relief it is to be to talk to some one who can understand! Of course
what you say is the utter truth. And you are right that no mere chance
led me to my present condition, but, on the other hand, prolonged and
deliberate study. Yet chance in a sense now governs it. I mean, my
entering the condition of Higher Space seems to depend upon the chance
of this and that circumstance. For instance, the mere sound of that
German band sent me off. Not that all music will do so, but certain
sounds, certain vibrations, at once key me up to the requisite pitch,
and off I go. Wagner's music always does it, and that band must have
been playing a stray bit of Wagner. But I'll come to all that later.
Only, first, I must ask you to send away your man from the spy-hole."
John Silence looked up with a start, for Mr. Mudge's back was to the
door, and there was no mirror. He saw the brown eye of Barker glued to
the little circle of glass, and he crossed the room without a word and
snapped down the black shutter provided for the purpose, and then heard
Barker shuffle away along the passage.
"Now," continued the little man in the chair, "I can begin. You have
managed to put me completely at my ease, and I feel I may tell you my
whole case without shame or reserve. You will understand. But you must
be patient with me if I go into details that are already familiar to
you--details of Higher Space, I mean--and if I seem stupid when I have
to describe things that transcend the power of language and are really
therefore indescribable."
"My dear friend," put in the other calmly, "that goes without saying.
To know Higher Space is an experience that defies description, and one
is obliged to make use of more or less intelligible symbols. But, pray,
proceed. Your vivid thoughts will tell me more than your halting words."
An immense sigh of relief proceeded from the little figure half lost
in the depths of the chair. Such intelligent sympathy meeting him
half-way was a new experience to him, and it touched his heart at once.
He leaned back, relaxing his tight hold of the arms, and began in his
thin, scale-like voice.
"My mother was a Frenchwoman, and my father an Essex bargeman," he
said abruptly. "Hence my name--Racine and Mudge. My father died before
I ever saw him. My mother inherited money from her Bordeaux relations,
and when she died soon after, I was left alone with wealth and a
strange freedom. I had no guardian, trustees, sisters, brothers, or any
connection in the world to look after me. I grew up, therefore, utterly
without education. This much was to my advantage; I learned none of
that deceitful rubbish taught in schools, and so had nothing to unlearn
when I awakened to my true love--mathematics, higher mathematics and
higher geometry. These, however, I seemed to know instinctively. It was
like the memory of what I had deeply studied before; the principles
were in my blood, and I simply raced through the ordinary stages, and
beyond, and then did the same with geometry. Afterwards, when I read
the books on these subjects, I understood how swift and undeviating
the knowledge had come back to me. It was simply memory. It was simply
_re-collecting_ the memories of what I had known before in a previous
existence and required no books to teach me."
In his growing excitement, Mr. Mudge attempted to drag the chair
forward a little nearer to his listener, and then smiled faintly as he
resigned himself instantly again to its immovability, and plunged anew
into the recital of his singular "disease."
"The audacious speculations of Bolyai, the amazing theories of
Gauss--that through a point more than one line could be drawn parallel
to a given line; the possibility that the angles of a triangle are
together _greater_ than two right angles, if drawn upon immense
curvatures-the breathless intuitions of Beltrami and Lobatchewsky--all
these I hurried through, and emerged, panting but unsatisfied, upon the
verge of my--my new world, my Higher Space possibilities--in a word, my
disease!
"How I got there," he resumed after a brief pause, during which he
appeared to be listening intently for an approaching sound, "is more
than I can put intelligibly into words. I can only hope to leave your
mind with an intuitive comprehension of the possibility of what I say.
"Here, however, came a change. At this point I was no longer absorbing
the fruits of studies I had made before; it was the beginning of
new efforts to learn for the first time, and I had to go slowly and
laboriously through terrible work. Here I sought for the theories and
speculations of others. But books were few and far between, and with
the exception of one man--a 'dreamer,' the world called him--whose
audacity and piercing intuition amazed and delighted me beyond
description, I found no one to guide or help.
"You, of course, Dr. Silence, understand something of what I am
driving at with these stammering words, though you cannot perhaps yet
guess what depths of pain my new knowledge brought me to, nor why an
acquaintance with a new development of space should prove a source of
misery and terror."
Mr. Racine Mudge, remembering that the chair would not move, did the
next best thing he could in his desire to draw nearer to the attentive
man facing him, and sat forward upon the very edge of the cushions,
crossing his legs and gesticulating with both hands as though he saw
into this region of new space he was attempting to describe, and
might any moment tumble into it bodily from the edge of the chair and
disappear from view. John Silence, separated from him by three paces,
sat with his eyes fixed upon the thin white face opposite, noting every
word and every gesture with deep attention.
"This room we now sit in, Dr. Silence, has one side open to space--to
Higher Space. A closed box only _seems_ closed. There is a way in and
out of a soap bubble without breaking the skin."
"You tell me no new thing," the doctor interposed gently.
"Hence, if Higher Space exists and our world borders upon it and lies
partially in it, it follows necessarily that we see only portions
of all objects. We never see their true and complete shape. We see
their three measurements, but not their fourth. The new direction is
concealed from us, and when I hold this book and move my hand all round
it I have not really made a complete circuit. We only perceive those
portions of any object which exist in our three dimensions; the rest
escapes us. But, once we learn to see in Higher Space, and objects will
appear as they actually are. Only they will thus be hardly recognisable!
"Now, you may begin to grasp something of what I am coming to."
"I am beginning to understand something of what you must have
suffered," observed the doctor soothingly, "for I have made similar
experiments myself, and only stopped just in time----"
"You are the one man in all the world who can hear and understand,
_and_ sympathise," exclaimed Mr. Mudge, grasping his hand and holding
it tightly while he spoke. The nailed chair prevented further
excitability.
"Well," he resumed, after a moment's pause, "I procured the implements
and the coloured blocks for practical experiment, and I followed the
instructions carefully till I had arrived at a working conception of
four-dimensional space. The tessaract, the figure whose boundaries are
cubes, I knew by heart. That is to say, I knew it and saw it mentally,
for my eye, of course, could never take in a new measurement, or my
hands and feet handle it.
"So, at least, I thought," he added, making a wry face. "I had reached
the stage, you see, when I could _imagine_ in a new dimension. I was
able to conceive the shape of that new figure which is intrinsically
different to all we know--the shape of the tessaract. I could perceive
in four dimensions. When, therefore, I looked at a cube I could see
all its sides at once. Its top was not foreshortened, nor its farther
side and base invisible. I saw the whole thing out flat, so to speak.
And this tessaract was bounded by cubes! Moreover, I also saw its
content--its insides."
"You were not yourself able to enter this new world," interrupted Dr.
Silence.
"Not then. I was only able to conceive intuitively what it was like
and how exactly it must look. Later, when I slipped in there and
saw objects in their entirety, unlimited by the paucity of our poor
three measurements, I very nearly lost my life. For, you see, space
does not stop at a single new dimension, a fourth. It extends in all
possible new ones, and we must conceive it as containing any number of
new dimensions. In other words, there is no space at all, but only a
spiritual condition. But, meanwhile, I had come to grasp the strange
fact that the objects in our normal world appear to us only partially."
Mr. Mudge moved farther forward till he was balanced dangerously on
the very edge of the chair. "From this starting point," he resumed,
"I began my studies and experiments, and continued them for years.
I had money, and I was without friends. I lived in solitude and
experimented. My intellect, of course, had little part in the work,
for intellectually it was all unthinkable. Never was the limitation of
mere reason more plainly demonstrated. It was mystically, intuitively,
spiritually that I began to advance. And what I learnt, and knew, and
did is all impossible to put into language, since it all describes
experiences transcending the experiences of men. It is only some of the
results--what you would call the symptoms of my disease--that I can
give you, and even these must often appear absurd contradictions and
impossible paradoxes.
"I can only tell you, Dr. Silence"--his manner became exceedingly
impressive--"that I reached sometimes a point of view whence all the
great puzzle of the world became plain to me, and I understood what
they call in the Yoga books 'The Great Heresy of Separateness'; why all
great teachers have urged the necessity of man loving his neighbour as
himself; how men are all really _one_; and why the utter loss of self
is necessary to salvation and the discovery of the true life of the
soul."
He paused a moment and drew breath.
"Your speculations have been my own long ago," the doctor said quietly.
"I fully realise the force of your words. Men are doubtless not
separate at all--in the sense they imagine----"
"All this about the very much Higher Space I only dimly, very dimly,
conceived, of course," the other went on, raising his voice again by
jerks; "but what did happen to me was the humbler accident of--the
simpler disaster--oh, dear, how shall I put it----?"
He stammered and showed visible signs of distress.
"It was simply this," he resumed with a sudden rush of words, "that,
accidentally, as the result of my years of experiment, I one day
slipped bodily into the next world, the world of four dimensions, yet
without knowing precisely how I got there, or how I could get back
again. I discovered, that is, that my ordinary three-dimensional body
was but an expression--a projection--of my higher four-dimensional body!
"Now you understand what I meant much earlier in our talk when I spoke
of chance. I cannot control my entrance or exit. Certain people,
certain human atmospheres, certain wandering forces, thoughts, desires
even--the radiations of certain combinations of colour, and above all,
the vibrations of certain kinds of music, will suddenly throw me into
a state of what I can only describe as an intense and terrific inner
vibration--and behold I am off! Off in the direction at right angles to
all our known directions! Off in the direction the cube takes when it
begins to trace the outlines of the new figure! Off into my breathless
and semi-divine Higher Space! Off, _inside myself_, into the world of
four dimensions!"
He gasped and dropped back into the depths of the immovable chair.
"And there," he whispered, his voice issuing from among the cushions,
"there I have to stay until these vibrations subside, or until they
do something which I cannot find words to describe properly or
intelligibly to you--and then, behold, I am back again. First, that is,
I disappear. Then I reappear."
"Just so," exclaimed Dr. Silence, "and that is why a few----"
"Why a few moments ago," interrupted Mr. Mudge, taking the words out
of his mouth, "you found me gone, and then saw me return. The music
of that wretched German band sent me off. Your intense thinking about
me brought me back--when the band had stopped its Wagner. I saw you
approach the peep-hole and I saw Barker's intention of doing so later.
For me no interiors are hidden. I see inside. When in that state the
content of your mind, as of your body, is open to me as the day. Oh,
dear, oh, dear, oh, dear!"
Mr. Mudge stopped and again mopped his brow. A light trembling ran
over the surface of his small body like wind over grass. He still held
tightly to the arms of the chair.
"At first," he presently resumed, "my new experiences were so vividly
interesting that I felt no alarm. There was no room for it. The alarm
came a little later."
"Then you actually penetrated far enough into that state to experience
yourself as a normal portion of it?" asked the doctor, leaning forward,
deeply interested.
Mr. Mudge nodded a perspiring face in reply.
"I did," he whispered, "undoubtedly I did. I am coming to all that. It
began first at night, when I realised that sleep brought no loss of
consciousness----"
"The spirit, of course, can never sleep. Only the body becomes
unconscious," interposed John Silence.
"Yes, we know that--theoretically. At night, of course, the spirit
is active elsewhere, and we have no memory of where and how, simply
because the brain stays behind and receives no record. But I found
that, while remaining conscious, I also retained memory. I had attained
to the state of continuous consciousness, for at night I regularly,
with the first approaches of drowsiness, entered _nolens volens_ the
four-dimensional world.
"For a time this happened regularly, and I could not control it;
though later I found a way to regulate it better. Apparently sleep is
unnecessary in the higher--the four-dimensional--body. Yes, perhaps.
But I should infinitely have preferred dull sleep to the knowledge.
For, unable to control my movements, I wandered to and fro, attracted,
owing to my partial development and premature arrival, to parts of this
new world that alarmed me more and more. It was the awful waste and
drift of a monstrous world, so utterly different to all we know and see
that I cannot even hint at the nature of the sights and objects and
beings in it. More than that, I cannot even remember them. I cannot now
picture them to myself even, but can recall only the _memory of the
impression_ they made upon me, the horror and devastating terror of it
all. To be in several places at once, for instance----"
"Perfectly," interrupted John Silence, noticing the increase of the
other's excitement, "I understand exactly. But now, please, tell me a
little more of this alarm you experienced, and how it affected you."
"It's not the disappearing and reappearing _per se_ that I mind,"
continued Mr. Mudge, "so much as certain other things. It's seeing
people and objects in their weird entirety, in their true and complete
shapes, that is so distressing. It introduces me to a world of
monsters. Horses, dogs, cats, all of which I loved; people, trees,
children; all that I have considered beautiful in life--everything,
from a human face to a cathedral--appear to me in a different shape
and aspect to all I have known before. I cannot perhaps convince you
why this should be terrible, but I assure you that it is so. To hear
the human voice proceeding from this novel appearance which I scarcely
recognise as a human body is ghastly, simply ghastly. To see inside
everything and everybody is a form of insight peculiarly distressing.
To be so confused in geography as to find myself one moment at the
North Pole, and the next at Clapham Junction--or possibly at both
places simultaneously--is absurdly terrifying. Your imagination will
readily furnish other details without my multiplying my experiences
now. But you have no idea what it all means, and how I suffer."
Mr. Mudge paused in his panting account and lay back in his chair. He
still held tightly to the arms as though they could keep him in the
world of sanity and three measurements, and only now and again released
his left hand in order to mop his face. He looked very thin and white
and oddly unsubstantial, and he stared about him as though he saw into
this other space he had been talking about.
John Silence, too, felt warm. He had listened to every word and had
made many notes. The presence of this man had an exhilarating effect
upon him. It seemed as if Mr. Racine Mudge still carried about with
him something of that breathless Higher-Space condition he had been
describing. At any rate, Dr. Silence had himself advanced sufficiently
far along the legitimate paths of spiritual and psychic transformations
to realise that the visions of this extraordinary little person had a
basis of truth for their origin.
After a pause that prolonged itself into minutes, he crossed the room
and unlocked a drawer in a bookcase, taking out a small book with a red
cover. It had a lock to it, and he produced a key out of his pocket and
proceeded to open the covers. The bright eyes of Mr. Mudge never left
him for a single second.
"It almost seems a pity," he said at length, "to cure you, Mr. Mudge.
You are on the way to discovery of great things. Though you may lose
your life in the process--that is, your life here in the world of
three dimensions--you would lose thereby nothing of great value--you
will pardon my apparent rudeness, I know--and you might gain what is
infinitely greater. Your suffering, of course, lies in the fact that
you alternate between the two worlds and are never wholly in one or the
other. Also, I rather imagine, though I cannot be certain of this from
any personal experiments, that you have here and there penetrated even
into space of more than four dimensions, and have hence experienced the
terror you speak of."
The perspiring son of the Essex bargeman and the woman of Normandy bent
his head several times in assent, but uttered no word in reply.
"Some strange psychic predisposition, dating no doubt from one of your
former lives, has favoured the development of your 'disease'; and the
fact that you had no normal training at school or college, no leading
by the poor intellect into the culs-de-sac falsely called knowledge,
has further caused your exceedingly rapid movement along the lines of
direct inner experience. None of the knowledge you have foreshadowed
has come to you through the senses, of course."
Mr. Mudge, sitting in his immovable chair, began to tremble slightly.
A wind again seemed to pass over his surface and again to set it
curiously in motion like a field of grass.
"You are merely talking to gain time," he said hurriedly, in a shaking
voice. "This thinking aloud delays us. I see ahead what you are coming
to, only please be quick, for something is going to happen. A band is
again coming down the street, and if it plays--if it plays Wagner--I
shall be off in a twinkling."
"Precisely. I will be quick. I was leading up to the point of how to
effect your cure. The way is this: You must simply learn to _block the
entrances_."
"True, true, utterly true!" exclaimed the little man, dodging about
nervously in the depths of the chair. "But how, in the name of space,
is that to be done?"
"By concentration. They are all within you, these entrances, although
outer cases such as colour, music and other things lead you towards
them. These external things you cannot hope to destroy, but once the
entrances are blocked, they will lead you only to bricked walls and
closed channels. You will no longer be able to find the way."
"Quick, quick!" cried the bobbing figure in the chair. "How is this
concentration to be effected?"
"This little book," continued Dr. Silence calmly, "will explain
to you the way." He tapped the cover. "Let me now read out to you
certain simple instructions, composed, as I see you divine, entirely
from my own personal experiences in the same direction. Follow these
instructions and you will no longer enter the state of Higher Space.
The entrances will be blocked effectively."
Mr. Mudge sat bolt upright in his chair to listen, and John Silence
cleared his throat and began to read slowly in a very distinct voice.
But before he had uttered a dozen words, something happened. A sound
of street music entered the room through the open ventilators, for a
band had begun to play in the stable mews at the back of the house--the
March from _Tannhäuser_. Odd as it may seem that a German band should
twice within the space of an hour enter the same mews and play Wagner,
it was nevertheless the fact.
Mr. Racine Mudge heard it. He uttered a sharp, squeaking cry and
twisted his arms with nervous energy round the chair. A piteous look
that was not far from tears spread over his white face. Grey shadows
followed it--the grey of fear. He began to struggle convulsively.
"Hold me fast! Catch me! For God's sake, keep me here! I'm on the rush
already. Oh, it's frightful!" he cried in tones of anguish, his voice
as thin as a reed.
Dr. Silence made a plunge forward to seize him, but in a flash, before
he could cover the space between them, Mr. Racine Mudge, screaming and
struggling, seemed to shoot past him into invisibility. He disappeared
like an arrow from a bow propelled at infinite speed, and his voice
no longer sounded in the external air, but seemed in some curious way
to make itself heard somewhere within the depths of the doctor's own
being. It was almost like a faint singing cry in his head, like a voice
of dream, a voice of vision and unreality.
"Alcohol, alcohol!" it cried, "give me alcohol! It's the quickest way.
Alcohol, before I'm out of reach!"
The doctor, accustomed to rapid decisions and even more rapid action,
remembered that a brandy flask stood upon the mantelpiece, and in less
than a second he had seized it and was holding it out towards the space
above the chair recently occupied by the visible Mudge. Then, before
his very eyes, and long ere he could unscrew the metal stopper, he saw
the contents of the closed glass phial sink and lessen as though some
one were drinking violently and greedily of the liquor within.
"Thanks! Enough! It deadens the vibrations!" cried the faint voice
in his interior, as he withdrew the flask and set it back upon the
mantelpiece. He understood that in Mudge's present condition one side
of the flask was open to space and he could drink without removing the
stopper. He could hardly have had a more interesting proof of what he
had been hearing described at such length.
But the next moment--the very same moment it almost seemed--the German
band stopped midway in its tune--and there was Mr. Mudge back in his
chair again, gasping and panting!
"Quick!" he shrieked, "stop that band! Send it away! Catch hold of me!
Block the entrances! Block the entrances! Give me the red book! Oh, oh,
oh-h-h-h!!!"
The music had begun again. It was merely a temporary interruption. The
_Tannhäuser_ March started again, this time at a tremendous pace that
made it sound like a rapid two-step as though the instruments played
against time.
But the brief interruption gave Dr. Silence a moment in which to
collect his scattering thoughts, and before the band had got through
half a bar, he had flung forward upon the chair and held Mr. Racine
Mudge, the struggling little victim of Higher Space, in a grip of iron.
His arms went all round his diminutive person, taking in a good part
of the chair at the same time. He was not a big man, yet he seemed to
smother Mudge completely.
Yet, even as he did so, and felt the wriggling form underneath him,
it began to melt and slip away like air or water. The wood of the
arm-chair somehow disentangled itself from between his own arms and
those of Mudge. The phenomenon known as the passage of matter through
matter took place. The little man seemed actually to get mixed up in
his own being. Dr. Silence could just see his face beneath him. It
puckered and grew dark as though from some great internal effort. He
heard the thin, reedy voice cry in his ear to "Block the entrances,
block the entrances!" and then--but how in the world describe what is
indescribable?