"Listen," she said, and uttered some sounds. I felt a kind of unholy
emotion. It had come like a sudden, suddenly hushed, intense gust of
wind through a breathless day. "What--what!" I cried.
"I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension."
I recovered my equanimity with the thought that I had been visited by
some stroke of an obscure and unimportant physical kind.
"I think we must have been climbing the hill too fast for me," I said,
"I have not been very well. I missed what you said." I was certainly
out of breath.
"I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension," she repeated with admirable
gravity.
"Oh, come," I expostulated, "this is playing it rather low down. You
walk a convalescent out of breath and then propound riddles to him."
I was recovering my breath, and, with it, my inclination to expand.
Instead, I looked at her. I was beginning to understand. It was obvious
enough that she was a foreigner in a strange land, in a land that
brought out her national characteristics. She must be of some race,
perhaps Semitic, perhaps Sclav--of some incomprehensible race. I had
never seen a Circassian, and there used to be a tradition that
Circassian women were beautiful, were fair-skinned, and so on. What was
repelling in her was accounted for by this difference in national point
of view. One is, after all, not so very remote from the horse. What one
does not understand one shies at--finds sinister, in fact. And she
struck me as sinister.
"You won't tell me who you are?" I said.
"I have done so," she answered.
"If you expect me to believe that you inhabit a mathematical
monstrosity, you are mistaken. You are, really."
She turned round and pointed at the city.
"Look!" she said.
We had climbed the western hill. Below our feet, beneath a sky that the
wind had swept clean of clouds, was the valley; a broad bowl, shallow,
filled with the purple of smoke-wreaths. And above the mass of red roofs
there soared the golden stonework of the cathedral tower. It was a
vision, the last word of a great art. I looked at her. I was moved, and
I knew that the glory of it must have moved her.
She was smiling. "Look!" she repeated. I looked.
There was the purple and the red, and the golden tower, the vision, the
last word. She said something--uttered some sound.
What had happened? I don't know. It all looked contemptible. One seemed
to see something beyond, something vaster--vaster than cathedrals,
vaster than the conception of the gods to whom cathedrals were raised.
The tower reeled out of the perpendicular. One saw beyond it, not
roofs, or smoke, or hills, but an unrealised, an unrealisable infinity
of space.
It was merely momentary. The tower filled its place again and I looked
at her.
"What the devil," I said, hysterically--"what the devil do you play
these tricks upon me for?"
"You see," she answered, "the rudiments of the sense are there."
"You must excuse me if I fail to understand," I said, grasping after
fragments of dropped dignity. "I am subject to fits of giddiness." I
felt a need for covering a species of nakedness. "Pardon my swearing," I
added; a proof of recovered equanimity.
We resumed the road in silence. I was physically and mentally shaken;
and I tried to deceive myself as to the cause. After some time I said:
"You insist then in preserving your--your incognito."
"Oh, I make no mystery of myself," she answered.
"You have told me that you come from the Fourth Dimension," I remarked,
ironically.
"I come from the Fourth Dimension," she said, patiently. She had the
air of one in a position of difficulty; of one aware of it and ready to
brave it. She had the listlessness of an enlightened person who has to
explain, over and over again, to stupid children some rudimentary point
of the multiplication table.
She seemed to divine my thoughts, to be aware of their very wording. She
even said "yes" at the opening of her next speech.
"Yes," she said. "It is as if I were to try to explain the new ideas of
any age to a person of the age that has gone before." She paused,
seeking a concrete illustration that would touch me. "As if I were
explaining to Dr. Johnson the methods and the ultimate vogue of the
cockney school of poetry."
"I understand," I said, "that you wish me to consider myself as
relatively a Choctaw. But what I do not understand is; what bearing that
has upon--upon the Fourth Dimension, I think you said?"
"I will explain," she replied.
"But you must explain as if you were explaining to a Choctaw," I said,
pleasantly, "you must be concise and convincing."