For three weeks Davidson remained in this singular state, seeing what at
the time we imagined was an altogether phantasmal world, and stone blind
to the world around him. Then, one Tuesday, when I called, I met old
Davidson in the passage. “He can see his thumb!” the old gentleman said,
in a perfect transport. He was struggling into his overcoat. “He can see
his thumb, Bellows!” he said, with the tears in his eyes. “The lad will
be all right yet.”
I rushed in to Davidson. He was holding up a little book before his
face, and looking at it and laughing in a weak kind of way.
“It’s amazing,” said he. “There’s a kind of patch come there.” He
pointed with his finger. “I’m on the rocks as usual, and the penguins
are staggering and flapping about as usual, and there’s been a whale
showing every now and then, but it’s got too dark now to make him out.
But put something _there_, and I see it—I do see it. It’s very dim and
broken in places, but I see it all the same, like a faint spectre of
itself. I found it out this morning while they were dressing me. It’s
like a hole in this infernal phantom world. Just put your hand by mine.
No—not there. Ah! Yes! I see it. The base of your thumb and a bit of
cuff! It looks like the ghost of a bit of your hand sticking out of the
darkening sky. Just by it there’s a group of stars like a cross coming
out.”
From that time Davidson began to mend. His account of the change, like
his account of the vision, was oddly convincing. Over patches of his
field of vision the phantom world grew fainter, grew transparent, as it
were, and through these translucent gaps he began to see dimly the real
world about him. The patches grew in size and number, ran together and
spread until only here and there were blind spots left upon his eyes. He
was able to get up and steer himself about, feed himself once more,
read, smoke, and behave like an ordinary citizen again. At first it was
very confusing to him to have these two pictures overlapping each other
like the changing views of a lantern, but in a little while he began to
distinguish the real from the illusory.
At first he was unfeignedly glad, and seemed only too anxious to
complete his cure by taking exercise and tonics. But as that odd island
of his began to fade away from him, he became queerly interested in it.
He wanted particularly to go down into the deep sea again, and would
spend half his time wandering about the low-lying parts of London,
trying to find the water-logged wreck he had seen drifting. The glare of
real daylight very soon impressed him so vividly as to blot out
everything of his shadowy world, but of a night-time, in a darkened
room, he could still see the white-splashed rocks of the island, and the
clumsy penguins staggering to and fro. But even these grew fainter and
fainter, and, at last, soon after he married my sister, he saw them for
the last time.
V
And now to tell of the queerest thing of all. About two years after his
cure, I dined with the Davidsons, and after dinner a man named Atkins
called in. He is a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and a pleasant,
talkative man. He was on friendly terms with my brother-in-law, and was
soon on friendly terms with me. It came out that he was engaged to
Davidson’s cousin, and incidentally he took out a kind of pocket
photograph case to show us a new rendering of his _fiancée_. “And,
by-the-by,” said he, “here’s the old _Fulmar_.”
Davidson looked at it casually. Then suddenly his face lit up. “Good
heavens!” said he. “I could almost swear—”
“What?” said Atkins.
“That I had seen that ship before.”
“Don’t see how you can have. She hasn’t been out of the South Seas for
six years, and before then—”
“But,” began Davidson, and then, “Yes—that’s the ship I dreamt of. I’m
sure that’s the ship I dreamt of. She was standing off an island that
swarmed with penguins, and she fired a gun.”
“Good Lord!” said Atkins, who had never heard the particulars of the
seizure. “How the deuce could you dream that?”
And then, bit by bit, it came out that on the very day Davidson was
seized, H. M. S. _Fulmar_ had actually been off a little rock to the
south of Antipodes Island. A boat had landed overnight to get penguins’
eggs, had been delayed, and a thunderstorm drifting up, the boat’s crew
had waited until the morning before rejoining the ship. Atkins had been
one of them, and he corroborated, word for word, the descriptions
Davidson had given of the island and the boat. There is not the
slightest doubt in any of our minds that Davidson has really seen the
place. In some unaccountable way, while he moved hither and thither in
London, his sight moved hither and thither in a manner that
corresponded, about this distant island. _How_ is absolutely a mystery.
That completes the remarkable story of Davidson’s eyes. It is perhaps
the best authenticated case in existence of a real vision at a distance.
Explanation there is none forthcoming, except what Professor Wade has
thrown out. But his explanation invokes the Fourth Dimension, and a
dissertation on theoretical kinds of space. To talk of there being “a
kink in space” seems mere nonsense to me; it may be because I am no
mathematician. When I said that nothing would alter the fact that the
place is eight thousand miles away, he answered that two points might be
a yard away on a sheet of paper and yet be brought together by bending
the paper round. The reader may grasp his argument, but I certainly do
not. His idea seems to be that Davidson, stooping between the poles of
the big electro-magnet, had some extraordinary twist given to his
retinal elements through the sudden change in the field of force due to
the lightning.
He thinks, as a consequence of this, that it may be possible to live
visually in one part of the world, while one lives bodily in another. He
has even made some experiments in support of his views; but, so far, he
has simply succeeded in blinding a few dogs. I believe that is the net
result of his work, though I have not seen him for some weeks. Latterly,
I have been so busy with my work in connection with the Saint Pancras
installation that I have had little opportunity of calling to see him.
But the whole of his theory seems fantastic to me. The facts concerning
Davidson stand on an altogether different footing, and I can testify
personally to the accuracy of every detail I have given.