauty? If there \textit{is} no refuge, if there is no place of
peace, and if all our dreams of quiet places are a folly and a snare,
why have we such dreams? Surely it was no ignoble cravings, no base
intentions, had brought us to this; it was Love had isolated us. Love
had come to me with her eyes and robed in her beauty, more glorious
than all else in life, in the very shape and colour of life, and summoned
me away. I had silenced all the voices, I had answered all the questions\mbox{---}I
had come to her. And suddenly there was nothing but War and Death!''

I had an inspiration. {}``After all,''\ I said, {}``it could have
been only a dream.''

{}``A dream!''\ he cried, flaming upon me, {}``a dream\mbox{---}when
even now\mbox{---}''

For the first time he became animated. A faint flush crept into his
cheek. He raised his open hand and clenched it, and dropped it to
his knee. He spoke, looking away from me, and for all the rest of
the time he looked away. {}``We are but phantoms,''\ he said, {}``and
the phantoms of phantoms, desires like cloud shadows and wills of
straw that eddy in the wind; the days pass, use and wont carry us
through as a train carries the shadow of its lights, so be it! But
one thing is real and certain, one thing is no dreamstuff, but eternal
and enduring. It is the centre of my life, and all other things about
it are subordinate or altogether vain. I loved her, that woman of
a dream. And she and I are dead together!

{}``A dream! How can it be a dream, when it drenched a living life
with unappeasable sorrow, when it makes all that I have lived for
and cared for, worthless and unmeaning?

{}``Until that very moment when she was killed I believed we had
still a chance of getting away,''\ he said. {}``All through the
night and morning that we sailed across the sea from Capri to Salerno,
we talked of escape. We were full of hope, and it clung about us to
the end, hope for the life together we should lead, out of it all,
out of the battle and struggle, the wild and empty passions, the empty
arbitrary `thou shalt'\ and `thou shalt not'\ of the world. We were
uplifted, as though our quest was a holy thing, as though love for
one another was a mission\ldots{}.

{}``Even when from our boat we saw the fair face of that great rock
Capri\mbox{---}already scarred and gashed by the gun \textit{emplacements}
and hiding-places that were to make it a fastness\mbox{---}we reckoned
nothing of the imminent slaughter, though the fury of preparation
hung about in puffs and clouds of dust at a hundred points amidst
the grey; but, indeed, I made a text of that and talked. There, you
know, was the rock, still beautiful, for all its scars, with its countless
windows and arches and ways, tier upon tier, for a thousand feet,
a vast carving of grey, broken by vine-clad terraces, and lemon and
orange groves, and masses of agave and prickly pear, and puffs of
almond blossom. And out under the archway that is built over the Piccola
Marina other boats were coming; and as we came round the cape and
within sight of the mainland, another little string of boats came
into view, driving before the wind towards the southwest. In a little
while a multitude had come out, the remoter just little specks of
ultramarine in the shadow of the eastward cliff.

{}```It is love and reason,'\ I said, `fleeing from all this madness,
of war.'

{}``And though we presently saw a squadron of aeroplanes flying across
the southern sky we did not heed it. There it was\mbox{---}a line
of little dots in the sky\mbox{---}and then more, dotting the southeastern
horizon, and then still more, until all that quarter of the sky was
stippled with blue specks. Now they were all thin little strokes of
blue, and now one and now a multitude would heel and catch the sun
and become short flashes of light. They came rising and falling and
growing larger, like some huge flight of gulls or rooks, or such-like
birds moving with a marvellous uniformity, and ever as they drew nearer
they spread over a greater width of sky. The southward wing flung
itself in an arrow-headed cloud athwart the sun. And then suddenly
they swept round to the eastward and streamed eastward, growing smaller
and smaller and clearer and clearer again until they vanished from
the sky. And after that we noted to the northward and very high Evesham's
fighting machines hanging high over Naples like an evening swarm of
gnats.

{}``It seemed to have no more to do with us than a flight of birds.

{}``Even the mutter of guns far away in the southeast seemed to us
to signify nothing\ldots{}.

{}``Each day, each dream after that, we were still exalted, still
seeking that refuge where we might live and love. Fatigue had come
upon us, pain and many distresses. For though we were dusty and stained
by our toilsome tramping, and half starved and with the horror of
the dead men we had seen and the flight of the peasants\mbox{---}for
very soon a gust of fighting swept up the peninsula\mbox{---}with
these things haunting our minds it still resulted only in a deepening
resolution to escape. O, but she was brave and patient! She who had
never faced hardship and exposure had courage for herself\mbox{---}and
me. We went to and fro seeking an outlet, over a country all commandeered
and ransacked by the gathering hosts of war. Always we went on foot.
At first there were other fugitives, but we did not mingle with them.
Some escaped northward, some were caught in the torrent of peasantry
that swept along the main roads; many gave themselves into the hands
of the soldiery and were sent northward. Many of the men were impressed.
But we kept away from these things; we had brought no money to bribe
a passage north, and I feared for my lady at the hands of these conscript
crowds. We had landed at Salerno, and we had been turned back from
Cava, and we had tried to cross towards Taranto by a pass over Mount
Alburno, but we had been driven back for want of food, and so we had
come down among the marshes by Paestum, where those great temples
stand alone. I had some vague idea that by Paestum it might be possible
to find a boat or something, and take once more to sea. And there
it was the battle overtook us.

{}``A sort of soul-blindness had me. Plainly I could see that we
were being hemmed in; that the great net of that giant Warfare had
us in its toils. Many times we had seen the levies that had come down
from the north going to and fro, and had come upon them in the distance
amidst the mountains making ways for the ammunition and preparing
the mounting of the guns. Once we fancied they had fired at us, taking
us for spies\mbox{---}at any rate a shot had gone shuddering over
us. Several times we had hidden in woods from hovering aeroplanes.

{}``But all these things do not matter now, these nights of flight
and pain\ldots{}. We were in an open place near those great temples
at Paestum, at last, on a blank stony place dotted with spiky bushes,
empty and desolate and so flat that a grove of eucalyptus far away
showed to the feet of its stems. How I can see it! My lady was sitting
down under a bush, resting a little, for she was very weak and weary,
and I was standing up watching to see if I could tell the distance
of the firing that came and went. They were still, you know, fighting
far from each other, with those terrible new weapons that had never
before been used: guns that would carry beyond sight, and aeroplanes
that would do\mbox{---}What \textit{they} would do no man could
foretell.

{}``I knew that we were between the two armies, and that they drew
together. I knew we were in danger, and that we could not stop there
and rest!

{}``Though all these things were in my mind, they were in the background.
They seemed to be affairs beyond our concern. Chiefly, I was thinking
of my lady. An aching distress filled me. For the first time she had
owned herself beaten and had fallen a-weeping. Behind me I could hear
her sobbing, but I would not turn round to her because I knew she
had need of weeping, and had held herself so far and so long for me.
It was well, I thought, that she would weep and rest and then we would
toil on again, for I had no inkling of the thing that hung so near.
Even now I can see her as she sat there, her lovely hair upon her
shoulder, can mark again the deepening hollow of her cheek.

{}```If we had parted,'\ she said, {}``if I had let you go.'

{}```No,'\ said I. `Even now, I do not repent. I will not repent;
I made my choice, and I will hold on to the end.''

{}``And then\mbox{---}

{}``Overhead in the sky something flashed and burst, and all about
us I heard the bullets making a noise like a handful of peas suddenly
thrown. They chipped the stones about us, and whirled fragments from
the bricks and passed\ldots{}.''

He put his hand to his mouth, and then moistened his lips.

{}``At the flash I had turned about\ldots{}.

{}``You know\mbox{---}she stood up\mbox{---}

{}``She stood up; you know, and moved a step towards me\mbox{---}

{}``As though she wanted to reach me\mbox{---}

{}``And she had been shot through the heart.''

He stopped and stared at me. I felt all that foolish incapacity an
Englishman feels on such occasions. I met his eyes for a moment, and
then stared out of the window. For a long space we kept silence. When
at last I looked at him he was sitting back in his corner, his arms
folded, and his teeth gnawing at his knuckles.

He bit his nail suddenly, and stared at it.

{}``I carried her,''\ he said, {}``towards the temples, in my
arms\mbox{---}as though it mattered. I don't know why. They seemed
a sort of sanctuary, you know, they had lasted so long, I suppose.

{}``She must have died almost instantly. Only\mbox{---}I talked
to her\mbox{---}all the way.''

Silence again.

{}``I have seen those temples,''\ I said abruptly, and indeed he
had brought those still, sunlit arcades of worn sandstone very vividly
before me.

{}``It was the brown one, the big brown one. I sat down on a fallen
pillar and held her in my arms\ldots{}. Silent after the first babble
was over. And after a little while the lizards came out and ran about
again, as though nothing unusual was going on, as though nothing had
changed\ldots{}. It was tremendously still there, the sun high, and
the shadows still; even the shadows of the weeds upon the entablature
were still\mbox{---}in spite of the thudding and banging that went
all about the sky.

{}``I seem to remember that the aeroplanes came up out of the south,
and that the battle went away to the west. One aeroplane was struck,
and overset and fell. I remember that\mbox{---}though it didn't
interest me in the least. It didn't seem to signify. It was like a
wounded gull, you know\mbox{---}flapping for a time in the water.
I could see it down the aisle of the temple\mbox{---}a black thing
in the bright blue water.

{}``Three or four times shells burst about the beach, and then that
ceased. Each time that happened all the lizards scuttled in and hid
for a space. That was all the mischief done, except that once a stray
bullet gashed the stone hard by\mbox{---}made just a fresh bright
surface.

{}``As the shadows grew longer, the stillness seemed greater.

{}``The curious thing,''\ he remarked, with the manner of a man
who makes a trivial conversation, {}``is that I didn't \textit{think}\mbox{---}I
didn't think at all. I sat with her in my arms amidst the stones\mbox{---}in
a sort of lethargy\mbox{---}stagnant.

{}``And I don't remember waking up. I don't remember dressing that
day. I know I found myself in my office, with my letters all slit
open in front of me, and how I was struck by the absurdity of being
there, seeing that in reality I was sitting, stunned, in that Paestum
temple with a dead woman in my arms. I read my letters like a machine.
I have forgotten what they were about.''

He stopped, and there was a long silence.

Suddenly I perceived that we were running down the incline from Chalk
Farm to Euston. I started at this passing of time. I turned on him
with a brutal question, with the tone of Now or never.

{}``And did you dream again?''

{}``Yes.''

He seemed to force himself to finish. His voice was very low.

{}``Once more, and as it were only for a few instants. I seemed to
have suddenly awakened out of a great apathy, to have risen into a
sitting position, and the body lay there on the stones beside me.
A gaunt body. Not her, you know. So soon\mbox{---}it was not her\ldots{}.

{}``I may have heard voices. I do not know. Only I knew clearly that
men were coming into the solitude and that that was a last outrage.

{}``I stood up and walked through the temple, and then there came
into sight\mbox{---}first one man with a yellow face, dressed in
a uniform of dirty white, trimmed with blue, and then several, climbing
to the crest of the old wall of the vanished city, and crouching there.
They were little bright figures in the sunlight, and there they hung,
weapon in hand, peering cautiously before them.

{}``And further away I saw others and then more at another point
in the wall. It was a long lax line of men in open order.

{}``Presently the man I had first seen stood up and shouted a command,
and his men came tumbling down the wall and into the high weeds towards
the temple. He scrambled down with them and led them. He came facing
towards me, and when he saw me he stopped.

{}``At first I had watched these men with a mere curiosity, but when
I had seen they meant to come to the temple I was moved to forbid
them. I shouted to the officer.

{}```You must not come here,'\ I cried, `\textit{I}\ am here. I
am here with my dead.'

{}``He stared, and then shouted a question back to me in some unknown
tongue.

{}``I repeated what I had said.

{}``He shouted again, and I folded my arms and stood still. Presently
he spoke to his men and came forward. He carried a drawn sword.

{}``I signed to him to keep away, but he continued to advance. I
told him again very patiently and clearly: `You must not come here.
These are old temples and I am here with my dead.'

{}``Presently he was so close I could see his face clearly. It was
a narrow face, with dull grey eyes, and a black moustache. He had
a scar on his upper lip, and he was dirty and unshaven. He kept shouting
unintelligible things, questions perhaps, at me.

{}``I know now that he was afraid of me, but at the time that did
not occur to me. As I tried to explain to him he interrupted me in
imperious tones, bidding me, I suppose, stand aside.

{}``He made to go past me, And I caught hold of him.

{}``I saw his face change at my grip.

{}```You fool,'\ I cried. `Don't you know? She is dead!'

{}``He started back. He looked at me with cruel eyes. I saw a sort
of exultant resolve leap into them\mbox{---}delight. Then, suddenly,
with a scowl, he swept his sword back\mbox{---}\textit{so}\mbox{---}and
thrust.''

He stopped abruptly. I became aware of a change in the rhythm of the
train. The brakes lifted their voices and the carriage jarred and
jerked. This present world insisted upon itself, became clamorous.
I saw through the steamy window huge electric lights glaring down
from tall masts upon a fog, saw rows of stationary empty carriages
passing by, and then a signal-box, hoisting its constellation of green
and red into the murky London twilight marched after them. I looked
again at his drawn features.

{}``He ran me through the heart. It was with a sort of astonishment\mbox{---}no
fear, no pain\mbox{---}but just amazement, that I felt it pierce
me, felt the sword drive home into my body. It didn't hurt, you know.
It didn't hurt at all.''

The yellow platform lights came into the field of view, passing first
rapidly, then slowly, and at last stopping with a jerk. Dim shapes
of men passed to and fro without.

{}``Euston!''\ cried a voice.

{}``Do you mean\mbox{---}?''

{}``There was no pain, no sting or smart. Amazement and then darkness
sweeping over everything. The hot, brutal face before me, the face
of the man who had killed me, seemed to recede. It swept out of existence\mbox{---}''

{}``Euston!''\ clamoured the voices outside; {}``Euston!''

The carriage door opened, admitting a flood of sound, and a porter
stood regarding us. The sounds of doors slamming, and the hoof-clatter
of cab-horses, and behind these things the featureless remote roar
of the London cobble-stones, came to my ears. A truckload of lighted
lamps blazed along the platform.

{}``A darkness, a flood of darkness that opened and spread and blotted
out all things.''

{}``Any luggage, sir?''\ said the porter.

{}``And that was the end?''\ I asked.

He seemed to hesitate. Then, almost inaudibly, he answered, {}``No.''

{}``You mean?''

{}``I couldn't get to her. She was there on the other side of the
Temple\mbox{---} And then\mbox{---}''

{}``Yes,''\ I insisted. {}``Yes?''

{}``Nightmares,''\ he cried; {}``nightmares indeed! My God! Great
birds that fought and tore.''
\end{document}
