She made a long speech of it; I condense. I can't remember her exact
words--there were so many; but she spoke like a book. There was
something exquisitely piquant in her choice of words, in her
expressionless voice. I seemed to be listening to a phonograph reciting
a technical work. There was a touch of the incongruous, of the mad, that
appealed to me--the commonplace rolling-down landscape, the straight,
white, undulating road that, from the tops of rises, one saw running for
miles and miles, straight, straight, and so white. Filtering down
through the great blue of the sky came the thrilling of innumerable
skylarks. And I was listening to a parody of a scientific work recited
by a phonograph.
I heard the nature of the Fourth Dimension--heard that it was an
inhabited plane--invisible to our eyes, but omnipresent; heard that I
had seen it when Bell Harry had reeled before my eyes. I heard the
Dimensionists described: a race clear-sighted, eminently practical,
incredible; with no ideals, prejudices, or remorse; with no feeling for
art and no reverence for life; free from any ethical tradition; callous
to pain, weakness, suffering and death, as if they had been invulnerable
and immortal. She did not say that they were immortal, however. "You
would--you will--hate us," she concluded. And I seemed only then to come
to myself. The power of her imagination was so great that I fancied
myself face to face with the truth. I supposed she had been amusing
herself; that she should have tried to frighten me was inadmissible. I
don't pretend that I was completely at my ease, but I said, amiably:
"You certainly have succeeded in making these beings hateful."
"I have made nothing," she said with a faint smile, and went on amusing
herself. She would explain origins, now.
"Your"--she used the word as signifying, I suppose, the inhabitants of
the country, or the populations of the earth--"your ancestors were mine,
but long ago you were crowded out of the Dimension as we are to-day, you
overran the earth as we shall do to-morrow. But you contracted diseases,
as we shall contract them,--beliefs, traditions; fears; ideas of pity
... of love. You grew luxurious in the worship of your ideals, and
sorrowful; you solaced yourselves with creeds, with arts--you have
forgotten!"
She spoke with calm conviction; with an overwhelming and dispassionate
assurance. She was stating facts; not professing a faith. We approached
a little roadside inn. On a bench before the door a dun-clad country
fellow was asleep, his head on the table.
"Put your fingers in your ears," my companion commanded.