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 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 Blavitski’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 questions, 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 Blavitski 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 Dr. 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 there. I was disconcerted at first by the well-dressed
waiters’ 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 a great 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 well-nigh 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 dipped 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 probably 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 grey 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 grey 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-shaped
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
whimpered 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 coarse 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
grey 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 grey 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 that 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.