The following days it seemed to both Fillery and Devonham that their
discussion of the first night had been pitched in too intense, too
serious a key. Their patient was so commonplace again, so ordinary. He
made himself quite at home, seemed contented and uncurious, taking it
for granted he had come to stay for ever, apparently.
Apart from his strange beauty, his size, virility and a general
impression he conveyed of immense energies he was too easy-going to
make use of, he might have passed for a peasant, a countryman to
whom city life was new; but an educated, or at least half-educated,
countryman. He was so big, yet never gauche. He was neither stupid
nor ill-informed; the garden interested him, he knew much about the
trees and flowers, birds and insects too. He discussed the weather,
prevailing wind, moisture, prospects of change and so forth with a
judgment based on what seemed a natural, instinctive knowledge. The
gardener looked on him with obvious respect.
"Such nice manners and such a steady eye," Mrs. Soames, the matron,
mentioned, too, approvingly to Devonham. "But a lot in him he doesn't
understand himself, unless I'm wrong. Not much the matter with his
nerves, anyhow. Once he's married--unless I'm much mistaken--eh, sir?"
He was quiet, talking little, and spent the morning over the books
Fillery had placed purposely in his sitting-room, books on simple
physics, natural history and astronomy. It was the latter that absorbed
him most; he pored over them by the hour.
Fillery explained the situation so far as he thought wise. The young
man was honesty and simple innocence, but only vaguely interested in
the life of the great city he now experienced for the first time. He
had in his luggage a copy of the Will by which Mason had left him
everything, and he was pleased to know himself well provided for. Of
Mason, however, he had only a dim, uncertain, almost an impersonal
memory, as of someone encountered in a dream.
"I suppose something's happened to me," he said to Fillery, his
language normal and quite ordinary again. He spoke with a slight
foreign accent. "There was somebody, of course, who looked after me and
lived with me, but I can't remember who or where it was. I was very
happy," he added, "and yet ... I miss something."
Dr. Fillery, remembering his promise, did not press him.
"It will all come back by degrees," he remarked in a sympathetic tone.
"In the meantime, you must make yourself at home here with us, for as
long as you like. You are quite free in every way. I want you to be
happy here."
"I live with you always," was the reply. "There are things I want to
tell you, ask you too." He paused, looking thoughtful. "There was
someone I told all to once."
"Come to me with everything. I'll help you always, so far as I can." He
placed a hand upon his knee.
"There are feelings, big feelings I cannot reach quite, but that make
me feel different"--he smiled beautifully--"from--others." Quick as
lightning he had changed the sentence at the last word, substituting
"others" for "you." Had he been aware of a slight uneasy emotion in
his listener's heart? It had hardly betrayed itself by any visible
sign, yet he had instantly divined its presence. Such evidences of a
subtle, intimate, understanding were not lacking. Yet Fillery admirably
restrained himself.
"There are bright places I have lost," he went on frankly, no sign of
shy reserve in him. "I feel confused, lost somewhere, as if I didn't
belong here. I feel"--he used an odd word--"doubled." His face shaded a
little.
"Big overpowering London is bound to affect you," put in Fillery,
who had noticed the rapid discernment, "after living among woods and
mountains, as you have lived, for years. All will come right in a
little time; we must settle down a bit first----"
"Woods and mountains," repeated the other, in a half-dreamy voice,
his eyes betraying an effort to follow thought elsewhere. "Of course,
yes--woods and mountains and hot living sunlight--and the winds----"
His companion shifted the conversation a little. He suggested a line of
reading and study.... They talked also of such ordinary but necessary
things as providing a wardrobe, of food, exercise, companionship of
his own age, and so forth--all the commonplace details of ordinary
daily life, in fact. The exchange betrayed nothing of interest, nothing
unusual. They mentioned theatres, music, painting, and, beyond the
natural curiosity of youth that was ignorant of these, no detail was
revealed that need have attracted the attention of anybody, neither
of doctor, psychologist, nor student of human nature. With the single
exception that the past years had been obliterated from memory, though
much that had been acquired in them remained, there was not noticeable
peculiarity of any sort. Both language and point of view were normal.
This was obviously LeVallon. The "N. H." personality scarcely cast a
shadow even. Yet "N. H.," the doctor was quick to see, lay ready and
waiting just below the surface. There was no doubt in _his_ mind which
was the central self and which its transient projection, the secondary
personality. Again, as he sat and talked, he had the odd impression
that someone with bright tidings ran swiftly past his life, perhaps
towards it.
The swift messenger was certainly not LeVallon. LeVallon, indeed, was
but a shadow cast before this glad, bright visitant. Thus he felt,
at any rate. LeVallon was an empty simulacrum left behind while "N.
H." rested, or was active upon other things, things natural to him,
elsewhere. LeVallon was an arm, a limb, a feeler that "N. H." thrust
out. At Charing Cross, for instance, for a brief moment only, "N.
H." had peered across his shoulder, then withdrawn again. In the car
had sat by his side LeVallon. The being he now chatted with was also
LeVallon only.
But in his own heart, deep down, hidden yet eager to break loose, lay
his own deeper self that burned within him. This, the important part
of him, yearned towards "N. H." And up rose the strange symbol that
always appeared when his deepest, perhaps his subliminal self was
stirred. That lost radiant valley in the haunted Caucasus shone close
and brimming over ... with light, with flowers, with splendid winds and
fire, symbols of a vaster, grander, happier life, though perhaps a life
not yet within the range of normal human consciousness.... The fiery
symbol flashed and passed.
Curious thoughts and pictures rose flaming in his mind, persistent
ideas that bore no possible relation to his intellectual, reasoning
life. Passing across the background of his brain, as with waves of
heat and colour, they were correlated somewhere with harmonious sound.
Music, that is, came with them, as though inspiration brought its own
sound with it that made singing natural. They haunted him, these vague,
pleasurable phantasmagoria that were connected, he felt sure, with
music, as with childhood's lost imaginings. For a long time he searched
in vain for their source and origin. Then, suddenly, he remembered.
He heard his father's gruff, humorous voice: "There's not a scrap of
evidence, of course...." And, sharply, vividly, the buried memory gave
up its dead. His childish question went crashing through the air: "Are
we the only beings in the world?"
"Nothing is ever lost," he reminded himself with a smile that Devonham
assuredly never saw. "Every seed must bear its fruit in time."
And emotion surged through him from the remorseless records of his
underself. The childhood's love, with its correlative of deep, absolute
belief, returned upon him, linked on somehow to that old familiar
symbol he knew to mean his awakening subconscious being--a flowering
Caucasian vale of sun and wind. A belief, he realized, especially a
belief of childhood, remains for ever inexpugnable, eternal, prolific
seed of future harvests.
The unstable in him betrayed its ineradicable, dangerous streak. There
rose upon him in a cloud strange notions that inflamed imagination
sweetly. Later reading, indeed, had laid flesh upon the skeleton of
the boyish notion, though derived in the first instance he certainly
knew not whence. The literature and tradition of the East, he recalled,
peopled the elements with conscious life, to which the world's
fairy-tales--remnant of lost knowledge possibly--added nerves and heart
and blood. In all human bodies, at any rate, dwelt not necessarily
always human spirits, human souls....
He checked himself with a smile he would have liked to call a chuckle,
but that yet held some inexplicable happiness at its heart. His
rugged, eager face, its expression bitten deeply by experience, turned
curiously young. There rushed through him the Eastern conception
of another system of life, another evolution, deathless, divine,
important, the Order of the _Devas_, a series of Nature Beings entirely
apart from human categories. They included many degrees, from fairies
to planetary spirits, the gods, so called; and their duties, work and
purposes were concerned, he remembered, with carrying out the Laws
of Nature, the busy tending of all forms and structures, from the
elaborately marvellous infusoria in a drop of stagnant water, the
growth of crystals, the upbuilding of flowers and trees, of insects,
animals, humans, to the guidance and guardianship of those vaster forms
of heavenly bodies, the stars, the planets and the mighty suns, whose
gigantic "bodies," inhabited by immenser consciousness, people empty
space.... A noble, useful, selfless work, God's messengers....
He checked himself again, as the rich, ancient notion flitted across
his stirring memory.
"Delightful, picturesque conceptions of the planet's young, fair
ignorance!" he reminded himself, smiling as before.
Whereupon rose, bursting through his momentary dream, with full-fledged
power, the great hope of his own reasoned, scientific Dream--that
man is greater than he knows, and that the progress of the Race was
demonstrable.
For, to the subliminal powers of an awakened Race these Nature Beings
with their special faculties, must lie open and accessible. The
human and the non-human could unite! Nature must come back into the
hearts of men and win them again to simple, natural life with love,
with joy, with naked beauty. Death and disease must vanish, hope and
purity return. The Race must develop, grow, become in the true sense
_universal_. It could know God!
The vision flashed upon him with extraordinary conviction, so that he
forgot for the moment how securely he belonged to the unstable. The
smile of happiness spread, as it were, over his entire being. He glowed
and pulsed with its delicious inward fire. Light filled his being for
an instant--an instant of intoxicating belief and certainty and vision.
The instant inspiration of a dream went lost and vanished. He had drawn
upon childhood and legendary reading for the substance of a moment's
happiness. He shook himself, so to speak. He remembered his patients
and his duties, his colleague too....
Nothing, meanwhile, occurred to arouse interest or attention. LeVallon
was quite docile, ordinary; he needed no watching; he slept well, ate
well, spent his leisure with his books and in the garden. He complained
often of the lack of sunlight, and sometimes he might be seen taking
some deep breaths of air into his lungs by the open window or on the
balcony. The phases of the moon, too, interested him, and he asked
once when the full moon would come and then, when Devonham told him,
he corrected the date the latter gave, proving him two hours wrong.
But, on the whole, there seemed little to differentiate him from the
usual young man whose physique had developed in advance of his mental
faculties; his knowledge in some respects certainly was backward, as in
the case of arrested development. He seemed an intelligent countryman,
but an unusually intelligent countryman, though all the time another
under-intelligence shone brightly, betraying itself in remarks and
judgments oddly phrased.
Dr. Fillery took him, during the following day or two, to concerts,
theatres, cinemas. He enjoyed them all. Yet in the theatres he was
inclined to let his attention wander. The degree of alertness varied
oddly. His critical standard, moreover, was curiously exacting; he
demanded the real creative interpretation of a part, and was quick to
detect a lack of inspiration, of fine technique, of true conception in
a player. Reasons he failed to give, and argument seemed impossible to
him, but if voice or gesture or imaginative touch failed anywhere, he
lost interest in the performer from that moment.
"He has poor breath," he remarked. "He only imitates. He is outside."
Or, "She pretends. She does not feel and know. Feeling--the feeling
that comes of fire--she has not felt."
"She does not understand her part, you mean?" suggested Fillery.
"She does not burn with it," was the reply.
At concerts he behaved individually too. They bored as well as puzzled
him; the music hardly stirred him. He showed signs of distress at
anything classical, though Wagner, Debussy, the Russians, moved him and
produced excitement.
"He," was his remark, with emphasis, "has _heard_. He gives me freedom.
I could fly and go away. He sets me free ..." and then he would say no
more, not even in reply to questions. He could not define the freedom
he referred to, nor could he say where he could go away _to_. But
his face lit up, he smiled his delightful smile, he looked happy.
"Stars," he added once in a tone of interest, in reply to repeated
questions, "stars, wind, fire, away from _this!_"--he tapped his head
and breast--"I feel more alive and real."
"It's real and true, that music? That's what you feel?"
"It's beyond this," he replied, again tapping his body. "_They have
heard._"
The cinema interested him more. Yet its limits seemed to perplex him
more than its wonder thrilled him. He accepted it as a simple, natural,
universal thing.
"They stay always on the sheet," he observed with evident surprise.
"And I hear nothing. They do not even sing. Sound and movement go
together!"
"The speaking will come," explained Fillery. "Those are pictures
merely."
"I understand. Yet sound is natural, isn't it? They ought to be heard."
"Speech," agreed his companion, "is natural, but singing isn't."
"Are they not alive enough to sing?" was the reply, spoken to himself
rather than to his neighbour, who was so attentive to his least
response. "Do they only sing when"--Fillery heard it and felt something
leap within him--"when they are paid or have an audience?" he finished
the sentence quickly.
"No one sings naturally of their own accord--not in cities, at any
rate," was the reply.
LeVallon laughed, as though he understood at once.
"There is no sun and wind," he murmured. "Of course. They cannot."
It was the cinemas that provided most material for observation, Fillery
found. There was in a cinema performance something that excited his
companion, but excited him more than the doctor felt he was justified
in encouraging. Obviously the other side of him, the "N. H." aspect,
came up to breathe under the stimulus of the rapid, world-embracing,
space-and-time destroying pictures on the screen. Concerts did not
stimulate him, it seemed, but rather puzzled him. He remained wholly
the commonplace LeVallon--with one exception: he drew involved patterns
on the edge of his programmes, patterns of a very complicated yet
accurate kind, as though he almost saw the sounds that poured into
his ears. And these ornamented programmes Dr. Fillery preserved.
Sound--music--seemed to belong to his interpretation of movement. About
the cinema, however, there seemed something almost familiar, something
he already knew and understood, the sound belonging to movement only
lacking.
Apart from these small incidents, LeVallon showed nothing unusual,
nothing that a yokel untaught yet of natural intelligence might not
have shown. His language, perhaps, was singular, but, having been
educated by one mind only, and in a region of lonely forests and
mountains, remote from civilized life, there was nothing inexplicable
in the odd words he chose, nor in the peculiar--if subtle and
penetrating--phrases that he used. Invariably he recognized the
spontaneous, creative power as distinguished from the derivative that
merely imitated.
He found ways of expressing himself almost immediately, both in speech
and writing, however, and with a perfection far beyond the reach of a
half-educated country lad; and this swift aptitude was puzzling until
its explanation suddenly was laid bare. He absorbed, his companion
realized at last, as by telepathy, the content of his own, of Fillery's
mind, acquiring the latter's mood, language, ideas, as though the two
formed one being.
The discovery startled the doctor. Yet what startled him still more
was the further discovery, made a little later, that he himself could,
on occasions, become so identified with his patient that the slightest
shade of thought or feeling rose spontaneously in his own mind too.
He remained, otherwise, almost entirely "LeVallon"; and, after a full
report made to Devonham, and the detailed discussion thereon that
followed, Dr. Fillery had no evidence to contradict the latter's
opinion: "LeVallon is the real true self. The other personality--'N.
H.' as we call it--is a mere digest and accumulation of material
supplied by his parents and by Mason."
"Let us wait and see what happens when 'N. H.' appears and _does_
something," Fillery was content to reply.
"If," answered Devonham, with sceptical emphasis, "it ever does appear."
"You think it won't?" asked Fillery.
"With proper treatment," said Devonham decisively, "I see no reason
why 'N. H.' should not become happily merged in the parent self--in
LeVallon, and a permanent cure result."
He put his glasses straight and stared at his chief, as much as to say
"You promised."
"Perhaps," said Fillery. "But, in my judgment, 'LeVallon' is too slight
to count at all. I believe the whole, real, parent Self is 'N. H.,'
and the only life LeVallon has at all is that which peeps up through
him--from 'N. H.'"
Fillery returned his serious look.
"If 'N. H.' is the real self, and I am right," he added slowly, "you,
Paul, will have to revise your whole position."
"I shall," returned Devonham. "But--you will allow this--it is a lot to
expect. I see no reason to believe in anything more than a subconscious
mind of unusual content, and possibly of unusual powers and extent," he
added with reluctance.
"It is," said Fillery significantly, "a lot to expect--as you said just
now. I grant you that. Yet I feel it possible that----" he hesitated.
Devonham looked uncomfortable. He fidgeted. He did not like the pause.
A sense of exasperation rose in him, as though he knew something of
what was coming.
"Paul," went on his chief abruptly in a tone that dropped instinctively
to a lower key--almost a touch of awe lay behind it--"you admit no
deity, I know, but you admit purpose, design, intelligence."
"Well," replied the other patiently, long experience having taught him
iron restraint, "it's a blundering, imperfect system, inadequately
organized--if you care to call that intelligence. It's of an extremely
intricate complexity. I admit that. Deity I consider an unnecessary
assumption."
"The love and hate of atoms alone bowls you over," was the unexpected
comment. "The word 'Laws' explains nothing. A machine obeys the laws,
but intelligence conceived that machine--and a man repairs and keeps
it going. Who--what--keeps the daisy going, the crystal, the creative
thought in the imagination? An egg becomes a leaf-eating caterpillar,
which in turn becomes a honey-eating butterfly with wings. A yolk turns
into feathers. Is that accomplished without intelligence?"
"Ask our new patient," interrupted Devonham, wiping his glasses with
unnecessary thoroughness.
"Which?"
Devonham startled, looked up without his glasses. It seemed the
question made him uneasy. Putting the glasses on suddenly, he stared at
his chief.
"I see what you mean, Edward," he said earnestly, his interest deeply
captured. "Be careful. We know nothing, remember, nothing of life.
Don't jump ahead like this or take your dreams for reality. We have our
duty--in a case like this."
Fillery smiled, as though to convey that he remembered his promise.
"Humanity," he replied, "is a very small section of the universe.
Compared to the minuter forms of life, which _may_ be quite as
important, if not more so, the human section is even negligible;
while, compared to the possibility of greater forms----" He broke off
abruptly. "As you say, Paul, we know nothing of life after all, do we?
Nothing, less than nothing! We observe and classify a few results,
that's all. We must beware of narrow prejudice, at any rate--you and I."
His eyes lost their light, his speech dried up, his ideas, dreams,
speculations returned to him unrewarded, unexpressed. With natures in
whom the subconscious never stirred, natures through whom its magical
fires cast no faintest upward gleam, intercourse was ever sterile,
unproductive. Such natures had no background. Even a fact, with them,
was detached from its true big life, its full significance, its divine
potentialities!...
"We must beware of prejudice," he repeated quietly. "We seek truth
only."
"We must beware," replied Devonham, as he shrugged his shoulders,
"of suggestion--of auto-suggestion above all. We must remember
how repressed desires dramatize themselves--especially," he added
significantly, "when aided by imagination. We seek only facts." On his
face appeared swiftly, before it vanished again, an expression of keen
anxiety, almost of affliction, yet tempered, as it were, by surprise
and wonder, by pity possibly, and certainly by affection.