“And is getting ready,” I added, “for its coming.”
“The Longest Day,” he whispered, looking about him with suppressed
excitement and ready, if necessary, to believe the earth would presently
stop turning. He gave one curious look at the sky, shuddered an instant
with intense delight, gave my hand a secret squeeze, and disappeared
like a goblin into the cottage. But behind him lingered something his
little presence had evoked. Wonder and expectation are true words of
power, and anticipation constructs the mould along which Imagination
later shall lead her fairy band. I realised what he had seen. The
orchard, the cow, the beehives _did_ look different. They were inviting,
as though something was on the way. The very sky, as the summer dusk
spread down it, wore colouring no ordinary June evening knew. Midsummer
Eve set free the fairies, and Jimbo knew it. The roses seemed to flutter
everywhere on wings.... The very lilac blooms had eyes.... I heard a
rustle as of skirts high up among the peeping stars....
How it came about is more than I can say, for I went to bed with a whirr
of wings and flowers in my head. The stillness of the night was magical,
four short hours of transparent darkness that seemed to gleam and
glimmer without hiding anything. Maria’s alarum clock was _not_ beside
my bed, for the simple reason that I had not asked for it. Jimbo and the
Longest Day between them had cast a glamour over me that had nothing to
do with hours, minutes, seconds. It was delicious and inexplicable. Yet
at other times I am an ordinary person, who knows that time is money and
money is difficult to come by without uncommon effort. All this came
for nothing. Jimbo did it.
And what did I do for Jimbo? I cannot say. His is the grand old magical
secret. He believed and wondered; he waited and asked no futile
questions; time and space obeyed his imperious little will; waking or
sleeping he dreamed, creating the world anew. I shut no eye that night.
I watched the wheeling constellations rise and pass. The whole, clear
summer night was rich with the silence of the gods. I dreamed, perhaps,
beside my open window, where the roses and the clematis climbed, shining
like lamps of starry beauty above the tiny lawn.... And at half-past
one, when the east began to whisper stealthily that Someone was on the
way, I left my chair and stole quietly down the narrow passage-way to
Jimbo’s room.... I was clever in my wickedness. I knew that if I waked
him, whispering that the Longest Day was about to break, he would open
half an eye, turn over in his thick childhood sleep, and murmur, as in
dream, “Then let it come.” And so, a little weary, if the truth be told,
I did all this, and--to my intense surprise--discovered Jimbo perched,
wide awake and staring, at the casement window. He had never closed an
eye, nor half an eye. He was watchful and alert, but undeniably tired
out, as I was.
“Jimbo,” I whispered, stealing in upon him, “the Longest Day is very
near. It’s so close you can hear it coming down the sky. It’s softer
than any dream you ever dreamed in your life. Come out--if you
will--we’ll see it from the orchard.”
He turned towards me in his little nightshirt like a goblin. His eyes
were very big, but the eyelids held open with an effort.
“Uncle,” he said in a tiny voice, “do you think it’s really come at
last? It’s been terribly slow, but I suppose that’s because it’s such an
awful length. Wasn’t it _wonderful_?”
And I tucked him up. Before the sheet was round his shoulder he was
asleep, ... and next morning when we met at breakfast, he just asked me
slyly, “Do you think mother guessed or saw anything of what _we_ saw?”
We glanced across the table, full of secret signs, together. Mother’s
letters were piled beside her plate, a book beneath them. It was my
stolen book. She had clearly sat up half the night devouring it.
“No,” I whispered, “I don’t think mother guesses anything at all.
Besides,” I added, “to-day is the Longest Day, so in any case she’d be a
very long time finding out.” And, as he seemed satisfied, I felt my
conscience clear, and said no more about it.
XXIV
IF THE CAP FITS----
Field-Martin, the naturalist, sat in his corner arm-chair at the Club
and watched them--this group of men that had drifted together round the
table just opposite and begun to talk. He did not wish to listen, but
was too near to help himself. The newspaper over which he had dozed lay
at his feet, and he bent forward to pick it up and make it crackle with
a pretence of reading.
“Then what _is_ psychometry?” was the question that first caught his
attention. It was Slopkins who asked it, the man with the runaway chin
and over-weighted, hooked nose, that seemed to bring forward all the top
of his face and made him resemble a large codfish for ever in the act of
rising to some invisible bait.
“Something to do with soul measuring, I suppose, unless my Greek has
gone utterly to pot,” said the jovial man beside him, pouring out his
tea from a height, as a waiter pours out flat beer when he wants to
force it to froth in the glass.
“Like those Yankee doctors, don’t you remember,” put in someone else,
with the irrelevance of casual conversation, “who weighed a human body
just before it died and just after, and made an affidavit that the
difference in ounces represented the weight of the soul.”
Several laughed. Field-Martin wheeled up his chair with vigorous strokes
of his heels and joined the group, accepting the offer of an extra cup
out of that soaring teapot. The particular subject under discussion
bored him, but he liked to sit and watch men talking, just as he liked
to sit and watch birds or animals in the open air, studying their
movements, learning their little habits, and the rest. The conversation
flowed on in desultory fashion in the way conversations usually do flow
on, one or two talkers putting in occasional real thoughts, the majority
merely repeating what they have heard others say.
“Yes, but what _is_ psychometry really?” repeated the codfish man, after
an interval during which the talk had drifted into an American story
that grew apparently out of the reference to American doctors. For that
particular invisible bait still hovered above the surface of his slow
mental stream, and he was making a second shot at it, after the manner
of his ilk.
The question was so obviously intended to be answered seriously that
this time no one guffawed or exercised his wit. For a moment, indeed,
no one answered at all. Then a man at the back of the group, a man with
a deep voice and a rather theatrical and enthusiastic manner, spoke.
“Psychometry, I take it,” he said with conviction, “is the quality
possessed by everything, even by inanimate objects, of sending out
vibrations which--which can put certain sensitive persons _en rapport_,
pictorially as it were, with all the events that have ever happened
within the ken of such objects----”
“Persons known as psychometrists, I suppose?” from the codfish man, who
seemed to like things labelled carefully.
The other nodded. “Psychometrist, I believe,” he continued, “is the name
of that very psychical and imaginative type that can ‘sense’ such
infinitely delicate vibrations. In reality, I suppose, they are
receptive folk who correspond to the sensitive photographic plate that
records vibrations of light in a similar way and results in a visible
picture.”
A man dropped his teaspoon with a clatter; another splashed noisily in
his cup, stirring it; a third plunged at the buttered toast of his
neighbour; and Field-Martin, the naturalist, gave an impatient kick with
his leg against the arm-chair opposite. He loathed this kind of talk.
The speaker evidently was one of those who knew by heart the “patter”
of psychical research, or what passes for it among credulous and
untrained minds--master of that peculiar jargon, quasi-scientific, about
vibrations and the rest, that such persons affect. But he was too lazy
to interrupt or disagree. Wondering vaguely who the speaker might be, he
drank his tea, and listened with laughter and disgust about equally
mingled in his mind. Others, besides the codfish, were asking questions.
Answers were not behindhand.
“You remember Denton’s experiments--Professor Denton, of Cambridge,
Mass.,” the enthusiastic man was saying, “who found that his wife was a
psychometrist, and how she had only to hold a thing in her hand, with
eyes blindfolded, to get pictures of scenes that had passed before it. A
bit of stone he gave her brought vivid and gorgeous pictures of
processions and pageants before her inner eye, I remember, and at the
end of the experiment her husband told her what the stone was.”
“By Jove! And what was it?” asked codfish.
“A fragment from an old temple at Thebes,” was the reply.
“Telepathy,” suggested someone.
“Quite possible,” was the reply. “But, another time, when he gave her
something wrapped up in a bit of paper, taken from a tray covered with
objects similarly wrapped up so that he could not know what particular
one he held at the moment, she took it for a second, then screamed out
that she was rushing, tearing, falling through space, and let it drop
with a gasp of breathless excitement----”
“And----?” asked one or two.
“It was a piece of meteorite,” was the answer. “You see, she had
psychometrised the sensations of the falling star. I know, for instance,
another woman who is so sensitive to the atmospheres of things and
people, that she can tell you every blessed thing about a stranger whose
just-vacated chair she sits down in. I’ve known her leave a bus, too,
when certain people have got in and sat next to her, because----”
Field-Martin paid for his neighbour’s tea by mistake and moved away,
hoping his contempt was not too clearly marked for politeness.
“----everything, you see, has an atmosphere charged with its own
individual associations. An object can communicate an emotion it has
borrowed by contact with someone living----” was a fragment of the last
sentence he heard as he left the room and went downstairs, spitting fire
internally against the speaker and all his kidney. He seized his hat and
hurried away. He walked home to his Chelsea flat, fuming inwardly,
wondering vaguely if there was any other club he could join where he
could have his tea without being obliged to listen to such stuff.... He
walked through the Park, meaning to cut through _via_ Queensgate, and as
he went he followed his usual custom of thinking out details of his
work: the next day, for instance, he was to lecture upon “English Birds
of Prey,” and in his mind he reviewed carefully the form and substance
of what he would say. He skirted the Serpentine, watching the sea-gulls
wheeling through the graceful figures of their evening dance against the
saffron sky. The exquisite tilt and balance of their bodies fascinated
him as usual. He stopped a moment to watch it. To a mind like his it was
full of suggestion, and instinctively he began comparing the method of
flight with that of the hawks; one or two points occurred to him that he
could make good use of in his lecture ... when he became aware that
something drew his attention down from the sky to the water, and that
the interest he felt in the birds was being usurped by thoughts of
another kind. Without apparent reason, reflections of a very different
order passed into the stream of his consciousness--somewhat urgently.
Sea-gulls, hawks, birds of prey, and the rest faded from his mental
vision; wings and details of flight departed; his eye, and with it his
thought, dropped from the sky to the surface of the water, shimmering
there beneath the last tints of the sunset. The emotion of the
“naturalist,” stirred into activity by the least symbol of his lifelong
study--a bird, an animal, an insect--had been curiously replaced; and
the transition was abrupt enough to touch him with a sense of
surprise--almost, perhaps, of shock.
Now, vigorous imagination, the kind that creates out of next to nothing,
was not an ingredient of his logical and “scientific” cast of mind, and
Field-Martin, slightly puzzled, was at a loss to explain this irregular
behaviour of his usually methodical system. He stepped back farther from
the brink where the little waves splashed ... yet, even as he did so, he
realised that the force dictating the impulse was of a protective
character, guiding, directing, almost warning. In words, had he been a
writer, he might have transposed it thus: “Be careful of that water!”
For the truth was it had suddenly made him _shrink_.
He continued his way, puzzled and disturbed. Of the mutinous forces that
lie so thinly screened behind life, dropping from time to time their
faint, wireless messages upon the soul, Field-Martin hardly discerned
the existence. And this passing menace of the water was disquieting--all
the more so because his temperament furnished him with no possible
instrument of measurement. A sense of deep water, cold, airless, still,
invaded his mind; he thought of its suffocating mass lying over mouth
and ears; he realised something of the struggle for breath, and the
frantic efforts to reach the surface and keep afloat that a drowning
man----
“But what nonsense is this? Where do these thoughts suddenly come
from?” he exclaimed, hurrying along. He had crossed the road now, so as
to put a greater distance, and a stretch of wholesome human traffic,
between him and that sheet of water lying like painted glass beneath the
fading sky. Yet it pulled and drew him back again to the shore, inviting
him with a curious, soft insistence that rendered necessary a distinct
effort of will to resist it successfully. Birds were utterly forgotten.
His very being was steeped in water--to the neck, to the eyes, his lungs
filled, his ears charged with the rushing noises of singing and drumming
that come to complete the dread bewilderment of the drowning man.
Field-Martin shook and trembled as he crossed the bridge by Kensington
Gardens.... That impulse to throw himself over the parapet was the most
outrageous and unaccountable thing that had ever come upon him ... and
as he hurried down Queensgate he tried to calculate whether there was
time for him to see his doctor that very night before dinner, or whether
he must postpone it to the first thing in the morning. For, assuredly,
this passing disorder of his brain must have immediate attention; such
results of overwork could not be seen to quickly enough. If necessary,
he would take a holiday at once....
He decided to say nothing to his wife ... and yet the odd thing was that
before dinner was half over the whole mood had vanished so completely,
and his normal wholesome balance of mind recovered such perfect control,
that he could afford to laugh at the whole thing, and _did_ laugh at
it--what was more, even made his wife laugh at it too. The fact remained
to puzzle and perplex, but the reality of it was gone.
But that night, when he went to the Club, the hall-porter stopped him:
“Beg pardon, sir, but Mr. Finsen thought you might have taken his hat by
mistake last night?”
“His hat?” The name “Finsen” was unknown to him.
“He wears a green felt hat like yours, sir, and they were on adjoining
pegs.”
Field-Martin took off his head-covering and discovered his mistake.
Finsen’s name was inside in small gold letters. He explained matters
with the porter, and left the necessary directions for the exchange to
be effected. Upstairs he ran into Slopkins.
“That chap Finsen was asking for you,” he remarked; “it seems you
exchanged hats last night by mistake, and the porter thought
possibly----”
“Who is Finsen?”
“You remember, he was talking so wonderfully last night about
psychometry----”
“Oh, is _that_ Finsen?”
“Yes,” replied the other. “Interesting man, but a bit queer, you know.
Gets melancholia and that sort of thing, I believe. It was only a week
or two ago, don’t you remember, that he tried to drown himself?”
“Indeed,” said Field-Martin dryly, and went upstairs to look at the
evening papers.
XXV
NEWS _v._ NOURISHMENT
The first thing I saw of him was the dome of his bald head and the strip
of wandering black hair that strayed across it like a bit of seaweed
left by an ebbing tide. The rest was hidden behind the opened newspaper
which he devoured while waiting for his luncheon. He was a little man. I
saw the tips of square boots with knobs on them projecting beneath the
table, and later I noted that his nose was aquiline, and that he had
large comfortable ears. He may have been something in a Forwarding
Office; he was not spruce enough for banking or insurance circles. He
read that evening edition as if the future of the race depended on it.
Then the girl, a lackadaisical, bird-like creature, brought his plate of
“braised beef an’ carruts” swimming in thick brown gravy, and set it
down with noisy clatter upon the marble table. He was so absorbed that
the dishes came as a surprise; and as he looked up, startled, the paper
descended softly upon the thick brown gravy. This was the first
disaster; for when he lifted it to find his place the columns of print
resembled a successful fly-paper. He looked round at everybody,
bewildered. For the moment, however, I was so interested in the
wandering strip of seaweed on his skull that I hardly noticed his
efforts to free the newspaper, himself, his neighbours, and the
cruet-stand from the adhesive entanglement of this portion of his
luncheon. There was a sound of scattering--then the girl had somehow
managed it for him with her grimy napkin. But that remnant of a tide
forgotten, as I came to regard it, fascinated me. It strayed, lonely as
a cloud; it was so admirably fastened down; the angle, curve, and
general adjustment had been evidently chosen with so much care. Its
“lie” upon that dome of silence had been calculated to a nicety, so that
it should relieve with the best possible effect the open waste around
it. It was like a mathematical problem. Only when his grave, dark eyes
met mine did I realise that I was staring rudely.
But long before my own hurried luncheon came, the difficulties in which
this stranger opposite was involved had fascinated me afresh. The
contents of the now mutilated evening paper absorbed him to the point of
positive conflict. It may have been the racing news, police reports, or
a breach of promise case; it may have been some special article and
leader, or it may have been merely advertisements, perhaps; I cannot
say. But his efforts to read and eat at the same time made me wonder
with a growing excitement for the final issue of the battle. Had I not
been alone, I would have laid a bet--with odds, I think, against
“braised beef an’ carruts.”
He did it all so gravely and so earnestly, aware of the claims of both
contestants, yet determined to be conscientious. Determined he most
certainly was. A man doing anything with all his heart is always
interesting to watch, but a man solemnly doing two things at once wins
admiration and respect as well. My sympathies went out to him. I longed
to give him hints. And the only time my attention wandered from this
contest between news and nourishment was when I watched that strip of
lonely seaweed rise and fall, vanish and reappear, with the movement of
his head in eating. The way it dived to meet the fork, then rose again
to greet the paper, was like the motion of a swimmer among waves.
He arranged his sight so cleverly, dividing it in some swift,
extraordinary manner, yet without squinting, between the occupants of
the arena. An eye and a half on each alternately seemed to be the plan,
the extra half left over being free to bring immediate first-aid when
needed; but his mind, I felt, was really with the paper all along. The
nourishment was pleasure, the news was duty. There was heroism in this
little man.
He would heap his fork with a marvellously balanced pyramid of beef and
carrots and bread, smear it over with thick gravy, top it with a dash of
salt--all with one hand, this!--then leave it hovering above the plate
while he looked back keenly at the paper, searching to find his place.
For between mouthfuls he always lost his place. It distressed me till he
found it again, my interest centred on the piled-up fork. But what
distressed me even more was that every time he found it and shot an eye
back again to the loaded implement--that pyramid tumbled! Three times
out of four, at least, it dropped its burden in this way; and the look
of weariness, surprise, and disappointment on his face at each collapse
was almost more than I could bear--in silence. He looked at that fork as
some men look at a dog--with mortified astonishment. “I’m surprised at
you,” his expression said, “after all those years, too!” I longed to
ask, “Why _did_ you add that carrot to the top? You might have known by
this time----!” But his own expression said quite plainly, “I built you
up so very carefully--all with one hand, too. You really _might_ have
stayed!”
My own tension became too keen then for mere amusement. I found myself
taking sides alternately with the beef and paper. I was conscious of a
desire to steady the fork for him while he read, and then to guide it
straight into his mouth. For it next became most painfully obvious that
he rarely found the opening--at the first attempt. With that
over-loaded, over-balanced fork, a dripping carrot perched on the apex
of the pile, he jabbed successively his lower lip, his cheek, his chin,
and once at least the tip of his nose, before the proper terminus was
reached and delivery accomplished. Small beauty-spots of brown remained
dotted here and there to mark the inaccuracy of his aim and the firmness
of his persistence.
For he was so patient. Both jobs he did so thoroughly. I began to wonder
if he did two things at once at other times as well: whether, for
instance, he buttoned his collar with one hand while with the other he
led that strip of seaweed into safety for the day’s adventure. Surely,
it seemed, he must excel at those parlour tricks which involve patting
the breast with one hand and rubbing it up and down with the other
simultaneously. Something of the sort he surely practised. Although the
way, with a piece of bread speared on his fork, he groped all round the
table for the gravy that was cooling on his plate, made me question his
absolute skill sometimes.
He was too absorbed to notice things around him. The stout, bespectacled
woman, for instance, who sat beside him on the leather couch, might not
have existed at all. The way she looked him up and down, hinting for
more room, was utterly lost upon him. So was the way she moved her
glass of steaming milk and her under-sized bananas to and fro to dodge
the paper he constantly flapped beneath her very nose. He took far more
than his proper share of space, and she clearly resented it most
bitterly, yet was afraid to speak. The movements of her glass and fruit
were like a game of chess: he played the stronger gambit and forced her
moves. She sulked--and lost.
The girl came up and whisked his unfinished plate away, asking him with
a sideways bend of the head, bird-like rather, if he wished to order
anything else, and his face shot up above the edge of the paper as
though she had interrupted him in the midst of a serious business
transaction.
“Didn’t I order something, miss?” he was heard to inquire resentfully,
one eye glued still to the sheet.
“Nothing not yet,” came the disinterested reply.
“Bring me sultana pudding hot--no, cold, I mean--with sauce, please,” he
said, as if remembering some quotation learnt by heart--and down he
plunged once more beneath that sea of print.