PART 1: THE DISCUSSION

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_By the same Author_:

THE EARLY HISTORY OF JACOB STAHL

A CANDIDATE FOR TRUTH

THE INVISIBLE TRUTH

THE HAMPDENSHIRE WONDER

GOSLINGS: A WORLD OF WOMEN

THE HOUSE IN DEMETRIUS ROAD

THESE LYNNEKERS

HOUSEMATES

NINETEEN IMPRESSIONS

GOD’S COUNTERPOINT

THE JERVAISE COMEDY

AN IMPERFECT MOTHER

REVOLUTION

_With Kenneth Richmond_:

W. E. FORD: A BIOGRAPHY

_Printed in Great Britain._

SIGNS & WONDERS

BY J. D. BERESFORD

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

NEW YORK ... MCMXXI

TO

WALTER DE LA MARE

“_Hath serving nature, bidden of the gods,

Thick-screened Man’s narrow sky,

And hung these Stygian veils of fog

To hide his dingied sty?--

The gods who yet, at mortal birth,

Bequeathed him fantasy?_”

‘FOG’ by WALTER DE LA MARE

CONTENTS

PAGE

PROLOGUE: THE APPEARANCE OF MAN 8

SIGNS AND WONDERS 12

THE CAGE 16

ENLARGEMENT 20

THE PERFECT SMILE 26

THE HIDDEN BEAST 34

THE BARRAGE 38

THE INTROVERT 44

THE BARRIER 50

THE CONVERT 54

A NEGLIGIBLE EXPERIMENT 68

THE MIRACLE 74

YOUNG STRICKLAND’S CAREER 80

A DIFFERENCE OF TEMPERAMENT 86

REFERENCE WANTED 92

AS THE CROW FLIES 96

THE NIGHT OF CREATION 102

PROLOGUE

THE APPEARANCE OF MAN: _A PLAY OUT OF TIME & SPACE_.

_When the curtain rises, two men and a woman are discovered talking

before an illimitable background._

FIRST MAN [_shaking hands with the man and the woman_] Well! Who’d have

thought of meeting you here!

WOMAN. Or you, as far as that goes. We thought you were living in

Putney.

FIRST MAN. So I am. It just happened that I’d run over this morning.

[_Enter R. a nebula, spinning slowly. It passes majestically across the

background as the scene proceeds._]

SECOND MAN. The world’s a very small place.

FIRST MAN. Ah! You’re right, it is.

WOMAN. And how’s the family?

FIRST MAN. Capital, thanks. Yours well, too, I hope?

WOMAN. All except Johnnie.

[_Enter R. a group of prehistoric animals; a few brontosauri,

titanotheres, mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers, and so on._]

FIRST MAN. What’s wrong with him?

WOMAN. He was bit by a dog. Nasty place he’s got.

FIRST MAN. Did you have it cauterised? They’re nasty things, dog-bites.

WOMAN. Oh, yes, we had it cauterised, you may be sure.

SECOND MAN [_reflectively_] Dangerous things, dogs.

FIRST MAN. If they’re not properly looked after, they are. Now I’ve got

a little dog....

[_At this point the speaker’s voice becomes inaudible owing to the

passing of the brontosauri, which gradually move off L._]

WOMAN [_becoming audible and apparently interrupting in the middle of

an anecdote_] Though I tell Johnnie it’s his own fault. He shouldn’t

have teased him.

[_Enter R. a few thousand savages with flat weapons._]

SECOND MAN. Boys will be boys.

WOMAN. Which is no reason, I say, that they shouldn’t learn to behave

themselves.

FIRST MAN. Can’t begin too soon, in my opinion.

[_Exeunt savages: enter the population of India._]

WOMAN. He might have been killed if a man hadn’t come up and pulled the

dog off him. A black man, he was, too.

FIRST MAN. What? A nigger?

WOMAN. Or a Turk, or something. I can’t never see the difference.

[_With a shiver._] Ugh! I hate black men, somehow. The look of ’em

gives me the shudders.

SECOND MAN [_on a note of faint expostulation_] My dear!

FIRST MAN. I’ve heard others say the same thing.

WOMAN. A pretty penny, Johnnie’ll cost us, with the Doctor and all.

[_Enter two armies engaged in a Civil War._]

FIRST MAN [_shaking his head, wisely_] Ah! I daresay it will.

SECOND MAN. _I_ don’t know what we’re coming to, what with wages and

prices and Lord knows what all?

FIRST MAN. No more do I. Why, only yesterday....

[_The rest of his sentence is drowned by the firing of a battery of

heavy guns._]

WOMAN. Oh! well, I suppose it’ll all come right in time.

[_The Civil War moves off L. Signs of the approaching end of the world

become manifest._]

FIRST MAN. We’ll hope for the best, I’m sure.

[_The Hosts of Heaven appear in the sky._]

SECOND MAN [_reflectively_] On the whole, I should say that things

looked a bit better than they did.

[_The Sea gives up its Dead._]

WOMAN. We shall take Johnnie to Ramsgate, as soon as his arm’s well.

FIRST MAN. We always go to Scarborough.

SECOND MAN. We have to consider the expense of the journey, especially

now there’s no cheap trains.

[_The universe bursts into flame. For a moment all is confusion; and

then the Spirit of the First Man is heard speaking._]

SPIRIT OF FIRST MAN. Well, I suppose I ought to be getting along.

SPIRIT OF SECOND MAN. Glad to have met you, anyway.

SPIRIT OF WOMAN. Funny our running up against you like this. As you

said, the world’s a very small place. Remember me to the family. [_They

go out._]

_The nebula, still spinning slowly, passes of the stage L._

CURTAIN AD LIB.

SIGNS & WONDERS

SIGNS & WONDERS

I dreamed this in the dullness of a February day in London.

I had been pondering the elements that go to the making of the human

entity, and more particularly that new aspect of the theory of the

etheric body which presents it as a visible, ponderable, tangible,

highly organised, but almost incredibly tenuous, form of matter. From

that I slid to the consideration of the possibility of some essence

still more remote from our conception of the gross material of our

objective experience; and then for a moment I held the idea of the

imperceptible transition from this ultimately dispersing matter to

thought or impulse--from the various bodies, etheric, astral, mental,

causal, or Buddhistic, to the free and absolute Soul.

I suppose that at this point I fell asleep. I was not aware of any

change of consciousness, but I cannot otherwise explain the fact

that in an instant I was transported from an open place in the North

of London, and from all this familiar earth of ours, to some planet

without the knowledge of the dwellers in the solar system.

This amazing change was accomplished without the least shock. It was,

indeed, imperceptible. The new world upon which I opened my eyes

appeared at first sight to differ in no particular from that I had so

recently left. I saw below me a perfect replica of the Hampstead Garden

Suburb. The wind blew from the east with no loss of its characteristic

quality. The occasional people who passed had the same air of tired

foreboding and intense preoccupation with the miserable importance

of their instant lives, that has seemed to me to mark the air of

the middle-classes for the past few weeks. Also it was, I thought,

beginning to rain.

I shivered and decided that I might as well go home. I felt that it was

not worth while to travel a distance unrecordable in any measure of

earthly miles, only to renew my terrestrial experiences. And then, by

an accident, possibly to verify my theory that it was certainly going

to rain, I looked up and realised at once the unspeakable difference

between that world and our own.

For on this little earth of ours the sky makes no claim on our

attention. It has its effects of cloud and light occasionally, and

these effects no doubt may engage at times the interest of the poet or

the artist. But to us, ordinary people, the sky is always pretty much

the same, and we only look at it when we are expecting rain. Even then

we often shut our eyes.

In that other world which revolves round a sun so distant that the

light of it has not yet reached the earth the sky is quite different.

Things happen in it. As I looked up, for instance, I saw a great door

open, and out of it there marched an immense procession that trailed

its glorious length across the whole width of heaven. I heard no sound.

The eternal host moved in silent dignity from zenith to horizon. And

after the procession had passed the whole visible arch of the sky

was parted like a curtain and there looked out from the opening the

semblance of a vast, intent eye.

But what immediately followed the gaze of that overwhelming watcher

I do not know, for someone touched my arm, and a voice close at my

shoulder said in the very tones of an earthly cockney:

“What yer starin’ at, guv’nor? Airyplanes? I can’t see none.”

I looked at him and found that he was just such a loafer as one may see

any day in London.

“Aeroplanes,” I repeated. “Great Heaven, can’t you see what’s up there?

The procession and that eye?”

He stared up then, and I with him, and the eye had gone; but between

the still parted heavens I could see into the profundity of a space so

rich with beauty and, as it seemed, with promise, that I held my breath

in sheer wonder.

“No! I can’t see nothin’, guv’nor,” my companion said.

And I presume that as he spoke I must have waked from my dream, for the

glory vanished and I found myself dispensing a small alms to a shabby

man who was representing himself as most unworthily suffering through

no fault of his own.

As I walked home through the rain I reflected that the people of that

incredibly distant world, walking, as they always do, with their gaze

bent upon the ground, are probably unable to see the signs and wonders

that blaze across the sky. They, like ourselves, are so preoccupied

with the miserable importance of their instant lives.

THE CAGE

I was not asleep. I have watched passengers who kept their eyes shut

between the stations, but as yet I have not seen an indisputable case

of anyone sound asleep on the Hampstead and Charing Cross Tube. Of

the other passages that make up London’s greater intestine I have

less experience, and it may be that some tubes are more conducive

to slumber than the one most familiar to me. I have no ambition to

make a dogmatic generalisation concerning either the stimulative or

soporific action of the Underground. I merely wish it to be understood

that I was not asleep, and that it was hardly possible that I could

have been, with a small portmanteau permanently on one foot, and the

owner of it--a little man who must have wished that the straps were

rather longer--intermittently on the other. Against this, however, I

have to put the fact that I could not say at which station the little

man removed from me the burden of himself and his portmanteau. Nor

could I give particulars of the appearance of such of my innumerable

fellow-passengers as were most nearly presented to me, although I do

know that most of them were reading--even the strap-hangers. It was,

indeed, this observation that started my vision or train of thought or

preoccupation--call it anything you like except a dream.

* * * * *

The eyes in his otherwise repulsive face held a wistfulness, a hint

of vague speculation that attracted me. He sat, hunched on the summit

of the steeply rising ground overlooking the sea, the place where the

forest comes so abruptly to an end that from a little distance it looks

as if it had been gigantically planed to a hard edge.

He was alone and ruminatively quiescent after food. He had fed well

and carelessly. Some of the bones that lay near him had been very

indifferently picked. He leaned forward clasping his hairy legs with

his equally hairy arms, and stared out with that hint of speculation

and wistfulness in his eyes over the placid magnificence of the Western

Sea--just disturbed enough to reflect a gorgeous road of fire that laid

a vanishing track across the waters up to the open goal of the low sun.

A faint breeze blew up the hill, and it seemed as if he leant his face

forward to drink the first refreshment of that sweet, cool air.

I approached him more nearly, trying to read his thought, rejoicing in

the knowledge that he could neither see nor apprehend me. For though a

man may know something of the past, the future is hidden from him, and

I represented to him a future that could only be reckoned in a vast

procession of centuries. Yet as I came nearer, so near that I could

rest my hands on his knees and gaze up closely into his eyes, he shrank

a little and leaned slightly away from me, as if he were uncertainly

aware of an unfamiliar, distasteful presence. I fancied that the mat of

hair on his chest just perceptibly bristled.

I could read his thought, now, and I was thrilled to discover that the

expression of his eyes had not misled me. He had attained to a form of

consciousness. He, alone, of all the beasts had received the gift of

constructive imagination. He could look forward, make plans to meet a

possible emergency. He knew already something of tomorrow. Even then

he was deep in speculation. That day he had hunted a slow but cunning

little beast which found a refuge among the great boulders that lay

piled in gigantic profusion along the foreshore. And he had failed.

Another quarry had been his, but that particular little beast had

outwitted him. And now, longing for it, he ruminated clumsy lethargic

plans for its capture.

It may have been that the unusual effort tired him, for presently he

slept, still hunched into the same compact heap, crouching with an

effect of swift alertness as if he were ready at the least alarm to

leap up and vanish into the cover of the forest.

Then, a plan came to me, also. I would bring a vision to this primitive

ancestor of mankind. I would merge myself with his being and he should

dream a dream of the immensely distant future. Blessed and privileged

above all the human race, he should know for an instant to what

inconceivable developments, to what towering heights of intellectual

and manipulative glory his descendants should one day be heir. I

had no definite idea of the precise illustration I should choose to

set forth the magnificence of man’s latest attainment. Nor did I

pause to consider what I myself might suffer in the process of this

infamous liaison between the ages. I acted on an impulse that I found

irresistible. I have myself longed so often to read the distant future

of mankind, that I felt as a god bestowing an inestimable gift. But I

should have known that in the mystical union it is the god and not the

man who suffers.

* * * * *

I was wrapped in an awful darkness as we fell stupendously through

time, but presently I knew that we were rising again, weighted with the

burden of primitive flesh. Then in an instant came a strange yellow

unnatural light, the roaring of a terrible sound--and the fearful

vision. The horror of it was unendurable; the shock of it so great that

spirit and flesh were rent asunder. I remained. He fell back to the

sweetness of the cool air blowing up from the tranquil sea.

Did he rush frantically into the forest or sit with dripping mouth and

wide alarmed eyes, rigidly staring at the scarlet rim of the setting

sun? Yet what could he have understood of the future in that moment of

detestable revelation? Could he have recognised men and women in their

strange disguise of modern dress, as being even of the same species

as himself? And if he had, what could he have known of them, seeing

them packed so closely together, immoveably wedged into the terror of

that rocking roaring cage of unknown material; seeing them occupied

in staring so intently and incomprehensibly at those amazing little

black-dotted white sheets? Impossible for him to guess that those

speckled sheets held a magic that transported his descendants from the

misery of their cage into imaginations so extensive and so various that

some of them might, however dimly and allusively, include himself,

hunched and ruminant, regarding the vast tranquillity of the sea.

The tunnel suddenly broke, the roaring gave place to a rattle that

by contrast was gentle and soothing. I opened my eyes. We were under

the sky again, slipping, with intermittent flashes of light, into the

harbour of Golder’s Green Station.

For a moment, I seemed to see the clumsy and violent shape of a beast

that strove in panic to escape; and then I came back to my own world of

the patient readers, with their white, controlled faces, forming now in

solemn procession down the aisle of the carriage.

But it was his dream, not mine. And I have been wondering whether, if I

dreamed also, the distant future might not seem equally unendurable to

me?

ENLARGEMENT

When he heard the first signal, warning the people of London to take

cover, his spirit revolted.

He began to picture with a sick disgust the scene of his coming

confinement in the dirty basement. Mrs. Gibson, his landlady, would

welcome him with the air of forced cheerfulness he knew so well. She

would make the same remarks about the noise of the guns. She would

say again: “Well, there’s one thing, it drowns the noise of the

bombs--if they’ve really got here this time.” Then Maunders from the

first floor would say that you could always pick out the sound of the

aerial torpedoes; and explain, elaborately, why. Mrs. Graham from the

second floor would say that she’d rather enjoy it, if it weren’t for

the children. And her eldest little prig of a boy would say, “I’m not

afraid, mumma,” and expect everyone to praise his courage. Mrs. Gibson

would praise him, of course. She would say: “There, now, I declare he’s

the bravest of anyone.” She was obliged to do it. She would never be

able to get new lodgers this winter. And when that preliminary talk was

done with, they would all begin again on the endlessly tedious topic of

reprisals; and keep it up until a pause in the barrage set them on to

spasmodic ejaculations of wonder whether “they” had been driven off, or

gone, or been shot down, or....

No; definitely, he would not stand it. He could better endure the

simultaneous explosion of every gun in London than three hours of that

conversation. Moreover, he could not face the horrible drip, drip, from

the scullery sink. On the night of the last raid he had been very near

the sink. And the thought of that steady plop ... plop ... of water

into the galley-pot Mrs. Gibson kept under the tap for some idiotic

reason, was as the thought of an inferno such as could not have been

conceived by Dante, nor organised by the Higher German Command.

Nerves? He shrugged his shoulders. In a sense, no doubt. Suspense,

dread, a long exasperation of waiting had filled every commonplace

experience--more particularly that dreadful dripping of the cold water

tap--with all kinds of horrible associations. But if it was “nerves,”

it was not nervousness, not fear of being killed, nothing in the least

like panic. He was quite willing to face the possible danger of the

open streets. But he could not and would not face Mrs. Gibson and the

scullery sink.

No; he must escape--a fugitive from protection. Men had fled from

strange things, but had they ever fled from a stranger thing than

refuge? He must go secretly. If Mrs. Gibson heard him she would stop

him, begin an immense, unendurable argument. She could not afford to

risk the loss of a lodger this winter. She would bring Maunders and

Mrs. Graham to join her in persuasion and protest. Freedom was hard to

win in London, in such times as these.

He crept down the long three flights of stairs like some wary criminal

feeling his cautious way to liberty. But once he had, with infinite

deliberation, slipped back the ailing latch of the front door, he

lifted his head and squared his shoulders with a great gasp of relief.

He could have wept tears of exultation. He was filled with a deep

thankfulness for this boon of his enlargement....

There was no sound of guns as yet; nor any sweep of searchlights

tormenting the wide gloom of the sky. It was a wonderful, calm night; a

little misty on the ground; but, above, the moon was serene and bright

as a new guinea.

He had no hesitation as to his direction. He desired the greatest

possible expansion of outlook; and turned his face at once towards the

river. On the Embankment he would be able to see a wide arc of the sky.

He had a sense of setting about a prohibited adventure, full of the

most daring and delicious excitements. His one dread was that he might

be interfered with, stopped, sent home.

The cycling policemen looked at him, he thought, with peculiar

suspicion. They gruffly shouted at him to take cover, with a curt note

of warning, as if he were breaking the law by indulging himself in this

escapade. He tried to avoid notice by slinking into the shadows. That

cold, inimical moonlight made everything so conspicuous....

Except for the policemen, the streets were vividly empty. He could feel

the spirit of London crouched in expectancy. Behind every darkened

window men, women, and children waited and longed for the relief of the

first gun. And while they waited they chattered and smiled. And all

their laughter and conversation was like these streets, vividly empty;

their spirits had taken cover.

He alone was free, exempt, rejoicing in his liberty....

The ground mist was thicker on the Embankment; and for a moment he

was confused by the loom of a strange obelisk that had a curiously

remote, exotic air in the midst of this familiar London. Then he

recognised the outline as that of Cleopatra’s Needle, and went close

up to the alien monument of another age and stared up at it in the

proclamatory moonlight. He wondered if any magic lingered in those

cryptic inscriptions? If they might not have endowed the very granite

with curious, occult powers. He was still staring at the solemn portent

of the obelisk when the barrage opened with unusual suddenness....

For a time he was crushed and overwhelmed by the pressure of that

intimidating fury of sound. He cowered and winced like a naked soul

exposed to the intimate vengeance of God. He was as beaten and battered

by the personal threat of those cumulative explosions as if every gun

sought him and him alone as the objective of its awful wrath.

But, by degrees, he began to grow accustomed even to that world-rocking

pandemonium. He became aware of the undertones that laced the dominant

roar and thunder of artillery. He could trace, he believed, beside the

shriek of shell, the humming whirr of an aeroplane he could not see.

And once something whizzed past him with a high singing hiss that ended

abruptly with a sharp clip. He guessed that a fragment of shrapnel had

buried itself in one of the plane-trees.

Yet the real danger of that warning did not terrify him as had the

enormous onslaught of noise from the barrage. At the next intermission

of the deafening bombardment he stood up, rested his hand on the

plinth of the obelisk, and stared, wondering and unafraid, into the

great arc of the sky. He could see no aeroplanes.... The stillness was

so profound that he could hear with a grateful distinctness the soft

clucking ripple of the rising flood.

Presently he dropped his regard for the heavens to the plain objective

of deserted London. The mist had almost dispersed in some places, had

thickened in others--churned and driven, perhaps, by the vast pressure

of the sound waves. Across the road he could see the impending cliff

of great buildings, pale and tall in the moonlight. At his feet the

plane-trees threw trembling, skeleton shadows. All the town waited in

suspense to know whether or not the bombardment would presently be

renewed.

He had a presentiment that it was all over. He felt the quick

exaltation and vigour of one who has suffered and escaped danger.

But when he looked up the Embankment and saw what he took to be the

silhouettes of three towering trams emerging with furtive silence from

the mist, he was aware of a faint sense of disappointment. Nothing was

left to him but to return to the common dreariness of life.

He took a step towards the trams that were advancing with such a

stately, such a hushed and ponderous deliberation....

Trams...?

He held his breath, staring and gaping, and then backed nervously

against the pedestal of the great Egyptian monument.

Had the shock of that awful bombardment broken his nerve? Was he mad?

Bewitched by some ancient magic? Or was it, perhaps, that in one swift

inappreciable moment he had been instantly killed by a fragment of

shrapnel, and that, now, his emerging spirit could, even as it watched

these familiar surroundings, peer back deep into the hidden mysteries

of time?

He pressed himself, shivering and fascinated, against the hard,

insistent reality of cold granite; but still in single file these three

colossal shapes advanced, solemn and majestic, rocking magnificently

with a slow and powerful gravity.

They were almost abreast of him now, sombre and stolid--three vast,

prehistoric, unattended Elephants, imperturbably exploring the silences

of this dead and lonely city.

They passed, and left him weak and trembling, but indescribably happy.

Two minutes later, a blind and insensible policeman, following the very

path of those magical evocations of the thought of ancient Egypt, rode

carelessly by, bearing the banal message that all was clear.

But the adventurer walked home in a dream of ecstasy. Whatever the

future might hold for him, he had pierced the veil of the commonplace.

He had seen and heard on the Thames Embankment that sacred, mystical

procession of the Elephants.

* * * * *

He looked at Mrs. Gibson with something of contempt when she brought

him his breakfast next morning. He could not respond to her chatter

concerning the foolish detail of last night’s raid. She, poor woman,

was afraid that she might, in some unknown way, have offended him. Her

last effort was meant as an amiable diversion. One never knew whether

people weren’t more scared than they chose to admit.

“There’s one amusin’ bit,” she said, laying his morning paper on the

table, “as I just glanced at while I was waitin’ for the water to

boil. It’s in Hincidents of the Raid. It seems as three performin’

elephunts goin’ ’ome from the ’Ippodrome or somewhere got loose--their

keeper done a bolt, I suppose, when the guns began--and got walkin’

off by theirselves all down the Embankment. They must ’a been a comic

sight, poor things. Terrified they was, no doubt....”

Now, why should God explain his miracles through the mouth of a Mrs.

Gibson?

THE PERFECT SMILE

The realisation of it first came to Douglas Owen when he was not quite

five years old.

From his babyhood he had been spoilt, more particularly by his father.

He could be such a charming little boy, and his frequent outbreaks of

real naughtiness were overlooked or gently reproved. They were even

admired in private by his parents, who regarded these first signs of

disobedience, temper, and selfishness as the marks of an independent

and original spirit.

Nevertheless, when Douglas was nearly five years old, he achieved a

minor climax that the most indulgent father could not overlook. Despite

all warnings and commands, Douglas would steal from the larder. When

there were cakes or tarts he took those for preference, but when there

was nothing else he would steal bread, merely, as it seemed, for

the pleasure of stealing it. His father had protested to his mother

that everything should be kept under lock and key, but as Mrs. Owen

explained: “You can’t expect a cook to be for ever locking things up.”

And the little Douglas was ingenious in his depredations. He chose his

moment with cunning. Also he knew, as the cook herself confessed, how

“to get round her.”

Mr. Owen, who was a tender-hearted idealist, admitted at last that

stern measures were called for, and he took Douglas into his study

and remonstrated with him gently, even lovingly, but with great

earnestness. The remonstrance gained strength from Mrs. Owen’s fear

that Douglas might make himself seriously ill by his illicit feastings.

Douglas, who was forward for his age, listened with attention to his

father’s serious lecture and promised reform. “I won’t do it again,

father. Promise,” he said with apparent sincerity. And his father,

believing absolutely in his child’s truthfulness, and remembering his

wife’s adjuration to be “really firm,” was tempted to clinch the thing

once for all by issuing an ultimatum.

“I’m sure you won’t, little son,” he said, “because you see if you did,

daddy would have to whack you. He’d hate doing it, but he’d have to do

it all the same.”

Douglas’s expression was faintly speculative. He had heard something

like this before, from his mother.

“But you’ve promised faithfully that you’ll never, never take anything

out of the larder, or the kitchen, or the pantry again, haven’t you,

darling?” Mr. Owen persisted, by way of having everything quite clear.

“Promised faithfully,” agreed Douglas; parted from his father with a

hug of forgiveness; and was found a quarter of an hour later in the

larder, eating jam with a spoon from a newly-opened jar.

“You threatened to whack him if he didn’t keep his promise, and you

must do it,” Mrs. Owen said firmly to her husband. “If you don’t keep

your promises, how can you expect him to keep his?”

“Damn!” murmured Mr. Owen with great intensity.

“I shall bring him in and leave him with you,” his wife said, correctly

interpreting her husband’s method of reluctantly accepting the

inevitable.

Douglas was brought, and it was evident that on this occasion he

was truly conscious of sin and apprehensive of the result. All his

nonchalance was gone from him. He did not cry, but his eyes were wide

and terrified. He looked a thoroughly guilty and scared child.

Mr. Owen hardened his heart. He thought of the contempt shown for

his authority, of the wilfully broken promise, and of the threat to

his son’s future unless he were made to realise that sin cannot go

unpunished.

Mrs. Owen, looking at her husband’s stern face, was satisfied that

justice would be done.

And then, when father and son were alone and sentence had been

pronounced, the smile came for the first time.

Douglas did not know why or how it came. He was only conscious of it as

something that illuminated his whole being, put him among the angels,

and gave him immunity from all earthly terrors.

To his father, the smile was simply blinding. It was so radiant, so

tender, forgiving, and altogether godlike. It condescended to his

weakness and mortality, and made him feel how unworthy he was of such

splendid recognition. His little son’s face glowed with a perfect

consciousness of power, and yet he seemed to surrender himself with a

dignified humility to this threatened infamy of corporal punishment.

Moreover, it was a smile that expressed the ultimate degree of

innocence. It was impossible for anyone who saw it to believe that

Douglas could have sinned in perversity, or with any evil intention.

And there was one other amazing peculiarity about this rare smile of

Douglas’s, for it not only permeated the finer feelings of those who

witnessed it, but was also reflected weakly in their faces, as the

outer and larger rainbow reflects the intensified beauty of the inner.

So now Mr. Owen’s smile faintly echoed his son’s.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” said Douglas confidently.

And Mrs. Owen waiting outside, listening in tremulous agitation for the

wail that should announce her husband’s resolution, heard no sound. And

presently Douglas came out, still wearing the last pale evidences of

his recent halo.

“But why didn’t you?” Mrs. Owen asked her husband, when their son was

out of earshot. She would have overlooked the essential omission,

almost with gratitude, if she had not believed it her duty to reprove

her husband’s characteristic weakness.

“He--he smiled,” Mr. Owen said.

“But Harold!” his wife protested.

Mr. Owen wrinkled his forehead and looked exceedingly distressed. “I

don’t know that I can explain,” he said. “It wasn’t an ordinary smile.

I’ve never seen him do it before. I--I have never seen anything like

it. I can only say that I would defy anyone to punish him when he

smiled like that.”

“I noticed as he came out....” began Mrs. Owen.

“It was practically over then,” her husband interrupted, and added with

a slightly literary turn of speech he sometimes adopted: “That was only

the afterglow.”

But it is worth recording that, from that time, Douglas, although he

was naughty enough in other ways, never robbed the larder again.

* * * * *

Nine years passed before Douglas’s great gift was once more manifested.

There was undoubtedly something unusually charming about the boy that

protected him from punishment; and as he had been spoilt by his father

at home, so was he also treated rather too leniently at school. But

Dr. Watson, his headmaster, came at last to the end of his weakness.

Douglas was becoming a bad influence in the school. His careless

evasions of discipline set an example of insubordination that was all

too readily followed by the other boys.

Dr. Watson braced himself to the inevitable. In his heart he regretted

the necessity, but he knew that Douglas must be sacrificed for the good

of the school. He had been warned and mildly punished a hundred times.

Now he must pay the full penalty.

The choice lay between expulsion and a public flogging, and when

Douglas chose the latter, Dr. Watson resolved that the flogging should

be of unusual severity. When the whole school was assembled, he made

a very earnest and moving speech, deploring the causes that had given

rise to the occasion, and showing how inevitable was the disgraceful

result.

Douglas, white and terrified, made ready in a trembling silence,

then, turning his back on the tensely expectant audience, he faced his

headmaster.

Arthur Coburn, Douglas’s humanitarian house-master, was so upset by

these preliminaries that for one moment he was tempted to leave the

hall. Corporal punishment had always seemed to him a horrible thing,

but never had it seemed quite so revolting as on this occasion. Yet

he fought against the feeling. He knew that his chief was neither a

stern nor a cruel man, and had been driven into the present position

by the sheerly impudent persistence of Douglas’s disobedience. By way

of alleviating as far as possible his own nervous distress, therefore,

Coburn took up a position with his back to the rostrum, and faced the

great crowd of just perceptibly intimidated boys.

And waiting, much as Douglas’s mother had waited in shamed anxiety

some nine years before, Coburn was amazed to see a sudden and

incomprehensible change in the massed faces before him. The tensity,

the look of half eager, half apprehensive expectation strangely

relaxed. A wave of what looked like relief ran back in a long ripple

of emotion from the front to the back of the many ranks of watching

boys. In one instant everyone was wearing a faint smile of almost holy

serenity.

Coburn turned with a leap of astonishment and stared at Dr. Watson. And

the smile he saw on the headmaster’s face outshone that on the faces of

his audience as the sun outshines the moon.

But no one save Dr. Watson saw the perfect radiance that flowed out

from the face of Douglas Owen....

“I’m sorry, sir,” was all that Douglas said.

Dr. Watson dropped his birch as if it had burnt him.

His second address to the school was hesitating and apologetic. He

tried to explain that when the clear signs of repentance and of reform

were so evident as they were in the case of Owen, corporal punishment

was superfluous and would be little short of criminal. Yet even

Coburn, who so profoundly agreed with the principle expounded, found

the explanation unsatisfying. He could not help feeling that Dr. Watson

was concealing his true reason.

Nevertheless, it is well to note that after this reprieve Douglas

passed the remainder of his school-life without committing any other

serious offence.

He was only thirty-two when he came before the last and most terrible

tribunal possible in our society.

After he left Cambridge, he was taken into a city office by a friend of

his father’s. Everyone liked him, and he might have made an excellent

position for himself if he had not led such a loose life out of

business hours. He seemed unable to resist any temptation, and the

inevitable result was that he got into debt.

When his father’s friend discovered the extent of Douglas’s thefts

from the firm, he had no choice but to dismiss him; although for the

young man’s sake not less than for the sake of his friendship with his

father, he never even threatened prosecution.

For a time Douglas lived at home. Later he went to Canada for a couple

of years. Then his father died, leaving him some five or six thousand

pounds, and he came home again--to spend it. When that money was all

gone, he lived on the charity of his many friends. They all knew him

for an incorrigible scamp, but he still retained much of his old charm.

The crime for which he came at last to be tried for his life at the

Old Bailey was too disgraceful an affair to be reported in detail.

The only possible defence was that Douglas was unquestionably drunk

when the murder was actually committed. Yet despite the weakness of

the case for the defending counsel, everyone in court including the

jury and possibly even Lord Justice Ducie himself, could not restrain

a feeling of sympathy for the prisoner. He had not lost, despite all

his excesses, his engaging air of ingenuous youth. And his manner

throughout the trial naturally evoked a strong sense of pity.

The jury did all they could for him by bringing in a verdict of

manslaughter.

The judge leaned forward with a kindly, almost fatherly air, as he

asked the prisoner if he had anything to say in his own defence.

And at that supreme moment, as he stood white and terrified in the

dock, Douglas was aware that once more, for the third time in his life,

that wonderful glow of power, peace, and condescension was beginning to

thrill through him.

He straightened himself and raised his head. He looked the judge in the

face. He believed that the perfect smile had come again to save him.

But he looked in vain for the old response.

The judge’s mouth had twitched as Douglas looked at him, and for one

instant all those who were waiting so anxiously for the pronouncement

of the sentence were astounded to see a look of horrible bestiality

flicker across the face of the old man who was accounted the most

gentle and philanthropic judge who had ever sat in the criminal court.

It was only a momentary impression, for Lord Ducie at once put both

hands before his face as if to shut off the sight of some terrible

infamy; but Bateson, the defending counsel, who was watching the judge,

says that he never afterwards could quite recover his old respect for

him.

It is unquestionably true that the hideous, depraved, and insulting

grimace which had so unexpectedly revealed the soul of Douglas Owen,

was solely responsible for the maximum sentence of twenty years’ penal

servitude that was imposed upon him.

If a man continually flouts the angels of grace, he must expect at last

to be delivered over to the devil he so devotedly serves.

THE HIDDEN BEAST

His house is the last in the village. Towards the forest the houses

become more and more scattered, reaching out to the wild of the wood

as if they yearned to separate themselves from the swarm that clusters

about the church and the inn. And his house has taken so long a stride

from the others that it is held to the village by no more than the

slender thread of a long footpath. Yet the house is set with its face

towards us, and has an air of resolutely holding on to the safety of

our common life, as if dismayed at its boldness in swimming so far it

had turned and desperately grasped the life-line of that footpath.

He lived alone, a strange man, surly and reticent. Some said that he

had a sinister look; and on those rare occasions when he joined us at

the inn, after sunset, he sat aside and spoke little.

I was surprised when, as we came out of the inn one night, he took

my arm and asked me if I would go home with him. The moon was at the

full, and the black shadows of the dispersing crowd that lunged down

the street seemed to gesticulate an alarm of weird dismay. The village

was momentarily mad with the clatter of footsteps and the noise of

laughter, and somewhere down towards the forest a dog was baying.

I wondered if I had not misunderstood him.

As he watched my hesitation his face pleaded with me. “There are times

when a man is glad of company,” he said.

We spoke little as we passed through the village towards the silences

of his lonely house. But when we came to the footpath he stopped and

looked back.

“I live between two worlds,” he said, “the wild and ...”--he paused

before he rejected the obvious antithesis, and concluded--“the

restrained.”

“Are we so restrained?” I asked, staring at the huddle of

black-and-silver houses clinging to their refuge on the hill.

He murmured something about a “compact,” and my thoughts turned to the

symbol of the chalk-white church-tower that dominated the honeycomb of

the village.

“The compact of public opinion,” he said more boldly.

My imagination lagged. I was thinking less of him than of the

transfiguration of the familiar scene before me. I did not remember

ever to have studied it thus under the reflections of a full moon. An

echo of his word, differently accented, drifted through my mind. I saw

our life as being in truth compact, little and limited.

He took up his theme again when we had entered the house and were

facing each other across the table, in a room that looked out over the

forest. The shutters were unfastened, the window open, and I could see

how, on the further shore of the waste-lands, the light feebly ebbed

and died against the black cliff of the wood.

“We have to choose between freedom and safety,” he said. “The

individual is too wild and dangerous for the common life. He must

make his agreement with the community; submit to become a member of

the people’s body. But I”--he paused and laughed--“_I_ have taken the

liberty of looking out of the back window.”

While he spoke I had been aware of a sound that seemed to come from

below the floor of the room in which we were sitting. And when he

laughed I fancied that I heard the response of a snuffling cry.

He looked at me mockingly across the table.

“It’s an echo from the jungle,” he said. “Some trick of reflected

sound. I can always hear it in this room at night.”

I shivered and stood up. “I prefer the safety of our common life,” I

told him. “It may be that I have a limited mind and am afraid, but

I find my happiness in the joys of security and shelter. The wild

terrifies me.”

“A limited mind?” he commented. “Probably it is rather that you lack a

fire in the blood.”

I was glad to leave him, and he on his part made no effort to detain me.

It was not long after this visit of mine that the people first began

to whisper about him in the village. At the beginning they brought

no charge against him, talking only of his strangeness and of his

separation from our common interests. But presently I heard a story

of some fierce wild animal that he caged and tortured in the prison

of his house. One said that he had heard it screaming in the night,

and another that he had heard it beating against the door. And some

argued that it was a threat to our safety, since the beast might escape

and make its way into the village; and some that such brutality, even

though it were to a wild animal, could not be tolerated. But I wondered

inwardly whether the affair were any business of ours so long as he

kept the beast to himself.

I was a member of the Council that year, and so took part in the voting

when presently the case was laid before us. But no vote of mine would

have helped him if I had dared to overcome my reluctance and speak in

his favour. For whatever reservations may have been secretly withheld

by the members of the Council, they were unanimous in condemning him.

We went, six of us, in full daylight, to search his house. He received

us with a laugh, and told us that we might seek at our leisure. But

though we sought high and low, peering and tapping, we found no

evidence that any wild thing had ever been concealed there.

And within a month of the day of our search he left the village.

I saw him alone once before he went, and he told me that he had chosen

for the wild and freedom, that he could no longer endure to be held to

the village even by the thread of the footpath.

But he did not thank me for having allowed the search of his house to

be conducted by daylight, although he knew that I at least was sure no

echo of the forest could be heard in that little room of his save in

the transfigured hours between the dusk and the dawn.

THE BARRAGE

_A STUDY IN EXTROVERSION_

My friend has a wonderful voice, a primitive voice, open-throated

and resonant, the great chest roar of the wild. When he shouts he

does it without visible effort. The full red of his face may deepen

to the opening shades of purple, but that evidence of constriction

is due solely to emotion. The lift of a major third in his tone is

accomplished without any appearance of muscular effort. He opens

another cylinder and lets the additional power find its own pitch in

the reverberating brass of the fog-horn. And the effect is as if the

devastating crash of the barrage had come suddenly and horribly near.

Perhaps, for one instant, the attack of his voice ceases, and then

while the room still trembles to the echo of his last statement, the

barrage leaps forward and spills its explosion into the secret refuges

of my being.

Behind that cover, the sense of the statements he gives forth with

such enormous assurance creeps up and falls upon me while I am still

insensible. It is as though his argument bayoneted me treacherously

while I am paralysed from shock. If my mind were free I could defeat

the simple attack of his argument; but should I be given one trifling

opportunity for speech I can never take it. My mind is battered,

crushed and inert. I dare not lift my head for fear of exposing myself

again to that awful approach of the barrage.

My friend has described himself so conclusively in a term of the old

free-trade dispute, that nothing could be added to enlighten his

definition. He is, and prides himself vociferously on the fact, a

whole-hogger. He gets that off on his lower register which is just

bearable. There is no need for the barrage to defend the approach of

that statement. It is self-evident. The great welt of his boots,

massive as an Egyptian plinth; the stiff hairiness of his bristling

tweeds; the honest amazement of his ripe face; the very solidity of

the signet ring that is nevertheless not too heavy for his hirsute

finger--all these proclaim him as the type and consummation of the

whole-hogger.

He adopted the label with pride some time in the middle ’nineties,

when he was already a mature, determined and unalterable man of

twenty-eight. He was a fervent patriot throughout the Boer War. He

has, since December, 1905, spent a fount of energy that would have

wrecked the physique of ten average men in denouncing such things

as Education Bills, Old Age Pensions, the Reform of the House of

Lords, Home Rule--in brief, the Government--or, as he always called

it, “_this_ Government.” And since the beginning of the war he has

demonstrated--proving every statement of the _Times_ by the evidence

of the _Daily Mail_--that there will never be any truth or sanity in

the world until the whole German race is beaten to its perjured knees

(his metaphors sometimes have an effect of concentration); until it

is so thrashed, scourged, humiliated, broken and defeated (a barrage

is necessarily redundant) that the last remaining descendants of the

Prussian shall crawl, pitifully exposed and humbled, about the earth,

begging God and man for forgiveness.

My friend is, in fact, the perfect type of what is known to

psycho-analysts as the extrovert. He has never questioned himself,

never doubted the infallibility of his own gospel, never known fear.

He does not understand the meaning of the word introspection, and

feels nothing but pity for a man who halts between two opinions. He

divides all mankind into two categories--splendid fellows and damned

fools--although I have found the suggestion of a third division in his

description of a querulous Tory as “a damned fool on the right side.”

On the wrong side, however, there are no splendid fellows. As he says,

he “hasn’t patience” with anyone who is either so thick-headed or so

unscrupulous as to disagree with him in politics.

By way of a hobby he farms 800 acres of land, and he has never had any

trouble with his labourers. I will admit that he is generous with a

careless, exuberant generosity that does not ask for gratitude. But it

is not his generosity that has won for him the devotion of his servants

and employees. They bow before his certainty. He is a religion to them,

a trustworthy holdfast in this world of unstable things.

And I suppose that is also why he is still “my friend.” His

conversation is nothing but a string of affirmations with none of

which I can agree. He is an intolerable bore, and his voice hurts me.

But I regard him with wonder and admiration, and when the terrors and

oppressions of the world threaten to break my spirit I go to him for

strength.

In the early days of our acquaintanceship I used to try, by facial

contortions and parenthetic gesture, to indicate my paltry disagreement

with his political and social creed. Perhaps I came near at that time

to inclusion in the “Damfool” category; but the nearness of my house,

his generosity in overlooking the preliminary marks of my idiocy, and

(deciding factor) the inappeasable craving for company which is his

only means of expression, influenced him to give me another and yet

another chance. He took to putting up the barrage at the least sign of

my disapproval, and so converted me--outwardly. While I am with him

I relax myself. I stare at him and wonder. I sometimes find myself

wishing that I could be like him!

It was, indeed, the thought of so impossible and outrageous an ambition

that prompted me to attempt this portrait of him. I have failed, I

know, to convey his proper quality. Anyone who has never met my friend

will find nothing but the echo and shadow of him in this sketch. But

is there anyone who has not met him or some member of his family? Down

here I associate him with the land, but he has business interests

connected with the Stock Exchange. And he has brothers, uncles and

sons--any number of them--all of the same virtue. They are in the

Army, the Law, Medicine, in the Pulpit, in Trade, in the House--in

everything. They are all successful, and they have all given their

services with immense vigour and volubility to the great task that

my friend defines as “downing the Hun.” They are all men of action,

and their thinking is done by a method as simple as simple addition.

A few sterling principles are taken for granted, principles that can

be applied in such phrases as “the good of the country,” “playing the

game,” “Rome was not built in a day,” or “what I go by is facts,”

and from these elementary premisses any and every argument can be

deduced by the two-plus-two method. It is the apotheosis and triumph

of a priorism. They do not believe in induction, and what they do not

believe in does not exist for them. Their strength is in loudness and

confidence, and they are very strong.

Nevertheless, puzzling over my friend and his family in my own

hair-splitting way, I have been wondering if this loudness is not

a sign that the family has lost something of its old power? Their

ancestors, also, were men of simple ideas and strong passions, men of

inflexible purpose. But they were not, so far as one can judge from

history, so blatantly loud. They bear the same kind of relation to my

friend that Lincoln does to Roosevelt.

Is the type changing, I ask myself, or only the conditions? And if the

latter, is the man of intense convictions and rigid principles become

so much of an anomaly in this new world of ours that the development

of the barrage has become necessary as a means of assertion against a

people who will question even such a simple premiss as that two added

to two invariably produces four? For they do that. Your characteristic

man of the age will warn you that the mathematical statement is an

assumption only, not a universal truth. He will probably add that in

any case it is useless as an analogy, since it disregards entirely the

qualitative value of “two.”

From the over-conscientious mind such criticisms as this tear away the

last hopes of stability. One loses faith in the Cosmos. But my friend

smiles his pity for all such damfoolishness. His solid feet are planted

on the solid earth. He knows that two and two make four. His ancestors

have proved it by their actions. And if such silly questioning of sound

principles is persisted in, he waves it aside and asserts himself in

his usual effective way.

Nevertheless, as I have said, it seems that that form of barrage was

once unnecessary.

THE INTROVERT

Nothing is more dispiriting than the practice of classifying humanity

according to “types.” Your professional psychologist does it for his

own purposes. This is his way of collating material for the large

generalisation he is always chasing. His ideal is a complete record.

He would like to present us as so many samples on a labelled card--the

differences between the samples on any one card being ascribed to an

initial carelessness in manufacture. His method is the apotheosis

of that of the gay Italian fortune-teller one used to see about the

streets, with her little cage of love-birds that sized you up and

picked you out a suitable future. Presently, we hope, the psychologist

will be able to do that for us with a greater discrimination. He will

take a few measurements, test our reaction times, consult an index,

and hand us out an infallible analysis of our “type.” After that we

shall know precisely what we are fitted for, and whether our ultimate

destination is the Woolsack or the Workhouse.

But your psychologist has his uses, and it is the amateur in this sort,

particularly the novel-writing amateur, who arouses our protest. He--I

use the pronoun asexually--does not spend himself in prophecy, but he

deals us out into packs with an air of knowing just where we belong.

And his novels prove how right he was, because you can prove anything

in a novel. His readers like this method. It is easy to understand, and

it provides them with an articulate description of the inevitable Jones.

I cling to that as some justification for the habit, as an excuse

for my own exhibition of the weakness, however dispiriting. It is so

convenient to have a shorthand reference for Jones and other of our

acquaintances. The proper understanding of any one of them might

engage the leisure of a lifetime; and if for general purposes we can

tuck our friends into some neat category, we serve the purposes of

lucidity.

Lastly, to conclude this apology, I would plead that a new scheme of

classification, such as that provided by psycho-analysis, is altogether

too fascinating to be resisted.

There is, for example, my friend David Wince, the typical “introvert,”

and an almost perfect foil for my friend the “extrovert,” previously

described. The two men loathe the sight of one another. Contempt on one

side and fear on the other is a sufficient explanation of their mutual

aversion. Wince, indeed, has an instinctive fear of anything that

bellows, and a rooted distrust of most other things. He suffers from a

kind of spiritual agoraphobia that makes him scared and suspicious of

large generalisations, broad horizons and cognate phenomena. He likes,

as he says, to be “sure of one step” before he takes the next. The open

distances of a political argument astound and terrify him. He takes

all discussions with a great seriousness, and displays an obstructive

passion for definition and the right use of words. “What I should like

to understand” is a favourite opening of his, and the thing he would

like to understand is almost invariably some abstruse and fundamental

definition.

The _á priori_ method is anathema to him. He is, in fact,

characteristically unable to comprehend it. He has little respect for

a syllogism as such, because his mind seems to work backwards, and all

his logical faculty is used in the dissection of premisses. When my

exasperation reaches the stage at which I say: “But, my dear fellow,

let us take it for granted, for the sake of argument ...” he wrings his

hands in despair and replies: “But that’s the whole point. We _can’t_

take these things for granted. If you don’t examine your premisses,

where _are_ you?” He has a habit in conversation of emphasizing such

words as those I have underlined, and a look of desolation comes into

his face when he plaintively enquires where we _are_. At those times

I see his timid, irresolute spirit momentarily staring aghast at the

threat of this world’s immense distances; before it ducks back with a

sigh of relief into the shelter afforded by his introspective analyses.

“Let us be quite sure of our ground,” he says, “before we draw any

deductions.” His ground is, I fancy, a kind of “dug-out.”

He has had an unfortunate matrimonial experience. His wife ran away

with another man, some three or four years ago, and he is trying to

screw himself up to the pitch of divorcing her. For a man of his

sensitiveness, the giving of evidence in Court upon such a delicate

subject will be a very trying ordeal. He has confided very little of

his trouble to me, but occasional hints of his, and the reports of

another friend who knew Mrs. Wince personally, lead me to suppose that

she was rather a large-minded, robust sort of woman. Perhaps he bored

her. I can imagine that he would bore anyone who had a lust for action;

and as they had been married for eight years and had no children, I

am not prepared to condemn Mrs. Wince, off-hand, for her desertion

of him. I have no doubt that Wince might be able to make out a good

ethical case for himself. I picture his attitude towards his wife as

being extremely self-denying, deprecatory and almost passionately

virtuous. But I prefer to reserve judgment on the issue between them. I

can imagine that his habit of procrastinating may have annoyed her to

desperation. He has told me with a kind of meek pride that he has often

been to the door of a shop, and then postponed the purchase he had come

to make until the next day. He loathes shopping. He finds the mildest

shopkeeper an intimidating creature. I do not know what would happen

to him if his hairdresser died. He has been to the same man for over

twenty years.

In politics he is a conscientious Radical, and his one test of

politicians is “Are they sincere?” He distrusts the Tories because he

believes that they must be working for their own personal ends, but he

has had a private weakness for Mr. Balfour ever since he read _The

Foundations of Belief_. His hero is W. E. Gladstone, whose opinions

represent to him, I fancy, some aspect of his own, while Gladstone’s

courage, Wince says, was “perfectly glorious.”

He adores courage, but only when it is the self-conscious kind. Our

friend Bellows, for instance, does not appear to Wince as brave,

but as callous, thick-skinned, or “simply a braggart.” All Wince’s

resentment comes to the surface when the two men meet by some untoward

accident. On one such occasion he magnificently left the room and

slammed the door after him, but I think that he probably regretted that

act of violence before he reached home. He has a nervous horror of

making enemies. He need have no fear in this case. Bellows considers

Wince as beneath his notice, and always speaks of him to me as “your

hair-splittin’ friend.”

Now that I have documented Wince I feel chiefly sorry for him, but

when I am in his company I frequently have a strong desire to shake

him. I wonder if his wife began by being sorry for him, and if her

escapade was incidentally intended as a shaking? Did she flaunt her

wickedness at him in the hope of “rousing him up”? If so, she failed,

ignominiously. Shakings of that sort only aggravate his terror of

life. Indeed, I do not think that anything can be done for him. If he

survives the war, the coming of the New Democracy will certainly finish

him. Talking of the possibility of a November Election, he told me that

he meant to abstain from voting. He said that he could not vote for

Lloyd George, and was afraid of putting too much power into the hands

of the Labour Party. He did not think that they had yet had enough

experience of government to be trusted with the control of a nation.

In the hallowed protections of the Victorian era he had his place and

throve after his fashion. Life was so secure and the future apparently

so certain. But he was not fitted to stand the strain of coming out

into the open. He is horrified by the war, but in his heart he is

still more horrified by the thought of the conditions that will come

with peace. He sees the future, I know, as a vast, formless threat.

He sees life exposed to a great gale of revolution. He is afraid that

his retreat will be no longer available, that one day he will find his

burrow stopped and himself called upon to face, and to work with, his

fellow-men.

But no doubt his natural timidity tends to over-estimate the

probability of these dangers.

THE BARRIER

The body seems to have a separate and industrious life of its

own. It carries on works of amazing intricacy beyond the reach of

consciousness; works, the very existence of which are unknown to us

so long as they are being successfully performed. Only when there is

some hitch or impediment, is the consciousness crudely signalled by

the message of pain. Attention is demanded, but no detail is given of

the nature of the trouble, nor of how it may be overcome. All that

the message conveys is a plea for rest, for the suspension of those

activities within the consciousness which are--may we assume?--using up

energy from some additional source that the workers now wish to draw

upon themselves.

Can we assume further, that this corporate life of the cells is not

entirely mechanical; is not a series of chemico-biological reflexes

or reactions, somehow mysteriously initiated at the birth of life and

continued by the stimulus of some unknown unconscious force so long

as this plastic, suggestible association of cells remains active?

For example, it would appear that although strangers from another

like community will be accepted and treated as fellow members, some

lack of sympathy, or different habit of work mars the perfection

of the building. In renewing the bone structure after trephining,

for instance, it has been found that a graft from the patient’s own

body--thin slices from the tibia are now being used--produces better

results than can be achieved by the workers with strange material. The

graft in this case is only used as a scaffolding. (Our assumed workers

with all their ingenuity are not equal to the task of throwing out

cantilevers into the void.) But the planks of the scaffolding become an

organic part of the new structure, and when the new material used is

foreign, we find the marks of divided purpose in plan and construction.

The new bone takes longer to form and the work is not so well done.

(Incidentally, it is interesting to notice how impossible our

mechanical metaphors become when we are speaking of this work of the

cells. I have spoken of throwing out a cantilever, and incorporating

the planks of a scaffold in the new structure, but cantilevers and

planks are themselves, also, workers! And, indeed, the fact that the

process cannot be truly stated or even conceived in mechanical terms

may be taken as a contribution to the metaphysical argument.)

Yet astounding and difficult as is this problem of the civic,

corporate life that is being lived without our knowledge, a still more

inconceivable partnership awaits our investigation. So far, we have

touched only on two domains; the first peculiar to those who study the

body from a more or less mechanical aspect, such as the surgeon or the

histologist; the second to the psychologist. There remains, I believe,

a third peculiar to the practical experiments of biology and psychology.

Such reflections as these have often haunted me, and my mind was

confusedly feeling for some key to the whole mystery as I stood by the

death-bed of old Henry Sturton. He had been fatally injured by a motor

omnibus as he stood in the gutter with his pitiful tray of useless

twopenny toys. No one else had been hurt; the accident would have

been no accident, nothing more than a violent and harmless skidding

of the juggernaut, if Henry Sturton had not been standing on that

precise spot. A difference of a few inches either way would have saved

him. As it was the whole performance seemed to have been fastidiously

planned in order to destroy him. And in his pocket they had found a

begging letter addressed to me that he had perhaps forgotten to post.

Or it may be that for once he had honestly intended to stamp it? I

had egotistically wondered if I was the person for whose benefit this

casual killing had been undertaken.

When I reached the hospital, he was either asleep or unconscious, but

they allowed me to wait within the loop of the screen that was to hide

the spectacle of his passing from the other patients in the ward. And

I stood there pondering on the marvel of the bodily functions. I got no

further than that until he opened his eyes and I saw my vision.

He had been a gross man. I had always disliked and despised him since

a certain occasion on which I had lunched with him at his Club. That

was more than twenty years ago. I was young then, full of eagerness for

the spiritual adventure of life, and he was a successful business man

of nearly fifty, coarse and stupid, drugged by his perpetual indulgence

in physical satisfactions. But, indeed, he had always been stupid. He

was, I have heard, the typical lout of his school, too lethargic to

be vicious, living entirely, as it seemed, for his stomach and his

bed. Heaven knows what his life would have been, if he had always been

forced to work for his bare living, but Providence has a habit of

pandering to fat men, and he succeeded to his father’s business, and

let it run itself on its own familiar lines.

He had never married. He was too selfish for that, but he had, so

someone told me, bought and mistreated more than one young woman for

his own office--his only positive sin in the eyes of the moralists;

though I used to feel that his whole existence was one vast

overwhelming sin from first to last. That, however, is the common error

of judgment of the ascetic, self-immolating type.

He found no friends when his business failed. His intimates were men of

the same calibre as himself, and rejected him in those circumstances

as he would have rejected them. The failure itself was an unlucky

accident. The man who ran the business proved unfaithful; he was

the victim of a confidence that begot in him the lust for power. He

gambled, lost, and absconded.

Sturton’s descent into the gutter was delayed for a few years by a

clerical appointment he begged from some firm with whom he had traded

before his bankruptcy. The appointment could not have been lucrative.

He attended the office every day, but nothing else seemed to have

been expected of him. He could have been capable of nothing else.

Whatever his potentialities may once have been, they were hopelessly

stultified by then. I used to meet him now and again in those days of

his clerkship; and let him gorge himself at my expense. That was his

single pleasure and desire. Poverty had exaggerated the cravings of his

gluttony.

And as I stood respectfully within the fold of the screen and looked

down at the flabby coarseness of the horrible old man in the bed,

I reflected that his body must in its own way have represented a

highly successful community of cells. There had been no distractions

of purpose in the entity we knew as Henry Sturton; no rending

uncertainties to upset his nerves and interfere with the steady

industry of his bodily functions.

I was thinking that when he opened his eyes and I caught a glimpse

of the fierce and splendid thing his body had always hidden from us.

I saw it then, beyond any shadow of doubt--the spirit that had been

imprisoned for seventy years, lying in wait eternally patient and

vigilant, for this one brief instant of expression. It looked at me

without recognition, yet with an amazing intensity, as if it knew that

all its long agony of suppression would find no other compensation than

this. So near release, his soul, still longing to touch life at some

point, had seized its opportunity when that intolerably gross barrier

of his body had been mangled and dislocated by this long-delayed

accident.

Then Henry Sturton coughed, and I saw the beautiful eager stare die out

of his eyes, and give place to that look of gross desire I had always

loathed. Even then, I believe, he craved for food. But the next moment

his eyes closed and his lips spurted a stream of blood.

The nurse was with him instantly, pushing me aside. I took advantage

of her preoccupation to stay till the end. I hoped for one more sight

of his soul. I thought it might take advantage of another intermission

before the work of the community was abruptly closed. But I did not see

it again.

He spoke once, two minutes before he died.

“God blast,” was what he said.

THE CONVERT

For the first time in his life, Henry Wolverton had been seriously

upset.

His had been an orderly life. Even when he was at Shrewsbury, he had

escaped bullying and other disturbances. He had been marked out as a

future scholar who would be a credit to the school; and his calm air of

reserve had also protected him. He might be classed as a “swat,” but he

was not the kind of swat who gets singled out for bullying. He was no

good at games, but he had a handsome, dignified presence, and he was

never known to put on side.

At Oxford he passed from triumph to triumph. After he got his

fellowship at Balliol, he married a girl-graduate from Lady Margaret

Hall, and they worked happily together on his research. He was writing

in many volumes, the _Economic History of the Sixteenth & Seventeenth

Centuries_; and at twenty-nine he was already an authority. His wife

died rather incidentally when they had been married three years, but

that had not seriously interfered with his life work.

Nor did the war, although it was a terrible nuisance, have any

considerable effect upon him. He undertook work of “national

importance” in Whitehall, and when he returned home in the afternoon to

the house he had taken at the corner of Bedford Square, he found that

he could still put in four or five valuable hours’ work on his history.

And if he wanted extra time for research in the British Museum library,

he could always get leave. Everyone in his department recognized the

fact that he was an exceptional man, and that the work he was engaged

upon would be a lasting monument to English scholarship.

By comparison, the war itself was almost an ephemeral thing.

Since the signing of the armistice, he had settled down to make up for

lost time. He had his whole future planned. He hoped to finish his

immediate task by the time he was sixty-five, but he foresaw that there

would still be other work for him to do. He would, for example, almost

certainly find it necessary by then to make revision in his earlier

volumes.

It was no trifle that had upset him on this particular day. But even

the fact that the English revolution had at last broken into the flame

of civil war would not have disturbed him so seriously, if he had not

conclusively proved in the course of the past five weeks that the

revolution was impossible. Throughout the welter of the national strike

disturbances, editors of any importance from the editor of the _Times_

downwards had begged him for articles. Although he had specialized upon

a study of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he was regarded as

the first authority on the entire history of the English people. And

in his articles, he had proved conclusively from his vast knowledge of

precedents and tradition, that the temper of the English people would

never seek the arbitrament of an armed revolution.

He was still convinced of that, although, so far as he could judge, the

revolution had already begun.

He had been startled in the middle of his best hours of the day, by

what he had at first imagined to be the back-firing of a rapidly

driven motor-bicycle. He went to the window, opened it wide (he always

kept it closed when he was working, to shut out the noise of the

traffic), and listened with an anxious attention. He had a peculiar

and unprecedented feeling of nervousness. He felt, for no assignable

reason, as if someone had discovered a bad anachronism in his book.

And then he was reluctantly driven to the conclusion that, indeed,

some mistake had been committed, although he could not admit that it

was his own. For the motor-bicycle continued to back-fire in short,

spasmodic bursts, while it remained stationary; and he could do longer

avoid the inference that it was as a matter of fact a machine gun, no

further away than Oxford Street. He could, also, hear dim and terrible

shouting, and more faintly, occasional cries of dismay, of anger, or of

fear.

The Square was completely deserted, but when he saw a scattered rout

of people flying north, up Bloomsbury Street, he closed the window and

began to pace up and down his well-fitted writing room, sanctified now,

by the five years’ work he had done there.

What so annoyed and disturbed him was that some officious, political

fool should have upset his scholarly deductions from the vast

precedents of history. He would not admit for one moment that he had

been mistaken; his chain of reasoning was unassailable. But, so he

inferred, some blundering, malicious idiot had made a gross error in

the conduct of the negotiations that, no longer ago than yesterday, had

promised so hopefully. The result of that error was incalculable. There

could be no doubt that the rioters had been fired upon, and so given a

sound cause, and what would perhaps be more effective still, a rallying

cry, to the great mass of unemployed workers. And the army could not be

depended upon. The more loyal part of it was in Germany enforcing the

peace terms. It was just possible in the circumstances that there might

be something very like an armed revolution, despite the fact that his

arguments had been so indubitably sound and right. Henry Wolverton was

exceedingly annoyed and upset.

His troubles did not end there. Just as he had succeeded, by a masterly

effort of concentration, in putting away the thought of this stupid

anomaly and returning to his work, his housekeeper came and tapped at

his door--a thing she had been explicitly forbidden to do, at that time

of day, in any circumstances whatever.

He ignored the first knock, and then she knocked again, more loudly.

He frowned, and bade her come in. She was stupid, like most women, and

would probably continue to pester him until she was admitted.

She came in trembling with agitation.

“Oh! I’m sure I beg your pardon, sir, coming now, against all orders,”

she said; “but William has just come in--it’s his evening off, you

know, sir--and he says there’s been firin’ in Oxford Circus, and people

killed, and--”

“I inferred that,” Henry Wolverton interrupted her calmly. “I heard the

machine guns. You had better tell William not to go out again.”

“Oh! sir, but he says we’re none of us safe,” the housekeeper wailed,

on the verge of hysterics. “He says there’ll be looting and Heaven only

knows what, and us so near Oxford Street.”

“I do not anticipate any effects of that kind, to-night, Mrs. Perry,”

Wolverton replied frigidly. “And, by the way, I should be glad if you

could let me have dinner half an hour earlier, this evening. After

these annoying disturbances, I may not be able to settle down again

until I have dined, and I shall work longer afterwards to make up for

lost time. Can you arrange that?”

“Yes, sir,” gasped Mrs. Perry. “Then, you don’t believe, sir--”

“I do not,” Wolverton returned with the dignity of the assured. “You

may lock the outer doors, if it gives you any sense of security. I

shall expect dinner in half an hour from now.”

Mrs. Perry returned to the kitchen greatly comforted by her master’s

magnificent confidence. She told William that things were not so bad as

he was afraid of! And William in his turn derived a sense of security

from the knowledge that he was living in the house of Henry Wolverton.

Nevertheless, they locked and bolted all the doors with a fine

attention to detail.

Henry Wolverton worked rather intermittently after dinner that night.

He was not disturbed by any noises from without. London was quieter

than he had ever known it. He could hear no sound of traffic either

along Bloomsbury Street or Tottenham Court Road. No paper boys came.

No one passed his window. He could not even hear the sound of the

policeman on his beat. But he found the absence of noise on this

occasion more disturbing than the presence of it would have been. He

found himself hailed out of his profoundest efforts of attention by

his consciousness of this abiding, deathly silence. He would discover

himself, sitting idly, listening to the stillness of the night.

A little after twelve o’clock, he got up and went to the front door.

And after he had somewhat impatiently unlocked it, drawn back the

bottom bolt and the top bolt, released the night latch, and undone the

chain, he opened the door and stood on the top step, looking out over

the darkness of the Square. After a moment or two, he realized with a

little shock of dismay why the Square looked unfamiliar to him. The

street lamps had not been lighted. Only a clear and brilliant moon in

its second quarter, brooded over the unprecedented silence; weakly

illuminating the apparently deserted city....

The thin scream of fear that suddenly pierced the stillness, came with

an effect of audacious irreverence.

Henry Wolverton stiffened and a cold thrill of apprehension ran down

his spine.

The scream was succeeded by a faint, eager patter of hurrying feet; and

then more distantly, by the brutal intrusion of hoarse shouts, and the

clutter of heavy boots vehemently running.

Wolverton did not move. Until now fear had never entered his life and

he had the courage of a man who has never faced a real danger.

The lighter footsteps were approaching very rapidly, coming up

Bloomsbury Street; and the sound of them seemed suddenly to lift and

acquire precision as a figure came round the corner and turned swiftly

into the Square. Wolverton could see then that the runner was a young

woman in a light dress.

He would have let her pass without trying to attract her attention. He

was watching the whole incident with the detached and careful interest

of the historian. But the young woman, herself, had evidently seen the

beacon of his open door before she actually reached it, and had settled

upon her course of action. She came straight up the steps without an

instant’s hesitation, pushed Henry Wolverton back into the hall, and

closed the door with the intent and silent urgency of a conspirator.

He made no attempt to speak, and the young woman crouched in silence

behind the door, until they had heard the clutter of heavy footsteps

pass by and hurry on, up the Square. The men were not shouting now,

but even through the heavy door, Wolverton could hear them gasping

and panting as they ran. The sound of it made him think of the hoarse

panting of great dogs.

When the flurry of that passing had dwindled again into silence,

the young woman got up, locked and bolted the door and faced Henry

Wolverton under the light of the hall lamp.

“So, that’s all right,” she said, with a little laugh of exultation.

“Do I understand--?” Wolverton began.

“Probably, I should imagine,” she interrupted him. “The scum’s let

loose--the hooligans; the Apaches. After the fighting comes pillage and

rapine.” She frowned slightly as she added, “I suppose rapine has got

to do with rape?”

“It is not used specifically in that sense, now,” Wolverton replied.

“But it had that meaning, earlier.”

“Oh, thanks! Well that was what I meant,” the young woman said. “Do you

mind if I come in and sit down? Is that your room? I’m a bit blown.”

Wolverton stood aside for her to enter the sacred places of his

writing-room.

She nodded by way of thanks, as she passed him, went in, looked round

the room and then having thrown herself with a sigh of relief into his

reading chair, proceeded to take off her hat.

“Jolly room,” she remarked pleasantly, as her deft fingers twitched and

patted at her hair. “You a writer?”

“My name is Henry Wolverton,” he informed her with a modest dignity.

“What?” she exclaimed, sitting bolt upright and staring at him eagerly.

“Henry Wolverton, the historian?”

He nodded gravely.

“Oh, Lord!” she said, and went on, “Well, I was wrong about one thing.

I said you must be a dried up little mummy of a man, all beard and

spectacles. And you’re not a bit like that. In fact you’re quite

unusually goodlooking.”

The faintest adumbration of a flush tinged Wolverton’s white forehead.

“My name appears to be known to you,” he remarked, ignoring the

compliment.

“Obviously,” his visitor retorted. “Pretty well known to everyone, I

should imagine, just now.”

“May I ask why?” he put in.

“Well, considering that you’re the man who’s responsible for the

revolution, I suppose you’re more famous at the present moment than any

man in Great Britain,” she said. “Though you’re not exactly popular

with either side, to-night, I should think,” she added thoughtfully.

Henry Wolverton made a little noise in his throat that sounded like an

asthmatic cough. With him that noise did duty for a laugh. “I’m afraid

I don’t follow you,” he said.

“Do you mean that you don’t admit your own responsibility for the

revolution?” she asked.

“I cannot see that I am even remotely connected with it,” he replied.

The young woman pursed her lovely mouth, and clasped her hands

round her knee. After a reflective pause she remarked with apparent

inconsequence, “My name is Susan Jeffery; but I don’t suppose that

conveys anything to you.”

“I believe I saw the name on a committee list of the ‘League of

Youth,’” Wolverton said.

“Lord, what a memory he has,” commented Susan Jeffery in a soft voice.

“But I must plead ignorance of the general scope of your activities,”

he continued.

“But you know something about our league?” she put in.

“Something,” he admitted.

“Such as our policy of percolation?”

“I understand that your endeavour is to be represented in every

imaginable grade of society.”

“Precisely. From royalty down to the criminal and the gutter-snipe,”

Susan confirmed. “We have only one qualification for membership; we

admit no one over twenty-five.”

“And have you many members, now?” Wolverton inquired politely.

“Nine thousand, eight hundred and forty-three,” Susan replied. “We

admitted a hundred and seven new members after our grand meeting

to-night, including a royal prince and two hooligans.”

Henry Wolverton nodded his head encouragingly.

“Most satisfactory,” he murmured.

Susan dropped her knee and sat up.

“I’m telling you this,” she said in a firm voice, “for your own good.

We discussed you at our meeting, and it was resolved unanimously that

you were largely responsible for the revolution that broke out to-day,

and will end God knows where or when.”

Wolverton made his noise again--Susan had not yet recognized it as

a laugh. “I must confess that I don’t quite follow your train of

reasoning,” he said.

“You don’t _look_ like a fool, either,” Susan commented, frankly. “I

suppose that’s just your one blind spot. Most of us have one.”

“Perhaps you would explain,” Wolverton suggested.

“It’s so bally obvious,” Susan replied. “You’ve been writing articles

for the last six weeks--they’ve appeared all over the shop--rubbing it

in about the English temper. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had been

anybody else, but people believe _you_. All sorts of people. We know

that, through the activities of the league, because we’re represented

everywhere. Well, what has been the effect of those articles? One side,

the side in power, has believed you and decided on your authority not

to give way. The other side, the workers, has believed you, too, and

they’re so annoyed to think that you are right that they’ve determined

to prove you’re wrong.”

“But, in that case, I was right,” Wolverton put in with his first sign

of excitement.

“You were, until you put your opinion on record,” Susan corrected

him. “You see,” she explained, “it’s like knowing the future. You can

only know it for certain about other people as long as you keep it to

yourself. If you tell a man that next Friday he’ll walk under a ladder

in Fleet Street, and that a brick will drop on his head and kill him,

he’ll keep out of Fleet Street next Friday, if he believes you.”

“I admit the instance,” Wolverton murmured.

“Well, it’s just the same in your case. The workers have been saying,

‘Here’s that chap Wolverton convincing everybody that there’ll be no

revolution, that we’ll have to give in, in the end, and make terms. And

all the politicians, and the owners and the middle classes believe him,

and they’ll stick it out to the last minute, because they’re sure we

have got the “English temper” and won’t fight. Well, we’ll jolly well

prove that Mr. Wolverton is wrong for once.’ You see,” Susan concluded

with a graceful gesture. “Our league knows these things. And it comes

to this: if you want your prophecies to come off, you must keep them to

yourself until after the event. Hasn’t your study of history taught you

that much?”

Henry Wolverton leaned forward in his chair and covered his face with

his hands.

“I’m sorry if I’ve upset you,” Susan said gently. “I’m sure you’re a

very nice man, really.”

Wolverton groaned. “I’m finally discredited,” he muttered.

“Oh, no!” Susan comforted him. “Not in your own line. Remember the

motto of our League: ‘These things are hidden from the wise and prudent

and revealed unto babes.’ No man, however clever he is, can be expected

to know everything.”

Henry Wolverton lifted his head.

“I shall never write again,” he said, in the tone of one who makes the

great renunciation; and he looked at Susan a trifle nervously, as if he

feared this immense announcement might be a little too much for her.

“Just as well,” she replied soothingly. “In any case we’ve pretty

well scrapped history now. It was never any practical use except as a

reference for precedents; and now we’re chucking precedents down the

sink as fast as we can. We’re all going to begin again presently--when

the fighting is over--on a new basis.”

Henry Wolverton jumped to his feet and began to pace up and down the

room.

“It’s sure to be a wrench at first, of course,” Susan consoled him.

“These things always are. But if I can help you in any way--”

He turned on her with the first sign of emotional passion he had ever

displayed.

“You!” he said fiercely. “Don’t you realize that you’ve destroyed

my whole life’s work; that you’ve robbed me in ten minutes of every

happiness and satisfaction I’ve ever had. Good God, if I’d known, I’d

have slammed the door in your face, just now. I would have delivered

you over to the scum of London to do what they would with you.”

Susan blushed. “I don’t think that’s a very nice thing to say,” she

remarked, gently. “But perhaps it’s just as well for you to blow off

steam a bit. It does help when you’ve had a real facer. And honestly,

you know, although I’m very sorry in a way, I do think it’s all for

your good that I came in to-night; because you would have been bound to

find it out for yourself sooner or later.”

Henry Wolverton stared at her, and his look of anger slowly gave place

to one of bewilderment.

“But what am I to _do_?” he asked. “I’ve always worked for ten hours a

day. I can’t live without work of some kind, and now....”

Susan got up and came across the room to him, with an expression of

bright and eager helpfulness.

“Oh! look here, we’ll find a use for you,” she said, laying her hand on

his arm. “You’re too old to join the league, of course--”

“I’m thirty-seven,” he interpolated.

“It’s quite young, really,” she comforted him. “I’m twenty-three. But

what I was going to say was that we are founding a reference committee

of experts of all kinds to advise the league. The members of that

committee will have no voice in our decisions, you understand; they’ll

be simply advisory. And it would be absolutely splendid to have you as

chairman. I shall get no end of prestige from the league for having

found you.” Her face shone with the joy of the successful discoverer.

“I understand you to suggest,” Henry Wolverton commented dryly,

“that I should devote the rest of my life, and the--er--fruits of my

scholarship, to instructing young men and women under twenty-five

years of age in the lessons of history; always with the distinct

understanding that they are in no way pledged to apply my advice in the

prosecution of their own policy?”

Susan did not miss the implications of his tone. “My dear man,” she

said, “whatever is the good of scholarship, if it isn’t to advise the

young? Surely you haven’t been studying history all these years just in

order to swap opinions with all the other old fogies?”

Henry Wolverton turned his back on her and walked over to the window.

After a short pause he faced her again and said, “You have a remarkable

power of statement, Miss Jeffery. I must admit that I have never before

considered the precise use, in the pragmatical sense, to which I might

apply my--er--scholarship; and I am ready to grant that your point is a

good one. Where your otherwise admirable logic seems to fail, however,

is in the admission that though I might turn my knowledge to good

effect by advising youth, I may be wasting all my effort since youth

will probably not be guided by my teaching.”

“I don’t know much about logic,” replied Susan, “but I should have

thought it must be pretty evident to you, to-day of all days, that if

we were going to be guided only by the lessons of history, our league

would be a back-number in a week. Isn’t it possible for you to get it

into your head that history isn’t everything?”

She put her last question with the appealing gesture of a mother

addressing a refractory and rather stupid child.

“How is history going to get us out of the mess you’ve landed us in,

for example?” she continued, as Henry Wolverton made no attempt to

answer her. “How is history, alone, going to help us presently to start

everything afresh on a new basis? You must know, yourself, that it’s no

good trying to get back to the old way of doing things. That could only

mean, by your own showing, that we should just be preparing the way for

all this to happen again.”

Henry Wolverton threw up his hands with a gesture of despair.

“But if I admit that you’re right,” he said, “I have to face the

conclusion that I’ve wasted my whole life.”

“Well, in a way, I’m afraid you have, rather,” Susan admitted. “It’s

a great pity, for instance, about this revolution of yours. It means

such a lot of blood and disorder; and people do get so out of hand when

there’s fighting going on. Now if the owners and the middle-classes

hadn’t been so cocksure, and had given way, we could have started in on

our new methods of government without any bother.”

She paused a moment, before she added,

“We’ve got it all worked out, you know, but, of course, I can’t tell

you anything about it, yet.”

“I am, in fact, what you would call a back-number,” Henry Wolverton

said.

Susan puckered her forehead. “I think there’s still a hope for you,”

she remarked.

“After all these years?” he asked.

“If you’d let me take you in hand for a bit,” she said. “You seem

willing to learn.”

“But you have surely more important work to do? You couldn’t spare time

to teach me?” he suggested.

“I think I might work it in,” she said reflectively. “I’d take you

about with me and show you things--real things, you know. What’s

chiefly wrong with you is that you’ve spent all your time over your old

books.”

“You suggest that I ought to study life in--in action?” Henry Wolverton

inquired.

“Rather,” Susan agreed. “You ought to come to one of our meetings.”

She stopped abruptly, and her hand went up to her mouth with a gesture

of dismay.

“Oh! Great Scott!” she ejaculated; “that reminds me, I was going on

to another frightfully important meeting when those hooligans started

chasing me; and that and our talk put it right out of my head.”

“At what time was this important meeting to be held?” Henry Wolverton

asked, looking at his watch.

“One o’clock,” she told him.

“You still have ten minutes,” he said.

Susan shuddered. “I daren’t go out again alone,” she confessed. “I

simply daren’t. I’d--I’d sooner stay here all night with you.”

“I shall be delighted to come with you,” Henry Wolverton said.

“You!” Susan exclaimed. “But don’t you understand the risk? The mob’s

loose. What good would you be against three or four chunky hooligans?”

Henry Wolverton squared his shoulders. He was a tall, finely-built man,

and his face had the cool assurance of one who has never known fear.

“I am not afraid of hooligans,” he said.

Susan gazed at him with frank admiration.

“You know you’re a perfect topper in some ways,” she complimented him.

He bowed gravely. “If I might be admitted to this meeting of yours,” he

said; “it would perhaps afford me an opportunity to begin my education.”

“If you’re sure you’re not afraid,” Susan replied, picking up her hat.

“I’m not in the least afraid,” he said. “Will you take my arm?”

At the open door they paused a moment, looking out into the darkness;

listening to the profound silence of the empty night--creative youth

and patient scholarship, hand-in-hand, facing the immense void of the

unforetellable future.

A NEGLIGIBLE EXPERIMENT

“I can’t get him right, somehow,” the young sculptor said, but he

looked tenderly at the little figure of the man he was modelling in

plasticine, as if, despite its very obvious defects, he found something

to admire in his creation.

“Wants stiffening, doesn’t he?” I suggested. “Couldn’t you put a wire

or something up his legs and back?”

“Well, you see,” my young friend explained, “I could if I knew

beforehand exactly what I was going to do with him. Only I don’t. I

like to make him up as I go along. I’m no good at it really. I can’t

think it all out ahead and then sit down and do it right off. I have to

experiment and--see how it comes, you know. Do you think his head is

too big?”

I thought it was rather big.

The young modeller regarded his creation with a look in which fondness

still seemed to preponderate.

“Perhaps if....” he said; then speech died out of him as his hands

again began to fashion and improve his little image of humanity.

And as I watched him a vision came to me. I lost consciousness of

the boy and his workshop. I wandered away into a dreamland of the

imagination, following the lure of a fantasy deeper and more satisfying

than the reality of life.

* * * * *

When I read in my morning’s paper of the “Nova” in the constellation

of Sagittarius, I thought first of H. G. Wells’s story of “The New

Star,” and smiled. Later, I turned with a little shiver of anxiety to

that chapter in Professor Lowell’s _Evolution of Worlds_ in which he

describes the possible coming of a “dark stranger” out of the depths

of space. Already there were points of striking resemblance between

Lowell’s imaginative account and the details that were appearing

casually, in the intervals between more important news, in the

newspapers. This new star differed from those other _novæ_ so many of

which have been recorded at various times. _They_ brought us tidings

of a collision that had already occurred, blazing out suddenly into a

short-lived splendour and quickly waning again to invisibility. This

stranger, astronomers were agreed, shone not by its own light but by

the reflected light of the sun. Then it must be, relatively, near.

Lowell’s calculations gave us something like thirty years to prepare

before the invader wrought the destruction of the solar system. But,

obviously, that calculation depended on various assumptions that the

reality need not verify. This strange visitor might be much smaller

than he had assumed--he had taken the enormous mass of the sun as his

standard--its albedo might be lower; its speed greater. Also Lowell’s

stranger was assumed to be coming at right angles to the plane of the

ecliptic; this one would, as it were, skim the edge of that swimming

saucer. Would any of the outer planets be interposed between us

and this dreadful visitor? Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars,

might any of them be a buffer to us--provide us, perhaps, with some

stupendous display in the heavens, but save us from ultimate disaster?

Everyone treated the thing so lightly. Here and there alarmist

paragraphs appeared, but they only displayed the hand of the

sensation-monger. No one took the threat seriously. And yet the

astronomers must know? They had had more than a week, now, in which to

make their calculations.

And then the shadow fell with such suddenness that it was impossible to

say how the certainty had come to us. Everyone knew. The astronomers

confirmed one another without a dissentient. And there was nothing

in the way. With a horrible unanimity the outer planets had left a

clear space for the intruder, while the Earth, with that blundering

indifference which is surely its chief characteristic, was stolidly

marching straight into the path of destruction. Is there any esoteric

significance in the fact that the Earth has a greater density than any

other member of the solar system?

Everyone knew, but little was changed. We went on with our affairs;

with little zest, no doubt--we could never forget the deepening shadow.

But what else was there for us to do but go on? We could not instantly

alter ourselves or our way of life. Religions blazed into a spasmodic

fever as men and women sought refuge from the dreadful reality. Crimes

of lust and greed increased for the same reason. But for the most part

we continued in the old ways by sheer inertia, though there was a new

and smaller moon visible to us in the night sky, a moon that waxed with

infinite slowness towards the full, and grew larger night by night.

We knew by then that the stranger was as big as Jupiter, and with a

density little less than that of the Earth.

The first portents of disaster came when our own moon was approaching

the new. The stranger’s mass had begun to affect the tides, and we were

warned to evacuate all low lands, near the sea, upon the estuaries, and

incidentally the river level in London. Four days before the highest

tide the Thames flooded Farringdon Street, Westminster, and great

districts on the south bank, and the retreating river laid bare the

river-bed as far down as Greenwich.

The population of London had fled to the heights North and South

before the great floods that devastated all the low lands of Essex,

Kent, Surrey, and Middlesex. And with that rush for safety and the

rapidly increasing portents of disaster the routine of civilisation was

definitely broken. It seemed as if in the mass we were being gradually

stripped of all our tediously-acquired virtues and vices, until but one

instinct remained, the instinct for self-preservation. That, however,

was only the effect produced by the panic movement of the crowd; when

one came to individuals....

I can, however, only speak of two, myself and another man. We sat

together on a hill in Derbyshire and watched through the last night.

A certain calmness had come to me, then, mingled with the queerest

feelings of excitement and expectation. Within sight of death, I could

still enjoy this amazing celestial adventure. The new planet that was

rushing in upon us had already torn us from our steady path about the

sun, and our old familiar moon dwindled to the size of a sixpence, and,

diminishing almost visibly, was within a few hours of destruction. For

the moon had fled its old allegiance to the Earth and was rushing to

the arms of this great stranger like some passionate, unfaithful lover.

But the new planet itself drowned all consciousness of lesser things

when it rose magnificently above the eastern horizon. That night it

was a full circle of yellow light, and across its great expanse moved

one circle of intense blackness, the size of our old moon, a circle

that was slowly increasing in size, the shadow of our own Earth. So

great a thing appeared this new planet, then, that when its lower rim

was at last clear of the horizon, its upper limb towered half-way to

the zenith. It had few markings, but from one pole, which was turned

markedly towards us, radiated uneven, dark lines--chains of mountains,

perhaps--that definitely produced the effect of a solid globe long

before its actual convexity was recognisable. All the rest of the

planet presented a smooth, unbroken expanse, possibly the vast bed of

some long-vanished sea.

For an hour or more my companion and I had sat in silence watching

this gigantic spectacle; then he said quietly, “We are witnessing the

failure of a negligible experiment.”

I did not answer at once. I had not caught his drift. I was struggling

with a foolish preoccupation, the result of an almost lifelong habit.

As I watched I was searching for words to describe what I saw. I wanted

to write my experience; yes, even there, under the sentence of death

pronounced not only upon me, but upon all humanity, I was struggling

with this meaningless desire to create a record that none could ever

read.

I made an effort and roused myself from this inane preoccupation.

“Negligible?” I said, grasping at what seemed to be his most prominent

word.

“Proved to be negligible,” he asserted. “You are a serious man? You

don’t cling to straws? You have no doubt that this is the end of

the Earth? Very well then, you know that we are to be destroyed? By

an accident? Possibly. Or it may be that this arrow that has been

discharged at us was shot deliberately; with a definite purpose.

“It isn’t as if the same thing had not happened before,” he continued

after a pause. “We have seen it--seen the effects at least. When some

temporary star blazed up in the sky, we inferred some such collision

as this. It may very well be that from a planet in some other system

men may catch sight of this tiny blaze of ours--and wonder. It will be

relatively a very small affair. Some of those we’ve seen must have been

many thousand times greater.

“But the point is that this experiment of making men upon the Earth

is now proved to be negligible. In a few hours it will be finished,

wiped out. And whether that termination is the result of accident or

design makes no difference to the effect. This is an answer to all our

philosophies and religions. Either we are the creatures of some chance

evolutionary process, or we are an experiment that has failed.”

I looked at him, and noted with a curious stir of unplaceable

recollection that his head was too large.

“It is certain that we shall go off like an exploded shell?” I asked.

“I don’t fancy that many of us will live to see that,” he replied.

“Most of us will be drowned in the next tide. It will come in a wall of

water many thousand feet high. Don’t you notice a feeling of lightness

in your body? The attraction of this great stranger is beginning

to drag at us. On the other side of the Earth men are feeling an

intolerable heaviness. And our speed increases. We have been drawn out

of our orbit. We are rushing now to greet the stranger with a kiss of

fire. Our circling about the sun is done for ever. We and the stranger

are leaping together like two bubbles in a cup.”

I believe some hours passed before I spoke again. A sense of imminence

had grown upon me in the meantime. I was aware of the guards that were

fetching me to execution.

“After all,” I cried, “there may still be such a thing as an immortal

soul. Though every physical expression is smashed at one blow, that

does not prove....”

“There is no such thing as proof possible,” my companion interrupted.

“But don’t you know in your heart that it’s no good?”

* * * * *

“No good. It’s no good.” I woke with a start at the repetition of that

statement.

My young modeller was rolling a great ball of plasticine, and before I

could stop him he had thrown it with deadly accuracy at his effigy of

man.

“He wouldn’t come right,” he explained, picked up the shapeless mass of

clay, and tossed it carelessly into a corner of the workshop.

“Oh, but you shouldn’t have done that,” I said, with the incurable

didacticism of the pedagogue.

THE MIRACLE

“_I’m_ dead.”

She heard the voice, _his_ voice, speaking distinctly, with something

of the same fatalism, half-careless, half-resentful, that he had used

when he returned to France after their five short days of married

life. For one moment she believed that it was actually his voice,

that he had come suddenly and wonderfully out of his six weeks’

insensibility, to a doubting interrogation of the darkness. But even

as she fumbled impatiently for the switch of the electric light, she

knew that the voice had not come from the bed on the further side of

the room, but had spoken its horrible message close, very close, to her

ear--intimately, confidentially, with a touch of swaggering, careless

courage.

And as the light, with an effect of servile obedience, disclosed the

room at her touch of the switch, she had no least hope that she would

be the witness of the longed-for miracle; that she would see him who

had lain so long a lax and useless counterfeit of his vigorous self,

half raised and questioning the unfamiliar surroundings with his

pitiful assertion.

Nevertheless she got out of bed, a slight pathetic figure in the white

light that searched out every corner of the room, and crossed to where

he lay inert and flaccid.

No, there was no change in him. The enigma that had baffled all the

specialists still persisted. He was still the living dead man who had

been ejected with just one little sobbing gasp of air out of the narrow

tunnel, the bore of his own body, by the premature explosion of the

mine he had spent six weeks’ labour in laying. On the further side that

explosion had blown out the flank of a hill, but he who had stoppered

the narrow vent on the hither side, like a plug of damp earth in the

mouth of a rifle-barrel, had been softly expelled into the presence

of his fellow-sappers waiting at the junction of the wider tunnel they

had bored, with never a mark of injury on him. Even his hair, which had

been so near--a paltry twenty feet or so--to the charge that had lifted

goodness knows how many tons of earth and stone sky-high--even his hair

had not been singed.

His body, almost incredibly, had come unscathed from its open sight of

death, but something--his wife thought of it as his spirit--had been

instantly shocked into silence. Since that awful experience he had

given no sign of consciousness or of volition. His bodily functions

continued their offices with a slow, dull persistence--he was fed

artificially now and again to remedy the slight waste of tissue--but

his spirit gave no least sign of its occupancy.

The specialists had been greatly interested, but he had given them so

little material for actual experiment that they had yielded to his

wife’s urgent request, and yesterday he had been transferred to her

immediate care in the reasonably convenient Maida Vale flat in which

they had spent their too restricted honeymoon....

She leant over him now and stared into his composed impassive face,

every feature of which was steady with the challenging quiet of death.

Where was he? she wondered. What could she conceivably do to reach him

through that unresponsive instrument on the bed--an instrument that

appeared as useless now as an unstrung piano?

And the voice, that had made its immense admission with the desperate

gallantry of one who had flung up his arms and acknowledged himself

prisoner to the great enemy--whence had come the voice? She could

remember no antecedent dream. The sound of his speaking had wakened

her, and in the act of waking she had heard his surrender made, as

clearly as if he had spoken it with his mouth at her ear. She felt that

she could hear it still. That reckless sentence was yet ringing through

the room: “_I’m_ dead.” Just so, she thought, might he have said

“Kamerad” in face of some overwhelmingly superior force.

“But you’re _not_; you’re not dead,” she pleaded to that insensible

figure; “you’re alive if--if you would but come back.”

She might as well have strummed on the keyboard of a wireless piano for

all the reaction she could produce from the lax representative that

lay before her, but her own verbal image returned to her with another

question.

Come back? From where? Where was _he_ now--the individuality she

addressed as “you”? Was that essential personality of his buried deep

in this spiritless automaton, or was it away somewhere in the void,

unaware both of its fleshly anchor and of her? Could she not reach that

spirit of his, poised out of time and space, by the powers of her own

love and longing, since they, too, surely were able to transcend the

limitations of the purely physical? But to do that she must not sit and

gaze at this empty replica on the bed; she must think not of his image,

but of _him_, not of the representative, but of the spirit.

Nevertheless, when she began to pace the length of the room, she found

that when the sight of her husband’s placid face was hidden some

stimulus to concentration was removed also. While she stared at him

her thought was held and focused, now she was distracted by her vision

of the familiar things that were associated with her past life in his

company. She was thinking, not of him, but of the things he had done,

the man he had been.

Perhaps darkness might help her, she thought, and she laid herself down

on the bed and once more quenched the obedient light.

For a time she lay still, staring into the blackness, clenched in a

vivid effort of concentration, and then her eyes closed, and even as

she protested that she would not sleep, she had a vision of herself

lying inert and pale on her own bed, even as he was lying.

Then she seemed to be rising, baffled and half-unwilling, through

wreaths of a palpable darkness that clung about her with a dragging,

suffocating weight. And then it seemed to her that she was wandering,

lost and perplexed, on a gaunt and arid plain that might once have been

the bed of a now vanished sea.

She was not alone. Other figures, wraiths of humanity, also wandered

here and there. But none noticed her. They moved as if they were

searching for something they could never hope to find. They peered

vaguely downwards, passing her with bent heads and eyes that sought the

ground with a reluctant determination....

She found herself trembling, not with horror, but with a rapture of

expectancy. She had become aware that one among these drifting wraiths

was moving definitely towards her, drawn by the power of her longing.

And she had command of the power, so that it was ecstasy to wield it.

Almost she was tempted to withhold her amazing strength in order to

taste again the pleasure of its renewed exercise.

Then with a sense of some lost interval she found herself face to face

with him. But he looked at her without a sign of recognition. His eyes,

too, were full of that aimless intention, as though he was under an

eternal command to search for some unknown thing that was hidden he

knew not where.

“Paul!” she cried to him.

He made no reply. He did not seem to have heard her. But still she was

conscious of her immense power over him.

“Paul,” she said again. “Come back with me.”

He heard her then; but now it was as if he could not see her. He looked

about him, half-startled, half-resentful. “There’s no way back from the

plains of France,” he said, and a sudden doubt shook her. Her power to

hold him was failing. From out of the ground the darkness was rising

again like a swelling lake of still, black smoke, clinging about her

feet with an awful weight of recall.

She was sinking into the blackness, struggling against its vast

strength as it rose, sluggish and irresistible, to her waist, her

breast, her neck. She could not fight its immense strength, but her

power had returned to her. They might be drowned together in the

darkness, but she would compel him to come with her. She could see him

no longer, but she was aware of her limitless ability to hold him to

her by the power of her longing and her love....

She came slowly out of some remote distance to a realisation of herself

lying unaccountably still and dazed on her own bed. She could not move,

as yet, but her eyes were open, and she could see the grey outline of

the room in the growing daylight.

And then, again, clearly, but more distantly, she heard the sound of

Paul’s voice repeating his strange assertion.

“I’m dead,” he said, but in the tone there was now, she thought, the

first flicker of a doubt, the statement of wonder.

She made a great effort and raised herself.

He was sitting up in bed, propping his weakened body on his tremulous

arms.

“You’re not dead, Paul; you’re _not_, you’re _not_,” she screamed.

“I’ve brought you back, and I am going to hold you here.”

In a moment she was kneeling by him, supporting, clasping him. Her

power had become overwhelming, illimitable.

He looked at her with a grin, that was in some way sheepish, a little

ashamed.

“Well, if I’m not, I jolly well ought to be,” he said.

It must have seemed to him so boastful to be alive again.

YOUNG STRICKLAND’S CAREER

No doubt the story of the future is written, so far as the future is

an expression of present potentialities. We boast our foreknowledge

of planetary history, and can prophesy with fine accuracy the

occurrence of every major and minor eclipse or occultation in the

solar system. But in the most precise science there remains always

at least one element that is undefinable and unknowable. The regular

traffic of planets about the sun might one day be upset by the coming

of an unknown visitor from the deeps of space. The materials of our

knowledge are so limited. And in human affairs we know so little of the

materials. Nevertheless, it may be that to the universal consciousness

the future is a foretellable expression of our present potentialities.

I remember how my friend Strickland used to harp on that theme eighteen

years ago. I was incredulous; a stickler for free-will. I could not

bear the thought of anything like a cut-and-dried programme of human

development. But my one really convincing retort to all his arguments

was to reply, “Oh; on broad lines, perhaps. On the very broadest lines.”

Strickland’s attitude just then was so obviously influenced by his

desires. He had married at forty, had one child, a boy, and was

oppressed by the fear that he would not live to see his son’s future.

Strickland was obsessed with that idea for a time. He even went so

far as to consult mediums. And a man of forty-five who will consult

professional mediums about the future cannot be quite sane.

His sole excuse for that lapse was the plea that astrology had failed

him. He had had two very expensive horoscopes cast, and they had been

most grievously at fault concerning the first three years of little

Strickland’s life. Both forecasts had been gloomy with regard to those

early years, prophesying a delicate constitution, unusual trouble with

infantile complaints. And one horoscope shrugged its inspired shoulders

at the critical period of teething, and continued with a kind of

cynical despair, as if the astrologer were a little ashamed of the way

he was earning his ten guineas: “Should he, however, survive....” And

the truth was that little Strickland was quite a fatiguingly healthy

child. His appetite and his craving for exercise, even at the age of

eight weeks, were, admittedly, almost abnormal.

So Strickland lost faith in the pattern of the stars, and tried

mediums, who were not so nervous of the magistrates in those days.

If he had stuck to one clairvoyante he might have laid his restless

enquiry, but, unhappily, the first lady he visited misread her client’s

hopes, and mapped out a successful business career for his little

son; and Strickland, who had already fulfilled that destiny in his

own life, and had ambitions to see his son leading a “really sensible

Government,” took another opinion. The second prophetess, pathetically

anxious to please, no doubt, saw young Strickland as a Bishop; the

third was a shade nearer to the mark with an Admiral; but the fourth--a

charming young woman, recently engaged to be married, and collecting a

trousseau by her last professional efforts--made the boy a Poet.

After that Strickland bought a crystal, and tried to see the future for

himself.

I laughed at him then, of course; and even now I feel inclined to laugh

at those first foolish enquiries of his. But his very earnestness

should have saved Strickland from anything like ridicule; and I am

glad to remember that I did not laugh when he told me of the one and

only vision that came to him through the crystal--it was, by the way,

an unusually fine specimen, as big as an orange. He picked it up

second-hand, somewhere in Soho.

As I see it, one of the most intriguing features of Strickland’s

experience is the fact that he had ceased to probe his son’s future

when the vision came. The boy was seven years old then, and had a

little sister of two and a half who had partly diverted her father’s

attention. And Strickland had probably outgrown the fear of his own

premature death; though it may be that his passionate longing for

assurance as to the glory of his boy’s career had not so much spent

itself as been thrust back into his sub-consciousness. Superficially

the difference in him was quite obvious. The change of his tone, for

example, when he spoke of his son. Even the manner of reference. The

tender enunciation of “My little boy” had altered to “That young rascal

of mine,” just the proudly modest description of the ordinary father.

And when the vision came, neither he nor I related it in any way to his

ancient search....

He came to my rooms one evening after dinner, produced the crystal from

his pocket, and tossed it over to me.

“A present for a sceptic,” he said. “I’ve finished with it.”

I might have thought that he was clearing up the lumber of his old

fancies if it had not been for his manner; but the garment of his

initiation still clung to him and affected me with the strangeness of

its mystery.

I shuddered.

“What did you see?” I asked.

“Oh! don’t say you believe in it,” he said; “after all your jeers at

me.”

“Did you see anything?” I insisted, nursing the crystal in the cave of

my two hands. I stared into it and saw the faint pink of my magnified

palm. No vision came to me; yet I was aware of some potency in the

thing.

“Perhaps some reflection, some translation of one’s

sub-consciousness....” I ventured.

Strickland sneered. “By God, I hope not,” he said.

“What were you--looking for?” I asked.

“For nothing. I wasn’t looking for anything,” he said. “I picked the

thing up by the merest accident. I was going to give it to the little

girl--as a plaything.”

“And then....” I prompted him.

“I saw a picture in it. It snatched my attention. I wasn’t thinking....”

“And the picture?”

“Hell. Just hell. The real thing; none of your picturesque flames

and torture. It came out at me, as it were, and it was--well, the

abomination of desolation, nothing more nor less than that.”

“But....” I began.

He interrupted me. His eyes were fixed on the vision of a future that

had become a fragment of his past. “A waste,” he said, in a low,

thoughtful voice. “A dead, horrible waste ... all black and pitted

and furrowed ... it looked as if there had been some awful, blasting

eruption ... or as if the whole earth had been scorched and blighted by

some unimaginably vast fire. But, oh! the terrible gauntness and death

of it all.”

He paused and threw his head back with a queer laugh before he

continued in a new tone, “It was just a silly nightmare, that’s all.

And it had its inevitable element of the grotesque. In the middle of

that waste there was a scarecrow, a live scarecrow--digging. Digging

turnips, if you please. Oh! it was bosh, of course, absolute bosh. I

shall have forgotten all about it next week. But I couldn’t give the

crystal to the little girl after that. You can keep it. Tell me if you

get anything....”

So I kept the crystal, and sometimes stared into it. But no vision came

to me.

* * * * *

It was in the late autumn of 1919 that Strickland got permission to

go out to France. The war had made an old man of him, although he was

little over sixty; and he begged me to go with him. “I should like you

to help me,” he said. “I have a feeling that we might, perhaps, hear

something about that young rascal of mine. ‘Wounded and missing,’ you

know, always leaves one with just a hope.”

The first beautiful release of peace was passing then into that

restless craving for immense action which affected us all so strongly

at that time; and the feeling was aggravated in my case by the

realisation of impotence. I was too old to help.

I accepted Strickland’s offer, eagerly....

I do not believe that he remembered his vision when, after a week’s

fruitless enquiry, we came one afternoon to the historic desert that

had once been beautiful France. Certainly, he made no reference to his

old experience; but he was almost senile. I noticed a difference in

him, even in that one week.

But _I_ remembered; and I had a fit of cold shivering that I could not

control when we came out on to the awful plain that they now call The

Plain of the Dead, and saw the figure of that one demented peasant,

dressed in the grotesque relics of two nations’ uniforms.

He was digging feverishly with his pointed spade, and I heard the ring

of it as it struck.

It was not a turnip that he wrenched up.

The thing rolled towards us....

Young Strickland’s head had always been a queer shape.

A DIFFERENCE OF TEMPERAMENT

The differences between “young” Royce and “old” Bunnett had a dramatic

quality that stirred even the wearied indifference of Stamp and Co.’s

counting-house to simple efforts in psychological analysis.

Young Royce was dark, square, and determined; a reasoned boaster, who

verified his boasts by action. When he made what sounded like a very

rash assertion, it was bad policy to contradict, and quite fatal to bet

against him.

Old Bunnett was tall and thin, fair, drooping, and despondent. He

seldom committed himself to a confident statement of opinion, but

gravely, almost voluptuously, hoped for the worst on every possible

occasion. He was, by the office’s classification, of the same breed as

“old Robinson,” who had come into the firm as a boy of fourteen and had

now served his employers faithfully for fifty-one years.

Royce found a delight in marking that likeness. “Bunny, my boy,” he

used to say, “you’ve come here to stop. When I come back here in twenty

years’ time I shall find you still at the same old grind. You’ll never

get out of it.”

“Not so sure as I want to,” was Bunny’s single form of defence against

this impeachment of his powers of initiative--that and a sniff. The

sniff was his characteristic comment on life; a long and thoughtful

substitute for speech. He was not more than ordinarily susceptible to

colds in the head; and his sniff was less a physical function than a

vehicle of mental expression.

Young Royce, however, wanted and meant to leave the firm “directly he

could see his way,” as he put it. He had a vein of prudence, or it may

have been merely shrewdness, that was sometimes overlooked by those

who had come a little to dread the threat of his boasting. The one

consolation afforded to those who suffered under his implication of

their feebleness was the reflection that he would almost certainly “go

to the bad one of these days.” Bunny, alone, was pessimist enough to

admit that Royce would “get on.” He had been known to add, “Sure to;

he’s the sort that gets on.”

The office as a whole jealously disagreed with him; and in their

vehement denouncement of Bunny’s pessimism failed to recognise that

underlying all the violent and obvious contrasts between Royce and

Bunnett there was at least one point of likeness, inasmuch as they both

believed in Royce. (The only likeness conceded by the office was the

coincidence that both men were born in the same month of the same year,

and had come into the firm of Stamp and Company on the same day.)

Royce had actually left the firm on the Saturday afternoon that first

introduced him to Bunnett’s mother on Hampstead Heath. He had “seen his

way” as far as a job at Capetown--a very risky and uncertain affair, in

the office’s opinion.

He had a streak of romantic sentiment hidden away somewhere, and he had

come up to the Spaniards’ Road to “take a last look at London.” He was

leaning over the railings looking down across the Vale of Health, when

he became aware of an arrested Bunnett sniffing profoundly at the back

of a bath-chair.

“My mother,” Bunnett said, by way of introduction, and then in a

half-aside, “she’s a bit of an invalid, but she’s been a little better

lately, ain’t you, mother? This is the Mr. Royce I was telling you

about. Just going out to South Africa.”

Mrs. Bunnett pinched her mouth into a line of sympathetic disapproval.

“It’s a long way to go,” she remarked--and sniffed thoughtfully.

She and her son were, Royce thought, as exactly alike as a couple of

old sheep.

The job in Capetown proved even more uncertain than the office had

hopefully predicted, and Royce presently migrated to Melbourne. Thence

he drifted across to Hobart. A year later he had found a temporary

post in Ceylon, then worked his way up the Bay of Bengal to Calcutta,

and stayed there a month before he took ship to Tientsin. It was in

1909, seven years after he had left London, that he first put foot in

America, landing at San Francisco, after crossing the Pacific from

Yokohama by way of Hawaii.

In those seven years he had suffered and learnt many things, but if the

staff of Stamp and Co.’s counting-house had met “young Royce” on his

landing in California they would have found no difference in him. He

came ashore with the boast that he meant to make money in America.

And, indeed, his apparent failure to win any financial success during

those years of wandering was due rather to that streak of imaginative

romance in him than to any weakness of character. It had been necessary

for him to satisfy some lust for adventure and experience before he

could settle down to achieve a worldly ambition. He knew himself well

enough to recognise his own quality. He had a perfect confidence in

his ability to make money eventually. And just as he had made good his

boasts in the old days, so now he made good his determination to seek

another form of romance in America.

It would be superfluous to trace the means of his ascent. He was

so obviously the successful type that readily finds employment and

opportunity in the United States. He had determination combined with

initiative and imagination. It is doubtful if even the deliberate,

conservative methods of Stamp and Co. could have overlooked his ability

if he had elected to stay in the employ of that stately English concern.

He became an American citizen in 1913, but he did not revisit

London until the autumn of 1917, when he came over on business as

a representative of the Steel Trust. Arthur H. Royce had become a

person of considerable importance and influence. He stayed at the

Carlton Hotel during the progress of his negotiations with the

English Government Department, the methods of which he ridiculed as

being founded on the same principles as those familiar to him in the

counting-house of Messrs. Stamp and Co.

But the old streak of romance showed itself again on the last Saturday

of his stay in England. He had not called on the partners or employees

of his old office. He had come to boast in action now, and the boast

of language had become futile and unnecessary. He went up to the

Spaniards’ Road solely to satisfy some need for self-approval that he

hoped to find in the contrast between his present condition and that in

which he had last looked down over the hazy prospect of London, fifteen

years before.

He was leaning over the rail in much the same place and attitude when

he saw, with a strange thrill, the once familiar figure of old Bunnett

coming towards him, pushing his invalid mother in what was surely the

same bath-chair.

Royce straightened himself, and turned to meet them. He wondered if

they would recognise him. There was something of the old self-conscious

boast in his attitude as he held out his hand and said;

“Hullo! Bunny. Still here, then?”

Bunnett and his mother sniffed in concert, a deep and melancholy

comment on life.

“Still here,” agreed Bunnett, and his mother added, “So you’re back in

London, Mr. Royce?”

“For a few days,” Royce admitted.

“South African job turn out all right?” Bunnett asked.

Royce hesitated. In one swift flash of retrospect he looked back on

those full and varied adventures that had begun for him with the

voyage to Capetown, and knew that though he stood there talking and

boasting for a week, he could not convey to old Bunnett and his mother

one-hundredth part of the romance and wonder that had glorified his

existence for fifteen years.

“Oh! yes; all right,” he said; “and you? Still with Stamps?”

And Bunnett, too, hesitated as if there were something he also lacked

power to describe before he answered “Yes, still there.”

The conversation seemed to offer no further possibilities. For a

moment they stood awkwardly, and then Bunnett said, “My mother’s a

bit of an invalid, but she’s been a little better lately.” He sniffed

thoughtfully.

As Royce made his way back to his hotel he modestly thanked God that he

was not as some other men.

He had, however, missed one small observation. He had been standing on

Bunnett’s right side as they talked, and had not noticed that he had

lost his left arm.

REFERENCE WANTED!

As usual, the compartment was nearly empty after we left Rickmansworth,

and I anticipated that my one other fellow-passenger would probably get

out at the next station and leave me to finish the dull journey alone.

I did not, in any case, expect much entertainment from his society. He

had a narrow forehead, and a preoccupied, rather scared, expression. It

crossed my mind that he might have been a sufferer from shell-shock. I

had seen that look in the eyes of one such case, a look at once timid,

defensive, and suspicious. I was surprised when he came across the

compartment to the seat opposite to me and began to talk.

We opened in the usual way by abusing the line, but he broke off in the

middle to comment on the book I had been reading, Dostoievsky’s _The

Possessed_.

“Fine stuff, that,” he commented, looked at me suspiciously

for a moment, and then added, “What’s that other book of his,

Anna--something?”

“Anna Karenin?” I suggested.

He nodded.

“But that’s Tolstoi,” I said.

“Very likely,” he replied; “I’ve no memory for some things. No memory

at all. But I’ve read more than you might expect. To be quite honest,

when I was a bit younger I read too much.”

I pricked up my ears. I saw the promise of getting him to talk about

himself. And I can listen to anything a man has to tell me of his own

history; it is only men’s opinions that I find so boring. Why will

people have opinions?

“And overstrained your memory?” I asked.

He shook his head and pursed his mouth. “It wasn’t that that ruined my

prospects,” he said.

“No?” I commented, as provocatively as I could.

He leaned a little forward and frowned with an effect of thoughtful

concentration as he said, “You see, in some ways I’ve got too good

a memory; the trouble with me is that I can’t remember what I’ve

remembered.”

I raised my eyebrows interrogatively. I could see that he was warm,

now, with the craving to confess himself.

“You aren’t a writer, yourself, by any chance?” he asked.

“I’ve done a certain amount,” I admitted.

“Thought you had rather that look,” he said; and went on quickly as if

he were afraid that I might, in the circumstances, be tempted to detail

my own achievements; “and that being so, my case might interest you,

professionally, as you might say.”

“It certainly would, if you care to....” I began, but I saw that he

was not listening. Those queer-looking eyes of his had taken on the

expression of one who is engaged in some immense effort of memory.

“As a young man,” he said--I guessed him to be, then, about

thirty-five--“I had a great ambition to become a writer; but although

my mind was full of ideas, I had no gift for putting them into

language. At first, I tried in the ordinary way, just as all beginners

do, to write stories for the magazines; but they none of them got

accepted. Which wasn’t to be wondered at. I knew myself how bad they

were, and I used to console myself a little with that knowledge. I may

have read somewhere that so long as you kept a cool head about your own

writing, there was hope for you.

“Anyway, I left off writing for a time--I wasn’t twenty then--and took

to studying. I read all the best authors--carefully, trying to see how

the thing was done. I had a lot of spare time one way and another,

and in the next five years I got through a wonderful lot of reading.

I didn’t confine myself to English authors, either; I read a heap of

translations from Russian, French, and German. And all that time I

never once tried to write again, myself. I was just getting to learn my

trade, I thought.

“Then I lost my job in the city, and while I was looking about for

another one I had another shot at writing a magazine story. Well, it

was certainly the nearest I’d got up to then of being the right thing.

It was a lot better written than any of my other shots, but the plot

was too weak. And I found that in learning to write I had lost all my

ideas. I’d forgotten all the old ones, and no new ones came to me. At

least, not at first.”

He paused a moment and looked out of the window before he continued,

rather abruptly: “An idea came to me, though, in the train one day--the

best I’d ever had. And I not only saw the whole story clear in my mind,

but I saw just how it ought to be written. I went home and began it at

once. I had it finished in two days. A little masterpiece I thought it

was. I submitted it to one of the reviews, and it was accepted within a

week.

“A fortnight later I’d written another. It was very different from the

first--done in another mood, as you might say, and lighter altogether.

But that one came, too, as an inspiration, and was accepted by one

of the magazines. And, after that, I used to get inspirations every

other day almost--all sorts of inspirations. I saw myself as the most

versatile and gifted writer of the day. I fancied that when my stories

were collected and published in book form they would cause a lot of

attention. By the time my second story appeared in the magazine--that

was the first to get into print--I had written about eight altogether,

and they’d all been taken by some editor or another--except one.”

He paused again, and remained silent for so long that I prompted him by

saying: “What was the matter with that one exception?”

He looked at me and sighed. “There wasn’t anything wrong with the

story, as you might say,” he said; “but there was a note from the

editor in which he said that my story appeared to be a translation from

some French writer, I’ve forgotten the name, and should not have been

submitted as an original contribution. Rather a nasty note it was.

“And about a week later my first story came out in the review, and then

there was the devil to pay. It seems that that was a translation, too,

from the Russian, and had been printed in English, in a collection

of the fellow’s works. His name began with a T, too, I fancy, but it

wasn’t Tolstoi.”

“Turgenev?” I suggested.

“Very likely,” he said wearily. “_I_ can’t remember. All I know is that

every one of my stories were cribs. I’d remembered them all, and didn’t

remember that I’d remembered. Well, I got back all the stories that

hadn’t been published, but there was the very deuce of a row.”

The train was drawing into Aylesbury, and my companion got up and

collected his things from the rack. Before he got out, however, he

paused to say, “Well, there you are. It was a dreadful experience for

me, but if you can make any use of it, professionally, so to speak,

you’re welcome to it. Good-day to you.”

I had still four more stations to go, and I sat on, turning over that

strange confession in my mind. The man had appeared to be honest,

the story sounded true as he told it, yet his phraseology and his

accent were not those I should have expected from one of his literary

experience.

But what worries me most of all is the vague but horribly persistent

impression that somewhere, at some time, I have seen that story of his

in print....

AS THE CROW FLIES

It is more than twenty years, now, since the late George Wallace

came into the offices of Hallows and Rice one afternoon and talked

to me about the novel he was writing. He was well known, even then,

as journalist, essayist, playwright, and poet, and I welcomed with

enthusiasm the suggestion that the firm of publishers for which I was

then reader should consider the book when it was written. He told me in

the strictest confidence that the title was to be _As the Crow Flies_,

and gave me a hint of the subject he proposed to treat. Both title and

subject were, I thought, admirable from every point of view, but he

said that he would prefer me to say nothing to the firm about the novel

until it was actually written. “Wait until you’ve read it, my dear

chap,” he said. “I haven’t told another soul as yet, and I don’t want

to, until the thing’s done and off my hands.”

I did not see him again for nearly six months. He was the guest of the

evening at a small literary dining club on that occasion, and when

I went over and sat down by him, after the speeches, he instantly

referred to our last interview by saying, “It’s getting on, but we

can’t talk about it here. How’s the business?” I told him that the

business, so far as I was concerned, remained in a state of tense

expectation for a really firstclass novel. He nodded with an air of

satisfaction. “You shall have it,” he said. “If you’ll walk part of

the way home with me I’ll tell you something about it.” He lived at

Highgate, and my rooms were at Herne Hill, but I was prepared to miss

the last train rather than lose that confidence. I was very eager in

those days.

And I certainly did not regret the walk to Highgate and back, nor the

two hours’ wait at Ludgate Hill for the 3.15 “paper” train. Wallace

let himself go that night, and made me realise that his novel was to

be the best thing for years. He told me all about it. The book was

to be a complete exposition of the British national character, as

portrayed in the person of his hero, Joseph Blake. Blake was to be a

success; a typical member of the middle class, educated at a grammar

school, entering a business career at eighteen, and Parliament at

forty-five; achieving cabinet rank at fifty-four, and the Premiership

at sixty-three. As a background to the central figure there were to

be any number of minor characters, all, as it were, supporting and

representing Blake--“the firm mass of British opinion” Wallace called

it. The single exception was to be a school friend of Blake’s, a man of

brilliant parts, but without social or personal ambitions, who spent

his life in writing works of philosophy that nobody wanted to read. He

was not poor, nor, in a sense, neglected--“we’ll get away altogether

from the typical romance,” Wallace commented--but his work and life

counted for nothing in popular opinion. The real climax of the book,

and incidentally the very first suggestion that Blake was not a great

man nor his friend (“I have thought of calling him John Rooke,” Wallace

said) a failure, was reached in the last few pages, when Blake, after a

prolonged illness, and patiently waiting for death, confides in Rooke

that he knows, now, that such a career as his had been was wasted

effort. To which Rooke replies that he had known that at school.

“How much of the book have you written?” I asked Wallace just before we

parted.

“About 80,000 words,” he told me, “but I am not absolutely satisfied

with some of the detail. What I propose to do is to finish the thing

and then partly rewrite it.”

He went to America on a long lecture-tour that autumn, and I did not

see him again for twelve months. I sought him out, then, because

McGillett made a casual reference to the magnum opus at lunch one day,

and I realised that I was no longer the only recipient of Wallace’s

confidence. In those days one of McGillett’s sources of income was

finding books for publishers, and afterwards using what influence he

had to get his discoveries well noticed in the Press; and when I found

that he knew about the book, I was afraid that I might not, after all,

get it for Hallows and Rice.

Wallace reassured me, however. He said that he never went back on a

bargain, and when I pointed out to him that no bargain had been made as

yet, he promised to call at the office next day and discuss terms with

the partners. On my recommendation, the terms offered were amazingly

liberal for a first novel; but my enthusiasm was powerful enough for

once to overcome the awful inertia of old Hallows. (He had been in

the publishing business for thirty years, and his one idea was to buy

as cheaply as he could. He had no conception of what Rice and myself

understood by “enterprise.”) The firm even went so far as to offer to

pay a proportion of the “advance” on signing the agreement, but Wallace

refused to accept that. He said that it would harass him to feel tied;

and he would not promise any particular date for the delivery of the

manuscript. “I’ve nearly finished the book,” he told us, “but when

it’s written, I want to put it away for three months and then go right

through it again with a fresh mind. I mean this book to be a classic.”

Old Hallows was tremendously impressed, I remember, and congratulated

me on having made “a real find.”

After that agreement was signed I no longer felt it necessary to hold

my tongue about the book, and I dropped a hint or two here and there

as to what might be expected when it was published. I cannot believe,

however, that I was the chief instigator of the steadily growing

interest that was being aroused by the promise of Wallace’s novel.

No doubt both old Hallows and Rice made occasional references in

public to the same subject, but I fancy that Wallace himself was the

really active propagandist. In any case, one was continually finding

references to _As the Crow Flies_ in the Press that spring, even the

name of Joseph Blake was sometimes referred to as an exemplar of the

British character. The book was asked for at the libraries, and I more

than once met people who declared that they had read it. At the office

we had decided to print a first edition of 20,000 copies, and we put a

note about it in our autumn list. Wallace assured me that summer (1899)

that the thing was done and only needed a final revision. “If I died

tomorrow,” he said, “the story is all there ready to be published, but

there is an incident or two that I want to alter before I send it along

to you. I mean to deliver you a perfect manuscript. I sha’n’t touch the

thing in proof.”

And then, of course, we did not press him for delivery in the autumn

of that year. We should not, in any case, have published so important

a book during the first months of the Boer war. And in the following

spring Wallace himself went out to South Africa. I did not see him

before he went. In fact, I did not know he had enlisted until I saw a

reference to the fact in the “literary notes” that were just beginning

to break out again in the daily and weekly papers.

In that paragraph Wallace’s name was, as usual, coupled with that of

his novel _As the Crow Flies_, a precedent that was invariably followed

two months later in his obituary notices. (It will be remembered that

he died of enteric in June 1900.) Many of the writers assumed that

the book had already been published, but some of the better informed

expressed their eagerness to read the book which they understood had

been completed before Wallace went out to the front.

I firmly believe that our failure to discover that precious manuscript

of Wallace’s was the cause of old Hallows’s breakdown and subsequent

retirement from the business. He used to go up to Highgate two or three

days a week to search Wallace’s house for possible hiding places. “He

would have been sure to have put it in some very safe place before he

left the country,” he would say, and then fret himself into a fever

lamenting the “rank imbecility” of not having insisted on taking

charge of the precious script before Wallace went away.

Rice’s theory was that Wallace had taken the MS. with him to make his

final revision, but I have often wondered whether Wallace had ever

begun it. I have found a suggestion of that one fatal omission, in his

title. He took too direct a method. So far as he was concerned, the

book was written, and published, and noticed, without his having put

pen to paper.

But the queer thing is that the unwritten book has outlived him. For

some reason it was not forgotten in the stress of the South African

war. And it will be remembered that, in the reaction of the first years

of this century, _As the Crow Flies_ was constantly “quoted,” and that

there was quite a controversy as to whether the figure of Joseph Blake

did not stand for that of Joseph Chamberlain.

Indeed, I was tempted to put down these notes of the true facts of the

case because a friend asked me yesterday where he could get a book

called _As the Crow Flies_, by George Wallace. A man had told him, he

said, that it was the finest novel of the century.

THE NIGHT OF CREATION

PART 1: THE DISCUSSION

1

The discussion had threatened while they were still at dinner. Leslie

Vernon had begun it: and there had been a hardness and a determination

in his expression that had sharpened the suggestion of fanaticism in

his clever face. Little Harrison, already looking a trifle flushed and

dishevelled, had only managed to avoid the direct issue by talking

rapidly, and with something more than his usual brilliance, about the

true inwardness of the Russian Revolution; a subject upon which he had

recently acquired some very special information. Even Lady Ulrica More,

who was manifestly prepared to encourage Vernon, had been borne down

and fairly talked into silence.

The other guests of the week-end party, although they had shown no

signs of disapproving Vernon’s choice of topic when he had irrelevantly

introduced it, had accepted their cue with a tactful readiness. Little

Harrison was their host, and if he wished, as he obviously did, to

avoid this topic of Psychical Research, it was their duty to support

him. Moreover, Mrs. Harrison had cut in almost at once, with that

bird-like flustered air of hers, to the effect that spiritualism

was almost “worse than religion with some people” and never led to

anything but recriminations. Vernon had smiled with a fine effect

of self-control when she had said that, but before he could defend

himself, Harrison at the other end of the table had got under way with

an anecdote of Lenin’s pre-revolution career in Switzerland.

And directly dinner was finished, he had suggested that they should

take their coffee and liqueurs on the lawn under the cedar. There

was excuse enough--it was a wonderful night--but Greatorex, the

leader-writer, who had acquired a habit of always looking for secret

motives, was probably right in calling the move to the garden “a clever

dodge.”

“Dodge?” enquired young Fell listlessly. He had sat through dinner with

a melancholy air of wondering how people could be interested in spirits

whether of the dead or of the Russians; but Greatorex had been too much

engrossed in drawing his own inferences to take any notice of Fell’s

distraction.

“Rather,” he said, taking Fell’s arm. “Gives Harrison the chance of

slipping off when he can’t stand it any longer. In a room, it’s a bit

pointed to get up and go away, but out here Vernon’ll probably find

himself addressing Harrison’s empty chair.”

Fell sighed. “What’s he want--Vernon, I mean?” he asked indifferently.

Greatorex was willing enough to explain. “He wants to bring Harrison

to book,” he said, leading his companion down towards the sunk fence

out of earshot of the rest of the party. “You see, Vernon has been

tremendously interested in that book of Schrenck-Notsing’s. You’ve seen

it, I expect? It’s all about materialisations. Extraordinary stuff.

They did get amazing results. The book’s full of photographs of the

materialisations. Licked Crookes’s _Katie King_ into a cocked hat.

Well, Vernon’s been writing about it all over the place. Says it proves

that there is a form of matter unknown to science, and that until the

sceptics have disproved that, they had better shut up about the problem

of immortality and so on. And then Harrison came out with a leader in

the Supplement, pooh-poohing the whole affair. Clever stuff, of course,

but not very sound on the logical side.”

“And Vernon wants to pin him down, I suppose?” Fell commented tepidly.

“He wants to have a straight argument,” Greatorex said, and then

sinking his voice to a confidential note, he continued, “And if you

ask me, Fell, Harrison’s _afraid_ of spiritualism. I’ve seen him

tackled before, and he loses his temper. He doesn’t want to listen! You

know the look that comes into a fellow’s face when he’s shutting his

mind against you--a sort of resolution and concentration as if he’d

got his eye on his own ideal somewhere in the middle distance, and did

not mean to look away from it....” He paused in the very heart of his

account of Harrison’s perversity, suddenly struck by the application of

his description to the present expression on Fell’s face. “Pretty much

the look you’re wearing now, in fact,” he concluded drily. “Sorry if

I’ve been boring you.”

Fell came back to a realisation of his lapse with a slight start. “No,

no, rather not, Greatorex,” he said. “I mean it wasn’t that; the truth

is I’m rather worried. I was thinking....” He waved his hand vaguely in

the direction of the sunset, and added, “That, somehow, made me feel as

if....”

Greatorex thrust his hands into the pockets of his dinner-jacket and

turned round to observe the phenomenon that had distracted Fell’s

attention. For a moment his prominent nose and rather small head came

out as an emphatic silhouette against the afterglow in the North-West;

and to Fell, already deep in the languors of sentiment, presented an

air of picturesque romance.

Since Fell had come out from the high-lights and conventional

influences of the house, his determination had begun to give way. In

the atmosphere of the dining-room, he had felt certain that he would

be right in doing what he had come down here expressly to do. Phyllis

was no wife for a Civil Servant in his position. He had seen the

consequences of such marriages in the Service. They kept a man back. If

he married her, he would lose just that extra fillip of influence which

would make the difference between special appointments and the common

routine of promotion that would leave him no better prospect than an

ultimate income of at best ten or twelve hundred pounds a year. One

could not expect Lady Ulrica, for example, to continue the patronage

she seemed, at present, so willing to lend him, if he made a marriage

of that kind. He had seen it all so clearly while they were at dinner,

and although his heart had failed him at the thought of his coming

interview with Phyllis--she was so sweet and so gentle and she loved

him with such an amazing singleness and rapture--he had been sure that

he must give her up before his honour was entangled.

But now all the prestige of social success, everything that was

represented by the fashion he had just left, was dwindling and fading;

the effect of it falling away so that it seemed to him garish and

unreal--as the lights and distractions of the town may seem to a man

who sets his face eagerly towards the joy of his quiet home. The rest

and immensity of nature was an enduring reality with which his love was

in perfect accord. He and Phyllis had their place in it. If he could

step down, now, to the sombre yews at the lake’s edge and take her in

his arms, as he had done a month ago, his last doubts would vanish on

the instant. They would be one with the greatness of earth, and able

to look down with contempt from their perfect enthronement, at the

frivolous and ephemeral superficiality of conventional life....

The sound of Greatorex’s voice seemed to take up the thread of his

dreams.

“’Course, you’re a poet, Fell,” Greatorex said. “You feel an evening

like this, I suppose? Means something quite tremendous to you?”

“You see,” Fell began, trembling on the verge of confession; “there is

a reason why, more particularly, to-night....”

Greatorex turned round and looked at him. “I shouldn’t,” he said.

“You’ll be sorry afterwards. Better not tell me. I know I look

romantic, but I’m not. Harrison says I ought to have been a pirate.

He’s wrong, I ought to have been a barrister. I’ll tell you, now, just

what I’ve been thinking while I’ve been looking at all this view that

makes you feel so sentimental. I’ve been thinking that I wouldn’t like

to have a lake so near the house--unhealthy. And I don’t care for all

those black yews, either. Melancholy, mournful, things.”

Fell shuddered. “They _are_ mournful,” he agreed, “but they’re in

keeping.”

“Too much,” Greatorex said. “I don’t know whether it’s your sentimental

influence or not, Fell; but, damn it, this place makes _me_ feel

superstitious, to-night. It’s so infernally quiet and brooding, as if

it were hatching some nasty mischief.”

“Or some wonderful miracle?” Fell suggested.

“We probably mean the same thing,” Greatorex said. “I’ve got a trick

of using prose words to get attention. ‘Wonderful miracle,’ you know,

would be either a cliché or bombast in a leader.”

Fell did not appear to hear this explanation. He was looking out over

the swell of Orton Park that was separated from Harrison’s garden by

the width of the lake. The afterglow was slowly dying and the greens

of turf and wood were deepening and hardening into dark masses little

softer than the funereal shadows of the clustered yews. The detail that

had recently started into almost excessive prominence under the level

light of the setting sun, was taking refuge in the temporary darkness

before it emerged again altered in shape and colour to greet the

mysteries of the moon. Only the lake still shone faintly, reflecting

a last glimmer of brightness in the Northern sky. Near the island,

a streamer of indigo ripples splayed out to mark the course of some

belated water-bird, hurrying back to the cover of the reeds; and in the

hush of the coming night Fell could almost believe that he heard the

delicate clash and whisper of infinitely tiny waves breaking in hasty

processional upon the sandy foreshore.

“’Straordinarily peaceful,” murmured Greatorex. “Suppose we ought to be

joining the others?”

“Yes, I suppose we ought,” Fell agreed tamely. What else was there to

do? He could not go down to the village of Long Orton now, and beseech

Phyllis to come out and walk with him by the lake. And without her,

all the glory of this amazing night was wasted.

Nor was the full promise of the night yet revealed to him; for it was

not until with a reluctant sigh he had turned to follow Greatorex back

to the nearly invisible group under the cedar, that he saw the Hunter’s

moon, a great disc of ruddy copper, resting as it seemed on the very

edge of the eastern horizon.

He lingered, gazing, for a few seconds, half resolved even now to

escape the banalities of polite conversation on the lawn and go

up to the village. This was such a rare night for the silences of

love; serene, brooding and mystical. Yet the automaton in him, the

formalised, cultured habit of the Civil Servant, moved him relentlessly

back towards the decencies of polite society and the patronage of Lady

Ulrica More.

As he silently approached the group on the lawn he heard the clear,

musical voice of Leslie Vernon.

“At least you might let one state a case, Harrison,” he was saying.

2

They had already passed the stage of skirmishing for position,

when Greatorex rejoined them. Something had apparently happened to

Harrison since he came out into the garden. He had lost that effect of

impatience which had underlain all his talk of Russia, when, as though

afraid of silence, he had been talking, a trifle desperately, against

some latent opposition.

Now, comfortably relaxed in the depth of a well-designed basket chair,

and little more of him visible than the gleam of his shirt front, the

pale blur of his face and the occasional glow of his cigarette end,

he had an air of being tolerantly complacent. It seemed that he was

willing to listen, however condescendingly, to Vernon’s attack.

“Look here, Harrison,” Vernon had begun. “Why won’t you talk this out?”

“Nothing fresh to say,” Harrison had replied.

“But _I_ have,” Vernon continued; and then Lady Ulrica definitely put

her weight into the scale by saying, “How fascinating! Something really

new in the way of evidence?”

“Or only a réchauffé?” Harrison interpolated.

“At least you might let one state a case,” Vernon said as Greatorex

joined the other four and sat down with a grunt beside his wife.

“We saw you gesticulating picturesquely against the sunset, G.,”

Harrison remarked, as though he would even now create a diversion and

defer the discussion indefinitely.

Greatorex snorted; quite conscious of the fact that in Harrison’s

presence he always played up in manner to that part of the buccaneer

which had been thrust upon him, although he disclaimed it in speech.

“Been discussing the effects of sunset on temperament,” he said.

“But did you see the _Moon_?” asked Mrs. Harrison, rather in the tone

of one who introduces a delightful piece of scandal.

“Afraid I missed that,” Greatorex said. “But I expect Fell has found

it. He’s probably worshipping now.”

“Oh! but you ought,” Mrs. Harrison asserted, still intent no doubt, on

keeping away from the subject of spiritualism, for her husband’s sake.

“It was like a rather badly done stage moon balanced on the scenery.

Sha’n’t we all go and worship with Mr. Fell?”

No one moved, however; and the excuse of joining Fell was spoilt by his

arrival at the cedar.

“Do help yourself to coffee and anything you want, Mr. Fell,” Mrs.

Harrison said. “If you can see, that is.” She was certainly doing her

best to keep the conversation at the right after-dinner level. She was

so far successful that for a minute or two little spurts of irrelevant

talk continued to start up and die away again, like the uncertain

catspaws of wind before a flat calm.

It was Harrison himself who at last anticipated the inevitable. He must

have felt, as everyone had--including his plucky but finally despairing

wife--that it was inevitable. There was something that urged them,

something more than that quiet determination of Vernon’s, although

his very silence conveyed a perpetual sense of remonstrance. But this

other, greater influence was with them as an almost palpable presence.

It was like a force exhausting them and drawing them into a common

focus.

None of them was more keenly aware of it than Fell, though he

attributed the weakness that was overcoming him to a particular source.

For here, with the arm of his chair almost touching that of Lady

Ulrica’s, he was planning an interview with Phyllis that held no least

hint of the renunciation of love. He was giving way freely and without

reserve to his dream. Moreover, he had a curious sense of instant

accomplishment, as if at that very moment his spirit and the spirit of

Phyllis had touched and coalesced. He was drifting into far heights

of remote and supernal ecstasy, when the thin, high voice of Harrison

recalled him to earth; and he started as though, on the verge of sleep,

he had been brutally jarred and awakened by the violent slamming of a

door.

“Hm! hm! Well, Vernon,” Harrison said. “We’re all waiting for that

statement of your case.”

Vernon’s chair creaked slightly as if he had suddenly leaned forward.

This moment of their beginning, when by some undivinable act of common

consent all oppositions had been temporarily relinquished and they were

agreed at least to listen, was, also, the moment of greatest darkness.

Presently the moon transmuted from copper to brass would rise above

the house and give validity and form to all that was now being created

in the profundity of the night. But when Vernon began to speak, he was

hidden from them; they realised him only as a voice, that issued with a

steady and increasing definition out of the silence and the shadows.

He talked well, pleading without passion for an unprejudiced

examination of all the new “facts” in psychical research. He had

a scholarly knowledge of his subject and gave his instances and

authorities, building up as it seemed to Lady Ulrica, to Fell, and even

to Greatorex, a case that it would be very hard to knock down.

Not once did Harrison interrupt him, and during Vernon’s occasional

pauses the immense stillness of the night seemed to close in upon the

little group under the cedar with a sudden intensity. The slender

stream of his steady speech was like a little candle, burning

delicately in the darkness, and when it was extinguished, his listeners

were freshly aware of themselves and their surroundings. In those

moments of almost painful silence, they sought to recover their

consciousness of the familiar world by restless movements and faint

articulations. Chairs creaked, someone sighed, and once Greatorex

rather brutally coughed.

Nearly at the end of his long speech, however, Vernon’s tone became

more emotional. He was talking, then, of materialisations and of the

strange and as yet unrecognised form of matter--provisionally known as

the ectoplasm or teleplasm--that issues from the body of the medium, is

manifested in visible forms that can be successfully photographed, and

can handle material objects.

“I claim that the existence of this matter is proved,” Vernon

concluded. “Given favourable conditions, the medium can build up

a form, visible, tangible, ponderable and capable of simulating

every appearance of material reality. I don’t say that this amazing

phenomenon proves the immortality of the soul, but I do say that until

you produce another hypothesis to cover the immense accumulation of

tested facts, you have no right to pronounce any opinion in psychical

research.”

By this time the moon, now pale as scoured brass, had topped the trees

behind the house, and was sending out pale and slender shafts of light

to pierce here and there the overshadowing gloom of the wide cedar:

one shaft had dappled the statuesque bare shoulder of Lady Ulrica, and

another had slanted down upon the smooth fair hair of Leslie Vernon.

And by such reflections and by other sources of faint diffusion, the

heavy brooding darkness that had so far enveloped the group on the

lawn, had been definitely lifted. Dimly they could see each other,

either as shadows against the increasing brightness beyond, or as

weakly illuminated figures picked out, maybe, by a brilliant little

spark of moonshine that had pierced its way through some common opening

in the many-storied foliage above.

And although there had come no least stir of wind to break the intense

calm, the releasing effect of the light was manifest upon the spirits

of the party. As Vernon ceased speaking everyone suddenly wanted to

talk. A little fusillade of chatter broke out, which only gave way when

Greatorex was heard saying: “If he believe not Stainton Moses and the

Lodges, neither will he believe though one rose from the dead.”

Mrs. Harrison laughed brightly. “We must remember that,” she said.

“But it’s not a question of rising from the dead at all, Mr.

Greatorex,” Lady Ulrica put in. She had no sense of humour.

Vernon apparently felt that all the effect of his long argument

was being foolishly dissipated by this absurd interruption. “Well,

Harrison, what’s your answer to my case?” he asked in a slightly raised

voice.

Harrison began to stammer, a sure sign that his temper was at last

beginning to conquer him. “I--I can’t see, even if we admit the

validity of these materialisations,” he said, “that you--you are any

nearer to proving your general case, Vernon. I’ve been into the whole

question very thoroughly and--and impartially, and I can only say that

I see no reason whatever to assume that we have ever received any

communication from the spirits of the dead. I think that that is the

real point under discussion, and I can’t see that you’ve done much to

support your contention. What d’you say, G.?”

Greatorex grunted. A beam of moonlight had just caught the most salient

of his features, and at the moment his face appeared to be all nose.

“You won’t accept my explanation of the facts, Harrison?” Vernon

persisted.

“I--I don’t see why I should,” Harrison replied. “I don’t see the

necessity for it. I--I’m not convinced, by any means, of the validity

of your examples. At present, I am content to go on with the enquiry

without formulating any theory. I contend that the evidence up to the

present time is insufficient to theorise upon.”

“Ah! well, there’s a lot more coming,” Vernon replied, and for the

first time a real note of passion crept into his voice. “Don’t you

realise that all these developments taken together are just the first

stages of the knowledge that is coming to us? They are symptoms, that’s

all, of the new trend in the evolution of mankind; of the coming of

the new age--the age of the Spirit. The days of materialism are nearly

spent, and the next generation will smile at our feeble tentatives.

“Do you ask me how I know? Well, I can’t tell you in terms that you

can understand. The best part of my knowledge is intuitional, but

intuition, even mysticism, must no longer be divorced from science

and intellect. That, I feel, is the essential synthesis of the new

doctrine. We are going to produce our material proofs; in the future

religion and science will become one.”

“My own opinion, precisely,” said Lady Ulrica.

But Vernon’s homily had proved a little too much for Harrison. He tried

to speak and could not control the pitch of his voice, which soared

ineffectively to a falsetto squeak.

“Er--er--I--I ...” he began, and had to get to his feet before he could

attain coherence. Then he started again with “No, no! It’s incredible

nonsense that--the kind of religion foreshadowed by spiritualism--could

ever appeal to sensible men and women. Are we to be expected to listen

to the drivelling platitudes of some supposed spirit communicating

through an illiterate old woman with the further interposition

of a ‘control,’ speaking pigeon English and imitating the worst

sophistications of a spoilt child? No, no, positively I can’t take that

kind of nonsense seriously. I--I have no sort of desire to imitate the

credulity of Lodge, Barrett and Crookes--no sort of desire. I--I--it’s

absurd. I’ve no patience even to talk about it. Who is coming to look

at the moon?” And without waiting to receive any response to his

invitation, he turned his back on the cedar and strode out, a perturbed

and impatient little figure, into the light of the open garden.

The other six followed him in a straggling procession.

Emma Harrison was obviously relieved that the discussion was at an

end. “I said it would only end in recriminations,” she explained to

Greatorex, who looked about seven feet high in contrast with her

diminutive slenderness. “Charles never can keep his temper about that

subject. And I did think it was very splendid of him to keep it as long

as he did. We can’t do with all that nonsense. Can you, Mr. Greatorex?”

Mrs. Harrison dropped her voice to an indiscreet confidence. “I always

think that our poor dear Lady Ulrica,” she whispered, “is so very much

the type from which mediums are made. You know, stout, placid, and not

too clever.”

“Queer thing why mediums should generally be so stupid,” commented

Greatorex, tactfully avoiding any overt agreement with his hostess’s

description of Lady Ulrica.

For a few minutes the party drifted about the lawn in couples, with

the exception of Harrison, who maintaining a little distance from the

others was pacing restlessly up and down, either working off his spleen

or thinking out some really telling retort that should settle Vernon’s

business once and for all.

The moon was now high in the heavens, but it had suffered another

transmutation. A faint screen of misty cirrus had crept over the sky,

and the brass was toned down almost to the whiteness of silver. And

with this change, the light in the garden had become more diffused. The

shadows had lost their hardness, the high-lights their accentuation.

And by degrees, some sense of a peculiar quality in the night began

to affect every member of the little party on the lawn. They began by

almost imperceptible changes in their movements to drift together into

a little knot, like the swimming bubbles in a cup. The area of their

promenade diminished until even Harrison himself had come into the

focus; and yet when they had again drawn into a group they had nothing

to say to one another. It is true that they were still conscious of a

slight social constraint, due to what had amounted to a quarrel between

the host and one of his guests. But there was something in their

attitude and their common movement towards each other that suggested

some deeper cause for their momentary awkwardness. It was as if each

of them was aware of some sudden fear, and hesitated to speak lest the

shameful fact should be revealed.

It was Mrs. Harrison who first broke a silence that was becoming

altogether too insistent--even the soft hush of their feet upon the

grass had ceased. She laughed artificially, with a touch as it seemed

of bravado, a laugh that might have disguised a shudder.

“I don’t know how it seems to you,” she said in a high strained voice,

“but it strikes me that it’s actually getting a little chilly.”

“Yes, yes. It is, Emma,” her husband replied with an effect of relief.

“I--I think we’d better go in. We get a cold air off the lake, now and

again,” he explained to the company at large.

“Precious little air, Harrison,” muttered Greatorex. “I’ve never known

a stiller night.”

“Haze come over the moon,” commented Fell, staring up into the sky.

“It has certainly turned colder,” remarked Lady Ulrica with a shiver;

“much colder.”

Harrison cleared his throat and made his usual effort to get his pitch.

“Hm! Hm! Perhaps we’re going to get some phenomena,” he said with a

slightly cracked laugh. “Always the first warning, isn’t it, Vernon, a

draught of cold air?”

“Always,” Lady Ulrica said solemnly, before Vernon could reply.

Harrison was about to speak again when Greatorex cut in. “I say,” he

said, in a voice that held a just perceptible note of excitement, “is

that one of your maids down there by the lake? Girl in white; moving

about by the yews?”

“What _do_ you mean?” Mrs. Harrison replied, speaking with a little

flurry of haste. “It must be after eleven, and the maids are in bed

long ago, I hope.”

“Someone down there, anyway,” Greatorex asserted.

“Hm, hm! G.’s quite right, my dear,” Harrison said. “I--I think we

ought to investigate this in the cause of common morality.”

“Charles? It may be one of the village girls,” his wife suggested.

“In which case she has no business in our paddock at midnight,”

Harrison replied, and as he spoke he began to walk with an air of

mechanical determination towards the steps in the sunk fence that led

to the meadow.

“Shall we all go?” Greatorex asked, but Mrs. Harrison manifestly

hesitated.

“I don’t know. Do you think, perhaps....” she began.

Greatorex, however, had not waited for her permission, and in half a

dozen strides he too had reached the meadow. Vernon, Lady Ulrica and

Mrs. Greatorex followed him with an effect of yielding to a sudden

impulse, and Emma found herself alone on the lawn with Robert Fell.

“Well, if they’re all going,” she said with a little hysterical laugh,

“I suppose we may as well go, too.”

“I don’t know. Yes. Do you think we ought?” Fell replied in a strangely

agitated voice.

Mrs. Harrison turned to look at him with a little start of surprise.

“Surely you’re not afraid?” she asked, unconsciously revealing the

cause of her own reluctance.

“Afraid?” he echoed, entirely misunderstanding her true intention.

“Afraid of what?”

“Well--ghosts!” she said.

“But you don’t really imagine, Mrs. Harrison....” Fell began.

“Not for one moment,” she said with determination. She was disturbed

and a trifle shocked by the marks of his agitation, which had

nevertheless stiffened her own courage. She was prepared now to

demonstrate how little she cared for an unexpected coldness in the air,

or for white figures moving about at the most unlikely hours on the

borders of the lake.

Already the shadows of the other five were stringing out across

the meadow, all of them clearly visible in the milky light of the

thinly veiled moon. They were moving very deliberately; but a certain

deliberation of approach was only decent if they expected to disturb a

tryst.

“Well, aren’t you coming, Mr. Fell?” Emma asked sharply.

He sighed and then, “Yes, I’ll come,” he said, in the tone of one who

finally commits himself.