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
shillingsworth.
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 gray 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 gray 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 sun-tanned 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 dare say 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 grayish 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 gray 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’s, 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.
Overcoming a childish terror, I threw back the bedclothes and thrust my
leg out of bed. Instead of coming out of my truckle-bed upon the floor,
I found my foot scarcely reached the edge of the mattress. I made
another step, as it were, and sat up on the edge of the bed. By the
side of my bed should be the candle, and the matches upon the broken
chair. I put out my hand and touched--nothing. I waved my hand in the
darkness, and it came against some heavy hanging, soft and thick in
texture, which gave a rustling noise at my touch. I grasped this and
pulled it; it appeared to be a curtain suspended over the head of my
bed.
I was now thoroughly awake, and beginning to realise that I was
in a strange room. I was puzzled. I tried to recall the overnight
circumstances, and I found them now, curiously enough, vivid in my
memory: the supper, my reception of the little packages, my wonder
whether I was intoxicated, my slow undressing, the coolness to my
flushed face of my pillow. I felt a sudden distrust. Was that last
night, or the night before? At any rate, this room was strange to
me, and I could not imagine how I had got into it. The dim, pallid
outline was growing paler, and I perceived it was a window, with the
dark shape of an oval toilet-glass against the weak intimation of the
dawn that filtered through the blind. I stood up, and was surprised
by a curious feeling of weakness and unsteadiness. With trembling
hands outstretched, I walked slowly towards the window, getting,
nevertheless, a bruise on the knee from a chair by the way. I fumbled
round the glass, which was large, with handsome brass sconces, to find
the blind-cord. I could not find any. By chance I took hold of the
tassel, and with the click of a spring the blind ran up.
I found myself looking out upon a scene that was altogether strange
to me. The night was overcast, and through the flocculent gray of the
heaped clouds there filtered a faint half-light of dawn. Just at the
edge of the sky the cloud-canopy had a blood-red rim. Below, everything
was dark and indistinct, dim hills in the distance, a vague mass of
buildings running up into pinnacles, trees like spilt ink, and below
the window a tracery of black bushes and pale gray paths. It was so
unfamiliar that for the moment I thought myself still dreaming. I felt
the toilet-table; it appeared to be made of some polished wood, and was
rather elaborately furnished--there were little cut-glass bottles and a
brush upon it. There was also a queer little object, horse-shoe shape
it felt, with smooth, hard projections, lying in a saucer. I could find
no matches nor candlestick.
I turned my eyes to the room again. Now the blind was up, faint
spectres of its furnishing came out of the darkness. There was a huge
curtained bed, and the fireplace at its foot had a large white mantel
with something of the shimmer of marble.
I leant against the toilet-table, shut my eyes and opened them again,
and tried to think. The whole thing was far too real for dreaming. I
was inclined to imagine there was still some hiatus in my memory, as a
consequence of my draught of that strange liqueur; that I had come into
my inheritance perhaps, and suddenly lost my recollection of everything
since my good fortune had been announced. Perhaps if I waited a
little, things would be clearer to me again. Yet my dinner with old
Elvesham was now singularly vivid and recent. The champagne, the
observant waiters, the powder, and the liqueurs--I could have staked my
soul it all happened a few hours ago.
And then occurred a thing so trivial and yet so terrible to me that I
shiver now to think of that moment. I spoke aloud. I said, ‘How the
devil did I get here?’ ... _And the voice was not my own._
It was not my own, it was thin, the articulation was slurred, the
resonance of my facial bones was different. Then, to reassure myself
I ran one hand over the other, and felt loose folds of skin, the
bony laxity of age. ‘Surely,’ I said, in that horrible voice that
had somehow established itself in my throat, ‘surely this thing is a
dream!’ Almost as quickly as if I did it involuntarily, I thrust my
fingers into my mouth. My teeth had gone. My finger-tips ran on the
flaccid surface of an even row of shrivelled gums. I was sick with
dismay and disgust.
I felt then a passionate desire to see myself, to realise at once in
its full horror the ghastly change that had come upon me. I tottered to
the mantel, and felt along it for matches. As I did so, a barking cough
sprang up in my throat, and I clutched the thick flannel nightdress I
found about me. There were no matches there, and I suddenly realised
that my extremities were cold. Sniffing and coughing, whimpering a
little, perhaps, I fumbled back to bed. ‘It is surely a dream,’ I
whispered to myself as I clambered back, ‘surely a dream.’ It was a
senile repetition. I pulled the bedclothes over my shoulders, over my
ears, I thrust my withered hand under the pillow, and determined to
compose myself to sleep. Of course it was a dream. In the morning the
dream would be over, and I should wake up strong and vigorous again to
my youth and studies. I shut my eyes, breathed regularly, and, finding
myself wakeful, began to count slowly through the powers of three.
But the thing I desired would not come. I could not get to sleep.
And the persuasion of the inexorable reality of the change that had
happened to me grew steadily. Presently I found myself with my eyes
wide open, the powers of three forgotten, and my skinny fingers upon
my shrivelled gums. I was, indeed, suddenly and abruptly, an old man.
I had in some unaccountable manner fallen through my life and come to
old age, in some way I had been cheated of all the best of my life, of
love, of struggle, of strength, and hope. I grovelled into the pillow
and tried to persuade myself that such hallucination was possible.
Imperceptibly, steadily, the dawn grew clearer.
At last, despairing of further sleep, I sat up in bed and looked
about me. A chill twilight rendered the whole chamber visible. It
was spacious and well-furnished, better furnished than any room I
had ever slept in before. A candle and matches became dimly visible
upon a little pedestal in a recess. I threw back the bedclothes,
and, shivering with the rawness of the early morning, albeit it was
summer-time, I got out and lit the candle. Then, trembling horribly,
so that the extinguisher rattled on its spike--I tottered to the glass
and saw--_Elvesham’s face_! It was none the less horrible because I
had already dimly feared as much. He had already seemed physically
weak and pitiful to me, but seen now, dressed only in a course flannel
nightdress, that fell apart and showed the stringy neck, seen now as
my own body, I cannot describe its desolate decrepitude. The hollow
cheeks, the straggling tail of dirty gray hair, the rheumy bleared
eyes, the quivering, shrivelled lips, the lower displaying a gleam of
the pink interior lining, and those horrible dark gums showing. You
who are mind and body together, at your natural years, cannot imagine
what this fiendish imprisonment meant to me. To be young and full of
the desire and energy of youth, and to be caught, and presently to be
crushed in this tottering ruin of a body....
But I wander from the course of my story. For some time I must have
been stunned at this change that had come upon me. It was daylight when
I did so far gather myself together as to think. In some inexplicable
way I had been changed, though how, short of magic, the thing had been
done, I could not say. And as I thought, the diabolical ingenuity of
Elvesham came home to me. It seemed plain to me that as I found myself
in his, so he must be in possession of _my_ body, of my strength, that
is, and my future. But how to prove it? Then, as I thought, the thing
became so incredible, even to me, that my mind reeled, and I had to
pinch myself, to feel my toothless gums, to see myself in the glass,
and touch the things about me, before I could steady myself to face the
facts again. Was all life hallucination? Was I indeed Elvesham, and he
me? Had I been dreaming of Eden overnight? Was there any Eden? But if
I was Elvesham, I should remember where I was on the previous morning,
the name of the town in which I lived, what happened before the dream
began. I struggled with my thoughts. I recalled the queer doubleness of
my memories overnight. But now my mind was clear. Not the ghost of any
memories but those proper to Eden could I raise.
‘This way lies insanity!’ I cried in my piping voice. I staggered to my
feet, dragged my feeble, heavy limbs to the washhand-stand, and plunged
my gray head into a basin of cold water. Then, towelling myself, I
tried again. It was no good. I felt beyond all question that I was
indeed Eden, not Elvesham. But Eden in Elvesham’s body!
Had I been a man of any other age, I might have given myself up to my
fate as one enchanted. But in these sceptical days miracles do not pass
current. Here was some trick of psychology. What a drug and a steady
stare could do, a drug and a steady stare, or some similar treatment,
could surely undo. Men have lost their memories before. But to exchange
memories as one does umbrellas! I laughed. Alas! not a healthy laugh,
but a wheezing, senile titter. I could have fancied old Elvesham
laughing at my plight, and a gust of petulant anger, unusual to me,
swept across my feelings. I began dressing eagerly in the clothes I
found lying about on the floor, and only realised when I was dressed
that it was an evening suit I had assumed. I opened the wardrobe
and found some more ordinary clothes, a pair of plaid trousers, and
an old-fashioned dressing-gown. I put a venerable smoking-cap on my
venerable head, and, coughing a little from my exertions, tottered out
upon the landing.
It was then, perhaps, a quarter to six, and the blinds were closely
drawn and the house quite silent. The landing was a spacious one, a
broad, richly-carpeted staircase went down into the darkness of the
hall below, and before me a door ajar showed me a writing-desk, a
revolving bookcase, the back of a study chair, and a fine array of
bound books, shelf upon shelf.
‘My study,’ I mumbled, and walked across the landing. Then at the sound
of my voice a thought struck me, and I went back to the bedroom and put
in the set of false teeth. They slipped in with the ease of old habit.
‘That’s better,’ said I, gnashing them, and so returned to the study.
The drawers of the writing-desk were locked. Its revolving top was also
locked. I could see no indications of the keys and there were none in
the pockets of my trousers. I shuffled back at once to the bedroom,
and went through the dress-suit, and afterwards the pockets of all the
garments I could find. I was very eager, and one might have imagined
that burglars had been at work, to see my room when I had done. Not
only were there no keys to be found, but not a coin, nor a scrap of
paper--save only the receipted bill of the overnight dinner.
A curious weariness asserted itself. I sat down and stared at the
garments flung here and there, their pockets turned inside out. My
first frenzy had already flickered out. Every moment I was beginning
to realise the immense intelligence of the plans of my enemy, to see
more and more clearly the hopelessness of my position. With an effort I
rose and hurried hobbling into the study again. On the staircase was a
housemaid pulling up the blinds. She stared, I think, at the expression
of my face. I shut the door of the study behind me, and, seizing a
poker, began an attack upon the desk. That is how they found me. The
cover of the desk was split, the lock smashed, the letters torn out of
the pigeon-holes and tossed about the room. In my senile rage I had
flung about the pens and other such light stationery, and overturned
the ink. Moreover, a large vase upon the mantel had got broken--I do
not know how. I could find no cheque-book, no money, no indications of
the slightest use for the recovery of my body. I was battering madly at
the drawers, when the butler, backed by two women-servants, intruded
upon me.
That simply is the story of my change. No one will believe my frantic
assertions. I am treated as one demented, and even at this moment I
am under restraint. But I am sane, absolutely sane, and to prove it I
have sat down to write this story minutely as the things happened to
me. I appeal to the reader, whether there is any trace of insanity in
the style or method of the story he has been reading. I am a young man
locked away in an old man’s body. But the clear fact is incredible to
every one. Naturally I appear demented to those who will not believe
this, naturally I do not know the names of my secretaries, of the
doctors who come to see me, of my servants and neighbours, of this
town (wherever it is) where I find myself. Naturally I lose myself in
my own house, and suffer inconveniences of every sort. Naturally I ask
the oddest questions. Naturally I weep and cry out, and have paroxysms
of despair. I have no money and no cheque-book. The bank will not
recognise my signature, for I suppose that, allowing for the feeble
muscles I now have, my handwriting is still Eden’s. These people about
me will not let me go to the bank personally. It seems, indeed, that
there is no bank in this town, and that I have an account in some part
of London. It seems that Elvesham kept the name of his solicitor secret
from all his household. I can ascertain nothing. Elvesham was, of
course, a profound student of mental science, and all my declarations
of the facts of the case merely confirm the theory that my insanity
is the outcome of overmuch brooding upon psychology. Dreams of the
personal identity indeed! Two days ago I was a healthy youngster, with
all life before me; now I am a furious old man, unkempt, and desperate,
and miserable, prowling about a great, luxurious, strange house,
watched, feared, and avoided as a lunatic by every one about me. And in
London is Elvesham beginning life again in a vigorous body, and with
all the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of threescore and ten. He has
stolen my life.
What has happened I do not clearly know. In the study are volumes
of manuscript notes referring chiefly to the psychology of memory,
and parts of what may be either calculations or ciphers in symbols
absolutely strange to me. In some passages there are indications that
he was also occupied with the philosophy of mathematics. I take it he
has transferred the whole of his memories, the accumulation that makes
up his personality, from this old withered brain of his to mine, and,
similarly, that he has transferred mine to his discarded tenement.
Practically, that is, he has changed bodies. But how such a change
may be possible is without the range of my philosophy. I have been a
materialist for all my thinking life, but here, suddenly, is a clear
case of man’s detachability from matter.
One desperate experiment I am about to try. I sit writing here
before putting the matter to issue. This morning, with the help
of a table-knife that I had secreted at breakfast, I succeeded
in breaking open a fairly obvious secret drawer in this wrecked
writing-desk. I discovered nothing save a little green glass phial
containing a white powder. Round the neck of the phial was a label,
and thereon was written this one word, ‘_Release_.’ This may be--is
most probably--poison. I can understand Elvesham placing poison in
my way, and I should be sure that it was his intention so to get rid
of the only living witness against him, were it not for this careful
concealment. The man has practically solved the problem of immortality.
Save for the spite of chance, he will live in my body until it has
aged, and then, again, throwing aside, he will assume some other
victim’s youth and strength. When one remembers his heartlessness, it
is terrible to think of the ever-growing experience that.... How long
has he been leaping from body to body?... But I tire of writing. The
powder appears to be soluble in water. The taste is not unpleasant.
There the narrative found upon Mr Elvesham’s desk ends. His dead body
lay between the desk and the chair. The latter had been pushed back,
probably by his last convulsions. The story was written in pencil,
and in a crazy hand, quite unlike his usual minute characters. There
remain only two curious facts to record. Indisputably there was some
connection between Eden and Elvesham, since the whole of Elvesham’s
property was bequeathed to the young man. But he never inherited. When
Elvesham committed suicide, Eden was, strangely enough, already dead.
Twenty-four hours before, he had been knocked down by a cab and killed
instantly, at the crowded crossing at the intersection of Gower Street
and Euston Road. So that the only human being who could have thrown
light upon this fantastic narrative is beyond the reach of questions.
Without further comment I leave this extraordinary matter to the
reader’s individual judgment.