Hooker looked into his face. "I'm going to bury _that_, anyhow,
before I lend a hand with this stuff."
"Don't be a fool, Hooker," said Evans, "Let that mass of corruption bide."
Hooker hesitated, and then his eye went carefully over the brown soil
about them. "It scares me somehow," he said.
"The thing is," said Evans, "what to do with these ingots. Shall we
re-bury them over here, or take them across the strait in the canoe?"
Hooker thought. His puzzled gaze wandered among the tall tree-trunks, and
up into the remote sunlit greenery overhead. He shivered again as his eye
rested upon the blue figure of the Chinaman. He stared searchingly among
the grey depths between the trees.
"What's come to you, Hooker?" said Evans. "Have you lost your wits?"
"Let's get the gold out of this place, anyhow," said Hooker.
He took the ends of the collar of the coat in his hands, and Evans took
the opposite corners, and they lifted the mass. "Which way?" said Evans.
"To the canoe?"
"It's queer," said Evans, when they had advanced only a few steps, "but my
arms ache still with that paddling."
"Curse it!" he said. "But they ache! I must rest."
They let the coat down, Evans' face was white, and little drops of sweat
stood out upon his forehead. "It's stuffy, somehow, in this forest."
Then with an abrupt transition to unreasonable anger: "What is the good of
waiting here all the day? Lend a hand, I say! You have done nothing but
moon since we saw the dead Chinaman."
Hooker was looking steadfastly at his companion's face. He helped raise
the coat bearing the ingots, and they went forward perhaps a hundred yards
in silence. Evans began to breathe heavily. "Can't you speak?" he said.
"What's the matter with you?" said Hooker.
Evans stumbled, and then with a sudden curse flung the coat from him. He
stood for a moment staring at Hooker, and then with a groan clutched at
his own throat.
"Don't come near me," he said, and went and leant against a tree. Then in
a steadier voice, "I'll be better in a minute."
Presently his grip upon the trunk loosened, and he slipped slowly down the
stem of the tree until he was a crumpled heap at its foot. His hands were
clenched convulsively. His face became distorted with pain. Hooker
approached him.
"Don't touch me! Don't touch me!" said Evans in a stifled voice. "Put the
gold back on the coat."
"Can't I do anything for you?" said Hooker.
"Put the gold back on the coat."
As Hooker handled the ingots he felt a little prick on the ball of his
thumb. He looked at his hand and saw a slender thorn, perhaps two inches
in length.
Evans gave an inarticulate cry and rolled over.
Hooker's jaw dropped. He stared at the thorn for a moment with dilated
eyes. Then he looked at Evans, who was now crumpled together on the
ground, his back bending and straightening spasmodically. Then he looked
through the pillars of the trees and net-work of creeper stems, to where
in the dim grey shadow the blue-clad body of the Chinaman was still
indistinctly visible. He thought of the little dashes in the corner of the
plan, and in a moment he understood.
"God help me!" he said. For the thorns were similar to those the Dyaks
poison and use in their blowing-tubes. He understood now what Chang-hi's
assurance of the safety of his treasure meant. He understood that grin
now.
"Evans!" he cried.
But Evans was silent and motionless, save for a horrible spasmodic
twitching of his limbs. A profound silence brooded over the forest.
Then Hooker began to suck furiously at the little pink spot on the ball of
his thumb--sucking for dear life. Presently he felt a strange aching pain
in his arms and shoulders, and his fingers seemed difficult to bend. Then
he knew that sucking was no good.
Abruptly he stopped, and sitting down by the pile of ingots, and resting
his chin upon his hands and his elbows upon his knees, stared at the
distorted but still quivering body of his companion. Chang-hi's grin came
into his mind again. The dull pain spread towards his throat and grew
slowly in intensity. Far above him a faint breeze stirred the greenery,
and the white petals of some unknown flower came floating down through the
gloom.
XI.
THE STORY OF THE LATE MR. ELVESHAM.
I set this story down, not expecting it will be believed, but, if
possible, to prepare a way of escape for the next victim. He, perhaps, may
profit by my misfortune. My own case, I know, is hopeless, and I am now in
some measure prepared to meet my fate.
My name is Edward George Eden. I was born at Trentham, in Staffordshire,
my father being employed in the gardens there. I lost my mother when I was
three years old, and my father when I was five, my uncle, George Eden,
then adopting me as his own son. He was a single man, self-educated, and
well-known in Birmingham as an enterprising journalist; he educated me
generously, fired my ambition to succeed in the world, and at his death,
which happened four years ago, left me his entire fortune, a matter of
about five hundred pounds after all outgoing charges were paid. I was then
eighteen. He advised me in his will to expend the money in completing my
education. I had already chosen the profession of medicine, and through
his posthumous generosity and my good fortune in a scholarship
competition, I became a medical student at University College, London. At
the time of the beginning of my story I lodged at 11A University Street in
a little upper room, very shabbily furnished and draughty, overlooking the
back of Shoolbred's premises. I used this little room both to live in and
sleep in, because I was anxious to eke out my means to the very last
shillings-worth.
I was taking a pair of shoes to be mended at a shop in the Tottenham Court
Road when I first encountered the little old man with the yellow face,
with whom my life has now become so inextricably entangled. He was
standing on the kerb, and staring at the number on the door in a doubtful
way, as I opened it. His eyes--they were dull grey eyes, and reddish under
the rims--fell to my face, and his countenance immediately assumed an
expression of corrugated amiability.
"You come," he said, "apt to the moment. I had forgotten the number of
your house. How do you do, Mr. Eden?"
I was a little astonished at his familiar address, for I had never set
eyes on the man before. I was a little annoyed, too, at his catching me
with my boots under my arm. He noticed my lack of cordiality.
"Wonder who the deuce I am, eh? A friend, let me assure you. I have seen
you before, though you haven't seen me. Is there anywhere where I can talk
to you?"
I hesitated. The shabbiness of my room upstairs was not a matter for every
stranger. "Perhaps," said I, "we might walk down the street. I'm
unfortunately prevented--" My gesture explained the sentence before I had
spoken it.
"The very thing," he said, and faced this way, and then that. "The street?
Which way shall we go?" I slipped my boots down in the passage. "Look
here!" he said abruptly; "this business of mine is a rigmarole. Come and
lunch with me, Mr. Eden. I'm an old man, a very old man, and not good at
explanations, and what with my piping voice and the clatter of the
traffic----"
He laid a persuasive skinny hand that trembled a little upon my arm.
I was not so old that an old man might not treat me to a lunch. Yet at the
same time I was not altogether pleased by this abrupt invitation. "I had
rather----" I began. "But I had rather," he said, catching me up, "and a
certain civility is surely due to my grey hairs."
And so I consented, and went with him.
He took me to Blavitiski's; I had to walk slowly to accommodate myself to
his paces; and over such a lunch as I had never tasted before, he fended
off my leading question, and I took a better note of his appearance. His
clean-shaven face was lean and wrinkled, his shrivelled, lips fell over a
set of false teeth, and his white hair was thin and rather long; he seemed
small to me,--though indeed, most people seemed small to me,--and his
shoulders were rounded and bent. And watching him, I could not help but
observe that he too was taking note of me, running his eyes, with a
curious touch of greed in them, over me, from my broad shoulders to my
suntanned hands, and up to my freckled face again. "And now," said he, as
we lit our cigarettes, "I must tell you of the business in hand.
"I must tell you, then, that I am an old man, a very old man." He paused
momentarily. "And it happens that I have money that I must presently be
leaving, and never a child have I to leave it to." I thought of the
confidence trick, and resolved I would be on the alert for the vestiges of
my five hundred pounds. He proceeded to enlarge on his loneliness, and the
trouble he had to find a proper disposition of his money. "I have weighed
this plan and that plan, charities, institutions, and scholarships, and
libraries, and I have come to this conclusion at last,"--he fixed his eyes
on my face,--"that I will find some young fellow, ambitious, pure-minded,
and poor, healthy in body and healthy in mind, and, in short, make him my
heir, give him all that I have." He repeated, "Give him all that I have.
So that he will suddenly be lifted out of all the trouble and struggle in
which his sympathies have been educated, to freedom and influence."
I tried to seem disinterested. With a transparent hypocrisy I said, "And
you want my help, my professional services maybe, to find that person."
He smiled, and looked at me over his cigarette, and I laughed at his quiet
exposure of my modest pretence.
"What a career such a man might have!" he said. "It fills me with envy to
think how I have accumulated that another man may spend----
"But there are conditions, of course, burdens to be imposed. He must, for
instance, take my name. You cannot expect everything without some return.
And I must go into all the circumstances of his life before I can accept
him. He _must_ be sound. I must know his heredity, how his parents
and grandparents died, have the strictest inquiries made into his private
morals."
This modified my secret congratulations a little.
"And do I understand," said I, "that I----"
"Yes," he said, almost fiercely. "You. _You_."
I answered never a word. My imagination was dancing wildly, my innate
scepticism was useless to modify its transports. There was not a particle
of gratitude in my mind--I did not know what to say nor how to say it.
"But why me in particular?" I said at last.
He had chanced to hear of me from Professor Haslar; he said, as a
typically sound and sane young man, and he wished, as far as possible, to
leave his money where health and integrity were assured.
That was my first meeting with the little old man. He was mysterious about
himself; he would not give his name yet, he said, and after I had answered
some questions of his, he left me at the Blavitiski portal. I noticed that
he drew a handful of gold coins from his pocket when it came to paying for
the lunch. His insistence upon bodily health was curious. In accordance
with an arrangement we had made I applied that day for a life policy in
the Loyal Insurance Company for a large sum, and I was exhaustively
overhauled by the medical advisers of that company in the subsequent week.
Even that did not satisfy him, and he insisted I must be re-examined by
the great Doctor Henderson.
It was Friday in Whitsun week before he came to a decision. He called me
down, quite late in the evening,--nearly nine it was,--from cramming
chemical equations for my Preliminary Scientific examination. He was
standing in the passage under the feeble gas-lamp, and his face was a
grotesque interplay of shadows. He seemed more bowed than when I had first
seen him, and his cheeks had sunk in a little.
His voice shook with emotion. "Everything is satisfactory, Mr. Eden," he
said. "Everything is quite, quite satisfactory. And this night of all
nights, you must dine with me and celebrate your--accession." He was
interrupted by a cough. "You won't have long to wait, either," he said,
wiping his handkerchief across his lips, and gripping my hand with his
long bony claw that was disengaged. "Certainly not very long to wait."
We went into the street and called a cab. I remember every incident of
that drive vividly, the swift, easy motion, the vivid contrast of gas and
oil and electric light, the crowds of people in the streets, the place in
Regent Street to which we went, and the sumptuous dinner we were served
with there. I was disconcerted at first by the well-dressed waiter's
glances at my rough clothes, bothered by the stones of the olives, but as
the champagne warmed my blood, my confidence revived. At first the old man
talked of himself. He had already told me his name in the cab; he was
Egbert Elvesham, the great philosopher, whose name I had known since I was
a lad at school. It seemed incredible to me that this man, whose
intelligence had so early dominated mine, this great abstraction, should
suddenly realise itself as this decrepit, familiar figure. I daresay every
young fellow who has suddenly fallen among celebrities has felt something
of my disappointment. He told me now of the future that the feeble streams
of his life would presently leave dry for me, houses, copyrights,
investments; I had never suspected that philosophers were so rich. He
watched me drink and eat with a touch of envy. "What a capacity for living
you have!" he said; and then with a sigh, a sigh of relief I could have
thought it, "it will not be long."
"Ay," said I, my head swimming now with champagne; "I have a future
perhaps--of a passing agreeable sort, thanks to you. I shall now have the
honour of your name. But you have a past. Such a past as is worth all my
future."
He shook his head and smiled, as I thought, with half sad appreciation of
my flattering admiration. "That future," he said, "would you in truth
change it?" The waiter came with liqueurs. "You will not perhaps mind
taking my name, taking my position, but would you indeed--willingly--take
my years?"
"With your achievements," said I gallantly.
He smiled again. "Kummel--both," he said to the waiter, and turned his
attention to a little paper packet he had taken from his pocket. "This
hour," said he, "this after-dinner hour is the hour of small things. Here
is a scrap of my unpublished wisdom." He opened the packet with his
shaking yellow fingers, and showed a little pinkish powder on the paper.
"This," said he--"well, you must guess what it is. But Kummel--put but a
dash of this powder in it--is Himmel."
His large greyish eyes watched mine with an inscrutable expression.
It was a bit of a shock to me to find this great teacher gave his mind to
the flavour of liqueurs. However, I feigned an interest in his weakness,
for I was drunk enough for such small sycophancy.
He parted the powder between the little glasses, and, rising suddenly,
with a strange unexpected dignity, held out his hand towards me. I
imitated his action, and the glasses rang. "To a quick succession," said
he, and raised his glass towards his lips.
"Not that," I said hastily. "Not that."
He paused with the liqueur at the level of his chin, and his eyes blazing
into mine.
"To a long life," said I.
He hesitated. "To a long life," said he, with a sudden bark of laughter,
and with eyes fixed on one another we tilted the little glasses. His eyes
looked straight into mine, and as I drained the stuff off, I felt a
curiously intense sensation. The first touch of it set my brain in a
furious tumult; I seemed to feel an actual physical stirring in my skull,
and a seething humming filled my ears. I did not notice the flavour in my
mouth, the aroma that filled my throat; I saw only the grey intensity of
his gaze that burnt into mine. The draught, the mental confusion, the
noise and stirring in my head, seemed to last an interminable time.
Curious vague impressions of half-forgotten things danced and vanished on
the edge of my consciousness. At last he broke the spell. With a sudden
explosive sigh he put down his glass.
"Well?" he said.
"It's glorious," said I, though I had not tasted the stuff.
My head was spinning. I sat down. My brain was chaos. Then my perception
grew clear and minute as though I saw things in a concave mirror. His
manner seemed to have changed into something nervous and hasty. He pulled
out his watch and grimaced at it. "Eleven-seven! And to-night I must--
Seven-twenty-five. Waterloo! I must go at once." He called for the bill,
and struggled with his coat. Officious waiters came to our assistance. In
another moment I was wishing him good-bye, over the apron of a cab, and
still with an absurd feeling of minute distinctness, as though--how can I
express it?--I not only saw but _felt_ through an inverted
opera-glass.
"That stuff," he said. He put his hand to his forehead. "I ought not to
have given it to you. It will make your head split to-morrow. Wait a
minute. Here." He handed me out a little flat thing like a seidlitz-powder.
"Take that in water as you are going to bed. The other thing was a
drug. Not till you're ready to go to bed, mind. It will clear your head.
That's all. One more shake--Futurus!"
I gripped his shrivelled claw. "Good-bye," he said, and by the droop of
his eyelids I judged he too was a little under the influence of that
brain-twisting cordial.
He recollected something else with a start, felt in his breast-pocket, and
produced another packet, this time a cylinder the size and shape of a
shaving-stick. "Here," said he. "I'd almost forgotten. Don't open this
until I come to-morrow--but take it now."
It was so heavy that I wellnigh dropped it. "All ri'!" said I, and he
grinned at me through the cab window as the cabman flicked his horse into
wakefulness. It was a white packet he had given me, with red seals at
either end and along its edge. "If this isn't money," said I, "it's
platinum or lead."
I stuck it with elaborate care into my pocket, and with a whirling brain
walked home through the Regent Street loiterers and the dark back streets
beyond Portland Road. I remember the sensations of that walk very vividly,
strange as they were. I was still so far myself that I could notice my
strange mental state, and wonder whether this stuff I had had was opium--a
drug beyond my experience. It is hard now to describe the peculiarity of
my mental strangeness--mental doubling vaguely expresses it. As I was
walking up Regent Street I found in my mind a queer persuasion that it
was Waterloo Station, and had an odd impulse to get into the Polytechnic
as a man might get into a train. I put a knuckle in my eye, and it was
Regent Street. How can I express it? You see a skilful actor looking
quietly at you, he pulls a grimace, and lo!--another person. Is it too
extravagant if I tell you that it seemed to me as if Regent Street had,
for the moment, done that? Then, being persuaded it was Regent Street
again, I was oddly muddled about some fantastic reminiscences that cropped
up. "Thirty years ago," thought I, "it was here that I quarrelled with my
brother." Then I burst out laughing, to the astonishment and encouragement
of a group of night prowlers. Thirty years ago I did not exist, and never
in my life had I boasted a brother. The stuff was surely liquid folly, for
the poignant regret for that lost brother still clung to me. Along
Portland Road the madness took another turn. I began to recall vanished
shops, and to compare the street with what it used to be. Confused,
troubled thinking is comprehensible enough after the drink I had taken,
but what puzzled me were these curiously vivid phantasm memories that had
crept into my mind, and not only the memories that had crept in, but also
the memories that had slipped out. I stopped opposite Stevens', the
natural history dealer's, and cudgelled my brains to think what he had to
do with me. A 'bus went by, and sounded exactly like the rumbling of a
train. I seemed to be dipping into some dark, remote pit for the
recollection. "Of course," said I, at last, "he has promised me three
frogs to-morrow. Odd I should have forgotten."
Do they still show children dissolving views? In those I remember one view
would begin like a faint ghost, and grow and oust another. In just that
way it seemed to me that a ghostly set of new sensations was struggling
with those of my ordinary self.
I went on through Euston Road to Tottenham Court Road, puzzled, and a
little frightened, and scarcely noticed the unusual way I was taking, for
commonly I used to cut through the intervening network of back streets. I
turned into University Street, to discover that I had forgotten my number.
Only by a strong effort did I recall 11A, and even then it seemed to me
that it was a thing some forgotten person had told me. I tried to steady
my mind by recalling the incidents of the dinner, and for the life of me I
could conjure up no picture of my host's face; I saw him only as a shadowy
outline, as one might see oneself reflected in a window through which one
was looking. In his place, however, I had a curious exterior vision of
myself, sitting at a table, flushed, bright-eyed, and talkative.
"I must take this other powder," said I. "This is getting impossible."
I tried the wrong side of the hall for my candle and the matches, and had
a doubt of which landing my room might be on. "I'm drunk," I said, "that's
certain," and blundered needlessly on the staircase to sustain the
proposition.
At the first glance my room seemed unfamiliar. "What rot!" I said, and
stared about me. I seemed to bring myself back by the effort, and the odd
phantasmal quality passed into the concrete familiar. There was the old
glass still, with my notes on the albumens stuck in the corner of the
frame, my old everyday suit of clothes pitched about the floor. And yet it
was not so real after all. I felt an idiotic persuasion trying to creep
into my mind, as it were, that I was in a railway carriage in a train just
stopping, that I was peering out of the window at some unknown station. I
gripped the bed-rail firmly to reassure myself. "It's clairvoyance,
perhaps," I said. "I must write to the Psychical Research Society."
I put the rouleau on my dressing-table, sat on my bed, and began to take
off my boots. It was as if the picture of my present sensations was
painted over some other picture that was trying to show through. "Curse
it!" said I; "my wits are going, or am I in two places at once?"
Half-undressed, I tossed the powder into a glass and drank it off. It
effervesced, and became a fluorescent amber colour. Before I was in bed
my mind was already tranquillised. I felt the pillow at my cheek, and
thereupon I must have fallen asleep.
* * * * *
I awoke abruptly out of a dream of strange beasts, and found myself lying
on my back. Probably every one knows that dismal, emotional dream from
which one escapes, awake indeed, but strangely cowed. There was a curious
taste in my mouth, a tired feeling in my limbs, a sense of cutaneous
discomfort. I lay with my head motionless on my pillow, expecting that my
feeling of strangeness and terror would pass away, and that I should then
doze off again to sleep. But instead of that, my uncanny sensations
increased. At first I could perceive nothing wrong about me. There was a
faint light in the room, so faint that it was the very next thing to
darkness, and the furniture stood out in it as vague blots of absolute
darkness. I stared with my eyes just over the bedclothes.
It came into my mind that some one had entered the room to rob me of my
rouleau of money, but after lying for some moments, breathing regularly to
simulate sleep, I realised this was mere fancy. Nevertheless, the uneasy
assurance of something wrong kept fast hold of me. With an effort I raised
my head from the pillow, and peered about me at the dark. What it was I
could not conceive. I looked at the dim shapes around me, the greater and
lesser darknesses that indicated curtains, table, fireplace, bookshelves,
and so forth. Then I began to perceive something unfamiliar in the forms
of the darkness. Had the bed turned round? Yonder should be the
bookshelves, and something shrouded and pallid rose there, something that
would not answer to the bookshelves, however I looked at it. It was far
too big to be my shirt thrown on a chair.