ordinary ants except for their size, and for the fact that some of the
larger of them bore a sort of clothing of grey. But at the time his
inspection was too brief for particulars. The head of Lieutenant da Cunha
appeared over the side of the cuberta, and a brief colloquy ensued.
"You must go aboard," said Gerilleau.
The lieutenant objected that the boat was full of ants.
"You have your boots," said Gerilleau.
The lieutenant changed the subject. "How did these men die?" he asked.
Captain Gerilleau embarked upon speculations that Holroyd could not
follow, and the two men disputed with a certain increasing vehemence.
Holroyd took up the field-glass and resumed his scrutiny, first of the
ants and then of the dead man amidships.
He has described these ants to me very particularly.
He says they were as large as any ants he has ever seen, black and moving
with a steady deliberation very different from the mechanical fussiness of
the common ant. About one in twenty was much larger than its fellows, and
with an exceptionally large head. These reminded him at once of the master
workers who are said to rule over the leaf-cutter ants; like them they
seemed to be directing and co-ordinating the general movements. They
tilted their bodies back in a manner altogether singular as if they made
some use of the fore feet. And he had a curious fancy that he was too far
off to verify, that most of these ants of both kinds were wearing
accoutrements, had things strapped about their bodies by bright white
bands like white metal threads...
He put down the glasses abruptly, realising that the question of
discipline between the captain and his subordinate had become acute.
"It is your duty," said the captain, "to go aboard. It is my
instructions."
The lieutenant seemed on the verge of refusing. The head of one of the
mulatto sailors appeared beside him.
"I believe these men were killed by the ants," said Holroyd abruptly in
English.
The captain burst into a rage. He made no answer to Holroyd. "I have
commanded you to go aboard," he screamed to his subordinate in Portuguese.
"If you do not go aboard forthwith it is mutiny--rank mutiny. Mutiny and
cowardice! Where is the courage that should animate us? I will have you in
irons, I will have you shot like a dog." He began a torrent of abuse and
curses, he danced to and fro. He shook his fists, he behaved as if beside
himself with rage, and the lieutenant, white and still, stood looking at
him. The crew appeared forward, with amazed faces.
Suddenly, in a pause of this outbreak, the lieutenant came to some heroic
decision, saluted, drew himself together and clambered upon the deck of
the cuberta.
"Ah!" said Gerilleau, and his mouth shut like a trap. Holroyd saw the ants
retreating before da Cunha's boots. The Portuguese walked slowly to the
fallen man, stooped down, hesitated, clutched his coat and turned him
over. A black swarm of ants rushed out of the clothes, and da Cunha
stepped back very quickly and trod two or three times on the deck.
Holroyd put up the glasses. He saw the scattered ants about the invader's
feet, and doing what he had never seen ants doing before. They had nothing
of the blind movements of the common ant; they were looking at him--as a
rallying crowd of men might look at some gigantic monster that had
dispersed it.
"How did he die?" the captain shouted.
Holroyd understood the Portuguese to say the body was too much eaten to
tell.
"What is there forward?" asked Gerilleau.
The lieutenant walked a few paces, and began his answer in Portuguese. He
stopped abruptly and beat off something from his leg. He made some
peculiar steps as if he was trying to stamp on something invisible, and
went quickly towards the side. Then he controlled himself, turned about,
walked deliberately forward to the hold, clambered up to the fore decking,
from which the sweeps are worked, stooped for a time over the second man,
groaned audibly, and made his way back and aft to the cabin, moving very
rigidly. He turned and began a conversation with his captain, cold and
respectful in tone on either side, contrasting vividly with the wrath and
insult of a few moments before. Holroyd gathered only fragments of its
purport.
He reverted to the field-glass, and was surprised to find the ants had
vanished from all the exposed surfaces of the deck. He turned towards the
shadows beneath the decking, and it seemed to him they were full of
watching eyes.
The cuberta, it was agreed; was derelict, but too full of ants to put men
aboard to sit and sleep: it must be towed. The lieutenant went forward to
take in and adjust the cable, and the men in the boat stood up to be ready
to help him. Holroyd's glasses searched the canoe.
He became more and more impressed by the fact that a great if minute and
furtive activity was going on. He perceived that a number of gigantic
ants--they seemed nearly a couple of inches in length--carrying
oddly-shaped burthens for which he could imagine no use--were moving in
rushes from one point of obscurity to another. They did not move in columns
across the exposed places, but in open, spaced-out lines, oddly suggestive
of the rushes of modern infantry advancing under fire. A number were
taking cover under the dead man's clothes, and a perfect swarm was
gathering along the side over which da Cunha must presently go.
He did not see them actually rush for the lieutenant as he returned, but
he has no doubt they did make a concerted rush. Suddenly the lieutenant
was shouting and cursing and beating at his legs. "I'm stung!" he shouted,
with a face of hate and accusation towards Gerilleau.
Then he vanished over the side, dropped into his boat, and plunged at once
into the water. Holroyd heard the splash.
The three men in the boat pulled him out and brought him aboard, and that
night he died.
III.
Holroyd and the captain came out of the cabin in which the swollen and
contorted body of the lieutenant lay and stood together at the stern of
the monitor, staring at the sinister vessel they trailed behind them. It
was a close, dark night that had only phantom flickerings of sheet
lightning to illuminate it. The cuberta, a vague black triangle, rocked
about in the steamer's wake, her sails bobbing and flapping, and the black
smoke from the funnels, spark-lit ever and again, streamed over her
swaying masts.
Gerilleau's mind was inclined to run on the unkind things the lieutenant
had said in the heat of his last fever.
"He says I murdered 'im," he protested. "It is simply absurd. Someone
_'ad_ to go aboard. Are we to run away from these confounded ants
whenever they show up?"
Holroyd said nothing. He was thinking of a disciplined rush of little
black shapes across bare sunlit planking.
"It was his place to go," harped Gerilleau. "He died in the execution of
his duty. What has he to complain of? Murdered!... But the poor fellow
was--what is it?--demented. He was not in his right mind. The poison
swelled him... U'm."
They came to a long silence.
"We will sink that canoe--burn it."
"And then?"
The inquiry irritated Gerilleau. His shoulders went up, his hands flew out
at right angles from his body. "What is one to _do?_" he said, his
voice going up to an angry squeak.
"Anyhow," he broke out vindictively, "every ant in dat cuberta!--I will
burn dem alive!"
Holroyd was not moved to conversation. A distant ululation of howling
monkeys filled the sultry night with foreboding sounds, and as the gunboat
drew near the black mysterious banks this was reinforced by a depressing
clamour of frogs.
"What is one to _do?_" the captain repeated after a vast interval,
and suddenly becoming active and savage and blasphemous, decided to burn
the _Santa Rosa_ without further delay. Everyone aboard was pleased
by that idea, everyone helped with zest; they pulled in the cable, cut it,
and dropped the boat and fired her with tow and kerosene, and soon the
cuberta was crackling and flaring merrily amidst the immensities of the
tropical night. Holroyd watched the mounting yellow flare against the
blackness, and the livid flashes of sheet lightning that came and went
above the forest summits, throwing them into momentary silhouette, and his
stoker stood behind him watching also.
The stoker was stirred to the depths of his linguistics. "_Saüba_ go
pop, pop," he said, "Wahaw" and laughed richly.
But Holroyd was thinking that these little creatures on the decked canoe
had also eyes and brains.
The whole thing impressed him as incredibly foolish and wrong, but--what
was one to _do_? This question came back enormously reinforced on the
morrow, when at last the gunboat reached Badama.
This place, with its leaf-thatch-covered houses and sheds, its
creeper-invaded sugar-mill, its little jetty of timber and canes, was very
still in the morning heat, and showed never a sign of living men. Whatever
ants there were at that distance were too small to see.
"All the people have gone," said Gerilleau, "but we will do one thing
anyhow. We will 'oot and vissel."
So Holroyd hooted and whistled.
Then the captain fell into a doubting fit of the worst kind. "Dere is one
thing we can do," he said presently, "What's that?" said Holroyd.
"'Oot and vissel again."
So they did.
The captain walked his deck and gesticulated to himself. He seemed to have
many things on his mind. Fragments of speeches came from his lips. He
appeared to be addressing some imaginary public tribunal either in Spanish
or Portuguese. Holroyd's improving ear detected something about
ammunition. He came out of these preoccupations suddenly into English. "My
dear 'Olroyd!" he cried, and broke off with "But what _can_ one do?"
They took the boat and the field-glasses, and went close in to examine the
place. They made out a number of big ants, whose still postures had a
certain effect of watching them, dotted about the edge of the rude
embarkation jetty. Gerilleau tried ineffectual pistol shots at these.
Holroyd thinks he distinguished curious earthworks running between the
nearer houses, that may have been the work of the insect conquerors of
those human habitations. The explorers pulled past the jetty, and became
aware of a human skeleton wearing a loin cloth, and very bright and clean
and shining, lying beyond. They came to a pause regarding this...
"I 'ave all dose lives to consider," said Gerilleau suddenly.
Holroyd turned and stared at the captain, realising slowly that he
referred to the unappetising mixture of races that constituted his crew.
"To send a landing party--it is impossible--impossible. They will be
poisoned, they will swell, they will swell up and abuse me and die. It is
totally impossible... If we land, I must land alone, alone, in thick
boots and with my life in my hand. Perhaps I should live. Or again--I
might not land. I do not know. I do not know."
Holroyd thought he did, but he said nothing.
"De whole thing," said Gerilleau suddenly, "'as been got up to make me
ridiculous. De whole thing!"
They paddled about and regarded the clean white skeleton from various
points of view, and then they returned to the gunboat. Then Gerilleau's
indecisions became terrible. Steam was got up, and in the afternoon the
monitor went on up the river with an air of going to ask somebody
something, and by sunset came back again and anchored. A thunderstorm
gathered and broke furiously, and then the night became beautifully cool
and quiet and everyone slept on deck. Except Gerilleau, who tossed about
and muttered. In the dawn he awakened Holroyd.
"Lord!" said Holroyd, "what now?"
"I have decided," said the captain.
"What--to land?" said Holroyd, sitting up brightly.
"No!" said the captain, and was for a time very reserved. "I have
decided," he repeated, and Holroyd manifested symptoms of impatience.
"Well,--yes," said the captain, "_I shall fire de big gun!_"
And he did! Heaven knows what the ants thought of it, but he did. He fired
it twice with great sternness and ceremony. All the crew had wadding in
their ears, and there was an effect of going into action about the whole
affair, and first they hit and wrecked the old sugar-mill, and then they
smashed the abandoned store behind the jetty. And then Gerilleau
experienced the inevitable reaction.
"It is no good," he said to Holroyd; "no good at all. No sort of bally
good. We must go back--for instructions. Dere will be de devil of a row
about dis ammunition--oh! de _devil_ of a row! You don't know,
'Olroyd..."
He stood regarding the world in infinite perplexity for a space.
"But what else was there to _do?_" he cried.
In the afternoon the monitor started down stream again, and in the evening
a landing party took the body of the lieutenant and buried it on the bank
upon which the new ants have so far not appeared...
IV.
I heard this story in a fragmentary state from Holroyd not three weeks
ago.
These new ants have got into his brain, and he has come back to England
with the idea, as he says, of "exciting people" about them "before it is
too late." He says they threaten British Guiana, which cannot be much over
a trifle of a thousand miles from their present sphere of activity, and
that the Colonial Office ought to get to work upon them at once. He
declaims with great passion: "These are intelligent ants. Just think what
that means!"
There can be no doubt they are a serious pest, and that the Brazilian
Government is well advised in offering a prize of five hundred pounds for
some effectual method of extirpation. It is certain too that since they
first appeared in the hills beyond Badama, about three years ago, they
have achieved extraordinary conquests. The whole of the south bank of the
Batemo River, for nearly sixty miles, they have in their effectual
occupation; they have driven men out completely, occupied plantations and
settlements, and boarded and captured at least one ship. It is even said
they have in some inexplicable way bridged the very considerable Capuarana
arm and pushed many miles towards the Amazon itself. There can be little
doubt that they are far more reasonable and with a far better social
organisation than any previously known ant species; instead of being in
dispersed societies they are organised into what is in effect a single
nation; but their peculiar and immediate formidableness lies not so much
in this as in the intelligent use they make of poison against their larger
enemies. It would seem this poison of theirs is closely akin to snake
poison, and it is highly probable they actually manufacture it, and that
the larger individuals among them carry the needle-like crystals of it in
their attacks upon men.
Of course it is extremely difficult to get any detailed information about
these new competitors for the sovereignty of the globe. No eye-witnesses
of their activity, except for such glimpses as Holroyd's, have survived
the encounter. The most extraordinary legends of their prowess and
capacity are in circulation in the region of the Upper Amazon, and grow
daily as the steady advance of the invader stimulates men's imaginations
through their fears. These strange little creatures are credited not only
with the use of implements and a knowledge of fire and metals and with
organised feats of engineering that stagger our northern minds--unused as
we are to such feats as that of the Saübas of Rio de Janeiro, who in 1841
drove a tunnel under the Parahyba where it is as wide as the Thames at
London Bridge--but with an organised and detailed method of record and
communication analogous to our books. So far their action has been a
steady progressive settlement, involving the flight or slaughter of every
human being in the new areas they invade. They are increasing rapidly in
numbers, and Holroyd at least is firmly convinced that they will finally
dispossess man over the whole of tropical South America.
And why should they stop at tropical South America?
Well, there they are, anyhow. By 1911 or thereabouts, if they go on as
they are going, they ought to strike the Capuarana Extension Railway, and
force themselves upon the attention of the European capitalist.
By 1920 they will be half-way down the Amazon. I fix 1950 or '60 at the
latest for the discovery of Europe.
XXXI.
THE DOOR IN THE WALL.
I.
One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me
this story of the Door in the Wall. And at the time I thought that so far
as he was concerned it was a true story.
He told it me with such a direct simplicity of conviction that I could not
do otherwise than believe in him. But in the morning, in my own flat, I
woke to a different atmosphere, and as I lay in bed and recalled the
things he had told me, stripped of the glamour of his earnest slow voice,
denuded of the focussed, shaded table light, the shadowy atmosphere that
wrapped about him and me, and the pleasant bright things, the dessert and
glasses and napery of the dinner we had shared, making them for the time a
bright little world quite cut off from everyday realities, I saw it all as
frankly incredible. "He was mystifying!" I said, and then: "How well he
did it!... It isn't quite the thing I should have expected him, of all
people, to do well."
Afterwards as I sat up in bed and sipped my morning tea, I found myself
trying to account for the flavour of reality that perplexed me in his
impossible reminiscences, by supposing they did in some way suggest,
present, convey--I hardly know which word to use--experiences it was
otherwise impossible to tell.
Well, I don't resort to that explanation now. I have got over my
intervening doubts. I believe now, as I believed at the moment of telling,
that Wallace did to the very best of his ability strip the truth of his
secret for me. But whether he himself saw, or only thought he saw, whether
he himself was the possessor of an inestimable privilege or the victim of
a fantastic dream, I cannot pretend to guess. Even the facts of his death,
which ended my doubts for ever, throw no light on that.
That much the reader must judge for himself.
I forget now what chance comment or criticism of mine moved so reticent a
man to confide in me. He was, I think, defending himself against an
imputation of slackness and unreliability I had made in relation to a
great public movement, in which he had disappointed me. But he plunged
suddenly. "I have," he said, "a preoccupation----
"I know," he went on, after a pause, "I have been negligent. The fact is--
it isn't a case of ghosts or apparitions--but--it's an odd thing to tell
of, Redmond--I am haunted. I am haunted by something--that rather takes
the light out of things, that fills me with longings..."
He paused, checked by that English shyness that so often overcomes us when
we would speak of moving or grave or beautiful things. "You were at Saint
Aethelstan's all through," he said, and for a moment that seemed to me
quite irrelevant. "Well"--and he paused. Then very haltingly at first, but
afterwards more easily, he began to tell of the thing that was hidden in
his life, the haunting memory of a beauty and a happiness that filled his
heart with insatiable longings, that made all the interests and spectacle
of worldly life seem dull and tedious and vain to him.
Now that I have the clue to it, the thing seems written visibly in his
face. I have a photograph in which that look of detachment has been caught
and intensified. It reminds me of what a woman once said of him--a woman
who had loved him greatly. "Suddenly," she said, "the interest goes out of
him. He forgets you. He doesn't care a rap for you--under his very
nose..."
Yet the interest was not always out of him, and when he was holding his
attention to a thing Wallace could contrive to be an extremely successful
man. His career, indeed, is set with successes. He left me behind him long
ago: he soared up over my head, and cut a figure in the world that I
couldn't cut--anyhow. He was still a year short of forty, and they say now
that he would have been in office and very probably in the new Cabinet if
he had lived. At school he always beat me without effort--as it were by
nature. We were at school together at Saint Aethelstan's College in West
Kensington for almost all our school-time. He came into the school as my
coequal, but he left far above me, in a blaze of scholarships and
brilliant performance. Yet I think I made a fair average running. And it
was at school I heard first of the "Door in the Wall"--that I was to hear
of a second time only a month before his death.
To him at least the Door in the Wall was a real door, leading through a
real wall to immortal realities. Of that I am now quite assured.
And it came into his life quite early, when he was a little fellow between
five and six. I remember how, as he sat making his confession to me with a
slow gravity, he reasoned and reckoned the date of it. "There was," he
said, "a crimson Virginia creeper in it--all one bright uniform crimson,
in a clear amber sunshine against a white wall. That came into the
impression somehow, though I don't clearly remember how, and there were
horse-chestnut leaves upon the clean pavement outside the green door. They
were blotched yellow and green, you know, not brown nor dirty, so that
they must have been new fallen. I take it that means October. I look out
for horse-chestnut leaves every year and I ought to know.
"If I'm right in that, I was about five years and four months old."
He was, he said, rather a precocious little boy--he learnt to talk at an
abnormally early age, and he was so sane and "old-fashioned," as people
say, that he was permitted an amount of initiative that most children
scarcely attain by seven or eight. His mother died when he was two, and he
was under the less vigilant and authoritative care of a nursery governess.
His father was a stern, preoccupied lawyer, who gave him little attention,
and expected great things of him. For all his brightness he found life a
little grey and dull, I think. And one day he wandered.
He could not recall the particular neglect that enabled him to get away,
nor the course he took among the West Kensington roads. All that had faded
among the incurable blurs of memory. But the white wall and the green door
stood out quite distinctly.
As his memory of that childish experience ran, he did at the very first
sight of that door experience a peculiar emotion, an attraction, a desire
to get to the door and open it and walk in. And at the same time he had
the clearest conviction that either it was unwise or it was wrong of him--
he could not tell which--to yield to this attraction. He insisted upon it
as a curious thing that he knew from the very beginning--unless memory has
played him the queerest trick--that the door was unfastened, and that he
could go in as he chose.
I seem to see the figure of that little boy, drawn and repelled. And it
was very clear in his mind, too, though why it should be so was never
explained, that his father would be very angry if he went in through that
door.
Wallace described all these moments of hesitation to me with the utmost
particularity. He went right past the door, and then, with his hands in
his pockets and making an infantile attempt to whistle, strolled right
along beyond the end of the wall. There he recalls a number of mean dirty
shops, and particularly that of a plumber and decorator with a dusty
disorder of earthenware pipes, sheet lead, ball taps, pattern books of
wall paper, and tins of enamel. He stood pretending to examine these
things, and _coveting_, passionately desiring, the green door.
Then, he said, he had a gust of emotion. He made a run for it, lest
hesitation should grip him again; he went plump with outstretched hand
through the green door and let it slam behind him. And so, in a trice, he
came into the garden that has haunted all his life.
It was very difficult for Wallace to give me his full sense of that garden
into which he came.
There was something in the very air of it that exhilarated, that gave one
a sense of lightness and good happening and well-being; there was
something in the sight of it that made all its colour clean and perfect
and subtly luminous. In the instant of coming into it one was exquisitely
glad--as only in rare moments, and when one is young and joyful one can be
glad in this world. And everything was beautiful there...