[Illustration: SPECIAL DELIVERY]
Meiklejohn, the curate, was walking through the Jura when this thing
happened to him. There is only his word to vouch for it, for the inn
and its proprietor are now both of the past, and the local record of
the occurrence has long since assumed the proportions of a picturesque
but inaccurate legend. As a true story, however, it stands out from
those of its kidney by the fact that there seems to have been a
deliberate intention in it. It saved a life--a life the world had need
of. And this singular rescue of a man of value to the best order of
things makes one feel that there was some sense, even logic, in the
affair.
Moreover, Meiklejohn asserts that it was the only psychic experience he
ever knew. Things of the sort were not a ‘habit’ with him. His rescue,
thus, was not one of those meaningless interventions that puzzle the
man in the street while they exhilarate the psychologist. It was a
deliberate and very determined affair.
Meiklejohn found himself that hot August night in one of the valleys
that slip like blue shadows hidden among pine-woods between the Swiss
frontier and France. He had passed Ste. Croix earlier in the day; Les
Rasses had been left behind about four o’clock; Buttes, and the Val de
Travers, where the cement of many a London street comes from, was his
goal. But the light failed long before he reached it, and he stopped
at an inn that appeared unexpectedly round a corner of the dusty road,
built literally against the great cliffs that formed one wall of the
valley. He was so footsore, and his knapsack so heavy, that he turned
in without more ado.
Le Guillaume Tell was the name of the inn--dirty white walls, with
thin, almost mangy vines scrambling over the door, and the stream
brawling beneath shuttered windows with green and white stripes all
patched by sun and rain. His room was sevenpence, his dinner of soup,
omelette, fruit, cheese, and coffee, a franc. The prices suited his
pocket and made him feel comfortable and at home. Immediately behind
the hotel--the only house visible, except the sawmill across the road,
rose the ever-crumbling ridges and precipices that formed the flanks
of Chasseront and ran on past La Sagne towards the grey Aiguilles de
Baulmes. He was in the Jura fastnesses where tourists rarely penetrate.
Through the low doorway of the inn he carried with him the strong
atmosphere of thoughts that had accompanied him all day--dreams of
how he intended to spend his life, plans of sacrifice and effort.
For his hopes of great achievement, even then at twenty-five, were
a veritable passion in him, and his desire to spend himself for
humanity a devouring flame. So occupied, indeed, was his mind with the
emotions belonging to this line of thinking, that he hardly noticed
the singular, though exceedingly faint, sense of alarm that stirred
somewhere in the depths of his being as he passed within that doorway
where the drooping vine-leaves clutched at his hat. He remembered
it a little later. The sense of danger had been touched in him. He
felt at the moment only a hint of discomfort, too vague to claim
definite recognition. Yet it was there--the instant he stepped within
the threshold--and afterwards he distinctly recalled its sudden and
unaccountable advent.
His bedroom, though stuffy, as from windows long unopened, was clean;
carpetless, of course, and primitive, with white pine floor and walls,
and the short bed, smothered under its duvet, very creaky. And very
short! For Meiklejohn was well over six feet.
‘I shall have to curl up, as usual, in a knot,’ was his reflection as
he measured the bed with his eye; ‘though to-night I think--after my
twenty miles in this air----’
The thought refused to complete itself. He was going to add that he was
tired enough to have slept on a stone floor, but for some undefined
reason the same sense of alarm that had tapped him on the shoulder as
he entered the inn returned now when he contemplated the bed. A sharp
repugnance for that bed, as sudden and unaccountable as it was curious,
swept into him--and was gone again before he had time to seize it
wholly. It was in reality so slight that he dismissed it immediately
as the merest fancy; yet, at the same time, he was aware that he would
rather have slept on another bed, had there been one in the room--and
then the queer feeling that, after all, perhaps, he would _not_ sleep
there in the end at all. How this idea came to him he never knew. He
records it, however, as part of the occurrence.
After eight o’clock a few peasants, and workmen from the sawmill,
came in to drink their _demi-litre_ of red wine in the common room
downstairs, to stare at the unexpected guest, and to smoke their vile
tobacco. They were neither picturesque nor amusing--simply dirty and
slightly malodorous. At nine o’clock Meiklejohn knocked the ashes from
his briar pipe upon the limestone window-ledge, and went upstairs,
overpowered with sleep. The sense of alarm had utterly disappeared; his
mind was busy once more with his great dreams of the future--dreams
that materialised themselves, as all the world knows, in the famous
Meiklejohn Institutes....
Berthoud, the proprietor, short and sturdy, with his faded brown coat
and no collar, slightly confused with red wine and a ‘tourist’ guest,
showed him the way up. For, of course, there was no _femme de chambre_.
‘You have the corridor all to yourself,’ the man said; showed him
the best corner of the landing to shout from in case he wanted
anything--there being no bell--eyed his boots, knapsack, and flask with
considerable curiosity, wished him good-night, and was gone. He went
downstairs with a noise like a horse, thought the curate, as he locked
the door after him.
The windows had been open now for a couple of hours, and the room smelt
sweet with the odours of sawn wood and shavings, the resinous perfume
of the surrounding hosts of pines, and the sharp, delicate touch of
a lonely mountain valley where civilisation has not yet tainted the
air. Whiffs of coarse tobacco, pungent without being offensive, came
invisibly through the cracks of the floor. Primitive and simple it all
was--a sort of vigorous ‘backwoods’ atmosphere. Yet, once again, as he
turned to examine the room after Berthoud’s steps had blundered down
below into the passage, something rose faintly within him to set his
nerves mysteriously a-quiver.
Out of these perfectly simple conditions, without the least apparent
cause, the odd feeling again came over him that he was--in danger.
The curate was not much given to analysis. He was a man of action
pure and simple, as a rule. But to-night, in spite of himself, his
thoughts went plunging, searching, asking. For this singular message of
dread that emanated as it were from the room, or from some article of
furniture in the room perhaps--that bed still touched his mind with a
peculiar repugnance--demanded somewhat insistently for an explanation.
And the only explanation that suggested itself to his unimaginative
mind was that the forces of nature hereabouts were--overpowering;
that, after the slum streets and factory chimneys of the last twelve
months, these towering cliffs and smothering pine-forests communicated
to his soul a word of grandeur that amounted to awe. Inadequate and
far-fetched as the explanation seems, it was the only one that occurred
to him; and its value in this remarkable adventure lies in the fact
that he connected his sense of danger partly with the bed and partly
with the mountains.
‘I felt once or twice,’ he said afterwards, ‘as though some powerful
agency of a spiritual kind were all the time trying to beat into my
stupid brain a message of warning.’ And this way of expressing it is
more true and graphic than many paragraphs of attempted analysis.
Meiklejohn hung his clothes by the open window to air, washed, read
his Bible, looked several times over his shoulder without apparent
cause, and then knelt down to pray. He was a simple and devout soul;
his Self lost in the yearning, young but sincere, to live for humanity.
He prayed, as usual, with intense earnestness that his life might be
preserved for use in the world, when in the middle of his prayer--there
came a knocking at the door.
Hastily rising from his knees, he opened. The sound of rushing water
filled the corridor. He heard the voices of the workmen below in
the drinking-room. But only darkness stood in the passages, filling
the house to the very brim. No one was there. He returned to his
interrupted devotions.
‘I imagined it,’ he said to himself. He continued his prayers,
however, longer than usual. At the back of his thoughts, dim, vague,
half-defined only, lay this lurking sense of uneasiness--that he was in
danger. He prayed earnestly and simply, as a child might pray, for the
preservation of his life....
Again, just as he prepared to get into bed, struggling to make the
heaped-up duvet spread all over, came that knocking at the bedroom
door. It was soft, wonderfully soft, and something within him thrilled
curiously in response. He crossed the floor to open--then hesitated.
Suddenly he understood that that knocking at the door was connected
with the sense of danger in his heart. In the region of subtle
intuitions the two were linked. With this realisation there came over
him, he declares, a singular mood in which, as in a revelation, he knew
that Nature held forces that might somehow communicate directly and
positively with--human beings. This thought rushed upon him out of the
night, as it were. It arrested his movements. He stood there upon the
bare pine boards, hesitating to open the door.
The delay thus described lasted actually only a few seconds, but in
those few seconds these thoughts tore rapidly and like fire through his
mind. The beauty of this lost and mysterious valley was certainly in
his veins. He felt the strange presence of the encircling forests, soft
and splendid, their million branches sighing in the night airs. The
crying of the falling water touched him. He longed to transfer their
peace and power to the hearts of suffering thousands of men and women
and children. The towering precipices that literally dropped their
pale walls over the roof of the inn lifted his thoughts to their own
wind-swept heights; he longed to convey their message of inflexible
strength to the weak-kneed folk in the slums where he worked. He was
peculiarly conscious of the presence of these forces of Nature--the
irresistible powers that regenerate as easily as they destroy.
All this, and far more, swept his soul like a huge wind as he stood
there, waiting to open the door in answer to that mysterious soft
knocking.
And there, when at length he opened, stood the figure of a man--staring
at him and smiling.
Disappointment seized him instantly. He had expected, almost believed,
that he would see something un-ordinary; and instead, there stood a man
who had merely mistaken the door of his room, and was now bowing his
apology for the interruption. Then, to his amazement, he saw that the
man beckoned: the figure was some one who sought to draw him out.
‘Come with me,’ it seemed to say.
But Meiklejohn only realised this afterwards, he says, when it was too
late and he had already shut the door in the stranger’s face. For the
man had withdrawn into the darkness a little, and the curate had taken
the movement for a mere acknowledgment of his mistake instead of--as he
afterwards felt--a sign that he should follow.
‘And the moment the door was shut,’ he says, ‘I felt that it would have
been better for me to have gone out into the passage to see what he
wanted. It came over me that the man had something important to say to
me. I had missed it.’
For some seconds, it seemed, he resisted the inclination to go after
him. He argued with himself; then turned to his bed, pulled back the
sheets and heavy duvet, and was met sharply again with the sense of
repugnance, almost of fear, as before. It leaped out upon him--as
though the drawing back of the blankets had set free some cold blast of
wind that struck him across the face and made him shiver.
At the same moment a shadow fell from behind his shoulder and dropped
across the pillow and upper half of the bed. It may, of course, have
been the magnified shadow of the moth that buzzed about the pale-yellow
electric light in the ceiling. He does not pretend to know. It passed
swiftly, however, and was gone; and Meiklejohn, feeling less sure
of himself than ever before in his life, crossed the floor quickly,
almost running, and opened the door to go after the man who had
knocked--twice. For in reality less than half a minute had passed since
the shutting of the door and its reopening.
But the corridor was empty. He marched down the pine-board floor for
some considerable distance. Below he saw the glimmer of the hall, and
heard the voices of the peasants and workmen from the sawmill as they
still talked and drank their red wine in the public room. That sound
of falling water, as before, filled the air. Darkness reigned. But
the person--the _messenger_--who had twice knocked at his door was
gone utterly.... Presently a door opened downstairs, and the peasants
clattered out noisily. He turned and went back to bed. The electric
light was switched off below. Silence fell. Conquering his strange
repugnance, Meiklejohn, with a prayer on his lips, got into bed, and in
less than ten minutes was sound asleep.
‘I admit,’ he says, in telling the story, ‘that what happened
afterwards came so swiftly and so confusingly, yet with such a storm
of overwhelming conviction of its reality, that its sequence may be
somewhat blurred in my memory, while, at the same time, I see it after
all these years as though it was a thing of yesterday. But in my
sleep, first of all, I again heard that soft, mysterious tapping--not
in the course of a dream of any sort, but sudden and alone out of the
dark blank of forgetfulness. I tried to wake. At first, however, the
bonds of unconsciousness held me tight. I had to struggle in order
to return to the waking world. There was a distinct effort before I
opened my eyes; and in that slight interval I became aware that the
person who had knocked at the door had meanwhile opened it and passed
into the room. I had left the lock unturned. The person was close
beside me in the darkness--not in utter darkness, however, for a rising
three-quarter moon shed its faint silver upon the floor in patches,
and, as I sprang swiftly from the bed, I noticed something alive
moving towards me across the carpetless boards. Upon the edges of a
patch of moonlight, where the fringe of silver and shadow mingled, it
stopped. Three feet away from it I, too, stopped, shaking in every
muscle. It lay there crouching at my very feet, staring up at me. But
was it man or was it animal? For at first I took it certainly for a
human being on all fours; but the next moment, with a spasm of genuine
terror that half stopped my breath, it was borne in upon me that the
creature was--nothing human. Only in this way can I describe it. It was
identical with the human figure who had knocked before and beckoned to
me to follow, but it was another presentation of that figure.
‘And it held (or brought, if you will) some tremendous message for
me--some message of tremendous importance, I mean. The first time I
had argued, resisted, refused to listen. Now it had returned in a form
that ensured obedience. Some quite terrific power emanated from it--a
power that I understood instinctively belonged to the mountains and the
forests and the untamed elemental forces of Nature. Amazing as it may
sound in cold blood, I can only say that I felt as though the towering
precipices outside had sent me a direct warning--that my life was in
immediate danger.
‘For a space that seemed minutes, but was probably less than a few
seconds, I stood there trembling on the bare boards, my eyes riveted
upon the dark, uncouth shape that covered all the floor beyond. I saw
no limbs or features, no suggestion of outline that I could connect
with any living form I know, animate or inanimate. Yet it moved and
stirred all the time--_whirled within itself_, describes it best;
and into my mind sprang a picture of an immense dark wheel, turning,
spinning, whizzing so rapidly that it appears motionless, and uttering
that low and ominous thunder that fills a great machinery-room of a
factory. Then I thought of Ezekiel’s vision of the Living Wheels....
‘And it must have been at this instant, I think, that the muttering and
deep note that issued from it formed itself into words within me. At
any rate, I heard a voice that spoke with unmistakable intelligence:
‘“Come!” it said. “Come out--at once!” And the sense of power that
accompanied the Voice was so splendid that my fear vanished and I
obeyed instantly without thinking more. I followed; it led. It altered
in shape. The door _was_ open. It ran silently in a form that was
more like a stream of deep black water than anything else I can think
of--out of the room, down the stairs, across the hall, and up to the
deep shadows that lay against the door leading into the road. There I
lost sight of it.’
Meiklejohn’s only desire, he says, then was to rush after it--to
escape. This he did. He understood that somehow it had passed through
the door into the open air. Ten seconds later, perhaps even less,
he, too, was in the open air. He acted almost automatically; reason,
reflection, logic all swept away. Nowhere, however, in the soft
moonlight about him was any sign of the extraordinary apparition that
had succeeded in drawing him out of the inn, out of his bedroom, out
of his--bed. He stared in a dazed way at everything--just beginning to
get control of his faculties a bit--wondering what in the world it all
meant. That huge spinning form, he felt convinced, lay hidden somewhere
close beside him, waiting for the end. The danger it had enabled him to
avoid was close at hand.... He _knew_ that, he says....
There lay the meadows, touched here and there with wisps of floating
mist; the stream roared and tumbled down its rocky bed to his left;
across the road the sawmill lifted its skeleton-like outline, moonlight
shining on the dew-covered shingles of the roof, its lower part hidden
in shadow. The cold air of the valley was exquisitely scented.
To the right, where his eye next wandered, he saw the thick black
woods rising round the base of the precipices that soared into the
sky, sheeted with silvery moonlight. His gaze ran up them to the far
ridges that seemed to push the very stars farther into the heavens.
Then, as he saw those stars crowding the night, he staggered suddenly
backwards, seizing the wall of the road for support, and catching his
breath. For the top of the cliff, he fancied, moved. A group of stars
was for a fraction of a second--hidden. The earth--the scenery of the
valley, at least--turned about him. Something prodigious was happening
to the solid structure of the world. The precipices seemed to bend over
upon the valley. The far, uppermost ridge of those beetling cliffs
shifted downwards. Meiklejohn declares that the way its movement hid
momentarily a group of stars was the most startling--for some reason
horrible--thing he had ever witnessed.
Then came the roar and crash and thunder as the mass toppled, slid,
and finally--took the frightful plunge. How long the forces of rain
and frost had been chiselling out the slow detachment of the giant
slabs that fell, or whence came the particular extra little push that
drove the entire mass out from the parent rock, no one can know. Only
one thing is certain: that it was due to no chance, but to the nicely
and exactly calculated results of balanced cause and effect. From the
beginning of time it had been known--it might have been accurately
calculated, rather--that this particular thousand tons of rock would
break away from the crumbling tops of the precipices and crash
downwards with the roar of many tempests into the lost and mysterious
mountain valley where Meiklejohn the curate spent such and such a
night of such and such a holiday. It was just as sure as the return of
Halley’s comet.
‘I watched it,’ he says, ‘because I couldn’t do anything else. I would
far rather have run--I was so frightfully close to it all--but I
couldn’t move a muscle. And in a few seconds it was over. A terrific
wind knocked me backwards against the stone wall; there was a vast
clattering of smaller stones, set rolling down the neighbouring
couloirs; a steady roll of echoes ran thundering up and down the
valley; and then all was still again exactly as it had been before. And
the curious thing was--ascertained a little later, as you may imagine,
and not at once--that the inn, being so closely built up against the
cliffs, had almost entirely escaped. The great mass of rock and trees
had taken a leap farther out, and filled the meadows, blocked the road,
crushed the sawmill like a matchbox, and dammed up the stream; but the
inn itself was almost untouched.
‘_Almost_--for a single block of limestone, about the size of a grand
piano, had dropped straight upon one corner of the roof and smashed
its way through my bedroom, carrying everything it contained down to
the level of the cellar, so terrific was the momentum of its crushing
journey. Not a stick of the furniture was afterwards discoverable--as
such. The bed seems to have been caught by the very middle of the
fallen mass.’
The confusion in Meiklejohn’s mind may be imagined--the rush of feeling
and emotion that swept over him. Berthoud and the peasants mustered in
less than a dozen minutes, talking, crying, praying. Then the stream,
dammed up by the accumulation of rock, carried off the debris of the
broken roof and walls in less than half an hour. The rock, however,
that swept the room and the _empty_ bed of Meiklejohn the curate into
dust, still lies in the valley where it fell.
‘The only other thing that I remember,’ he says, in telling the story,
‘is that, as I stood there, shaking with excitement and the painful
terror of it all, before Berthoud and the peasants had come to count
over their number and learn that no one was missing--while I stood
there, leaning against the wall of the road, something rose out of the
white dust at my feet, and, with a noise like the whirring of some
immense projectile, passed swiftly and invisibly away up into space--so
far as I could judge, towards the distant ridges that reared their
motionless outline in moonlight beneath the stars.’