I saw her lips move. The countryman started, shuddered, and by a clumsy,
convulsive motion of his arms, upset his quart. He rubbed his eyes.
Before he had voiced his emotions we had passed on.
"I have seen a horse-coper do as much for a stallion," I commented. "I
know there are words that have certain effects. But you shouldn't play
pranks like the low-comedy devil in Faustus."
"It isn't good form, I suppose?" she sneered.
"It's a matter of feeling," I said, hotly, "the poor fellow has lost his
beer."
"What's that to me?" she commented, with the air of one affording a
concrete illustration.
"It's a good deal to him," I answered.
"But what to me?"
I said nothing. She ceased her exposition immediately afterward, growing
silent as suddenly as she had become discoursive. It was rather as if
she had learnt a speech by heart and had come to the end of it. I was
quite at a loss as to what she was driving at. There was a newness, a
strangeness about her; sometimes she struck me as mad, sometimes as
frightfully sane. We had a meal somewhere--a meal that broke the current
of her speech--and then, in the late afternoon, took a by-road and
wandered in secluded valleys. I had been ill; trouble of the nerves,
brooding, the monotony of life in the shadow of unsuccess. I had an
errand in this part of the world and had been approaching it deviously,
seeking the normal in its quiet hollows, trying to get back to my old
self. I did not wish to think of how I should get through the year--of
the thousand little things that matter. So I talked and she--she
listened very well.
But topics exhaust themselves and, at the last, I myself brought the
talk round to the Fourth Dimension. We were sauntering along the
forgotten valley that lies between Hardves and Stelling Minnis; we had
been silent for several minutes. For me, at least, the silence was
pregnant with the undefinable emotions that, at times, run in currents
between man and woman. The sun was getting low and it was shadowy in
those shrouded hollows. I laughed at some thought, I forget what, and
then began to badger her with questions. I tried to exhaust the
possibilities of the Dimensionist idea, made grotesque suggestions. I
said: "And when a great many of you have been crowded out of the
Dimension and invaded the earth you will do so and so--" something
preposterous and ironical. She coldly dissented, and at once the irony
appeared as gross as the jocularity of a commercial traveller. Sometimes
she signified: "Yes, that is what we shall do;" signified it without
speaking--by some gesture perhaps, I hardly know what. There was
something impressive--something almost regal--in this manner of hers; it
was rather frightening in those lonely places, which were so forgotten,
so gray, so closed in. There was something of the past world about the
hanging woods, the little veils of unmoving mist--as if time did not
exist in those furrows of the great world; and one was so absolutely
alone; anything might have happened. I grew weary of the sound of my
tongue. But when I wanted to cease, I found she had on me the effect of
some incredible stimulant.
We came to the end of the valley where the road begins to climb the
southern hill, out into the open air. I managed to maintain an uneasy
silence. From her grimly dispassionate reiterations I had attained to a
clear idea, even to a visualisation, of her fantastic conception--allegory,
madness, or whatever it was. She certainly forced it home. The
Dimensionists were to come in swarms, to materialise, to devour like
locusts, to be all the more irresistible because indistinguishable. They
were to come like snow in the night: in the morning one would look out and
find the world white; they were to come as the gray hairs come, to sap the
strength of us as the years sap the strength of the muscles. As to methods,
we should be treated as we ourselves treat the inferior races. There would
be no fighting, no killing; we--our whole social system--would break as a
beam snaps, because we were worm-eaten with altruism and ethics. We, at our
worst, had a certain limit, a certain stage where we exclaimed: "No, this
is playing it too low down," because we had scruples that acted like
handicapping weights. She uttered, I think, only two sentences of
connected words: "We shall race with you and we shall not be weighted,"
and, "We shall merely sink you lower by our weight." All the rest went
like this:
"But then," I would say ... "we shall not be able to trust anyone.
Anyone may be one of you...." She would answer: "Anyone." She prophesied
a reign of terror for us. As one passed one's neighbour in the street
one would cast sudden, piercing glances at him.
I was silent. The birds were singing the sun down. It was very dark
among the branches, and from minute to minute the colours of the world
deepened and grew sombre.
"But--" I said. A feeling of unrest was creeping over me. "But why do
you tell me all this?" I asked. "Do you think I will enlist with you?"
"You will have to in the end," she said, "and I do not wish to waste my
strength. If you had to work unwittingly you would resist and resist and
resist. I should have to waste my power on you. As it is, you will
resist only at first, then you will begin to understand. You will see
how we will bring a man down--a man, you understand, with a great name,
standing for probity and honour. You will see the nets drawing closer
and closer, and you will begin to understand. Then you will cease
resisting, that is all."
I was silent. A June nightingale began to sing, a trifle hoarsely. We
seemed to be waiting for some signal. The things of the night came and
went, rustled through the grass, rustled through the leafage. At last I
could not even see the white gleam of her face....
I stretched out my hand and it touched hers. I seized it without an
instant of hesitation. "How could I resist you?" I said, and heard my
own whisper with a kind of amazement at its emotion. I raised her hand.
It was very cold and she seemed to have no thought of resistance; but
before it touched my lips something like a panic of prudence had
overcome me. I did not know what it would lead to--and I remembered that
I did not even know who she was. From the beginning she had struck me
as sinister and now, in the obscurity, her silence and her coldness
seemed to be a passive threatening of unknown entanglement. I let her
hand fall.
"We must be getting on," I said.
The road was shrouded and overhung by branches. There was a kind of
translucent light, enough to see her face, but I kept my eyes on the
ground. I was vexed. Now that it was past the episode appeared to be a
lost opportunity. We were to part in a moment, and her rare mental gifts
and her unfamiliar, but very vivid, beauty made the idea of parting
intensely disagreeable. She had filled me with a curiosity that she had
done nothing whatever to satisfy, and with a fascination that was very
nearly a fear. We mounted the hill and came out on a stretch of soft
common sward. Then the sound of our footsteps ceased and the world grew
more silent than ever. There were little enclosed fields all round us.
The moon threw a wan light, and gleaming mist hung in the ragged hedges.
Broad, soft roads ran away into space on every side.
"And now ..." I asked, at last, "shall we ever meet again?" My voice
came huskily, as if I had not spoken for years and years.
"Oh, very often," she answered.
"Very often?" I repeated. I hardly knew whether I was pleased or
dismayed. Through the gate-gap in a hedge, I caught a glimmer of a white
house front. It seemed to belong to another world; to another order of
things.
"Ah ... here is Callan's," I said. "This is where I was going...."
"I know," she answered; "we part here."
"To meet again?" I asked.
"Oh ... to meet again; why, yes, to meet again."