Mr. Remnant’s Z Ray
Dr. Lewis was kept some time at the Garth. It was past twelve when he
got back to his house.
He went quickly to the room that overlooked the garden and the sea and
threw open the French window and peered into the darkness. There, dim
indeed against the dim sky but unmistakable, was the tall pine with its
sparse branches, high above the dense growth of the ilex trees. The
strange boughs which had amazed him had vanished; there was no
appearance now of colors or of fires.
He drew his chair up to the open window and sat there gazing and
wondering far into the night, till brightness came upon the sea and
sky, and the forms of the trees in the garden grew clear and evident.
He went up to his bed at last filled with a great perplexity, still
asking questions to which there was no answer.
The doctor did not say anything about the strange tree to Remnant. When
they next met, Lewis said that he had thought there was a man hiding
amongst the bushes—this in explanation of that warning gesture he had
used, and of his going out into the garden and staring into the night.
He concealed the truth because he dreaded the Remnant doctrine that
would undoubtedly be produced; indeed, he hoped that he had heard the
last of the theory of the Z Ray. But Remnant firmly reopened this
subject.
“We were interrupted just as I was putting my case to you,” he said.
“And to sum it all up, it amounts to this: that the Huns have made one
of the great leaps of science. They are sending ‘suggestions’ (which
amount to irresistible commands) over here, and the persons affected
are seized with suicidal or homicidal mania. The people who were killed
by falling over the cliffs or into the quarry probably committed
suicide; and so with the man and boy who were found in the bog. As to
the Highway case, you remember that Thomas Evans said that he stopped
and talked to Williams on the night of the murder. In my opinion Evans
was the murderer. He came under the influence of the Ray, became a
homicidal maniac in an instant, snatched Williams’s spade from his hand
and killed him and the others.”
“The bodies were found by me on the road.”
“It is possible that the first impact of the Ray produces violent
nervous excitement, which would manifest itself externally. Williams
might have called to his wife to come and see what was the matter with
Evans. The children would naturally follow their mother. It seems to me
simple. And as for the animals—the horses, dogs, and so forth, they as
I say, were no doubt panic stricken by the Ray, and hence driven to
frenzy.”
“Why should Evans have murdered Williams instead of Williams murdering
Evans? Why should the impact of the Ray affect one and not the other?”
“Why does one man react violently to a certain drug, while it makes no
impression on another man? Why is A able to drink a bottle of whisky
and remain sober, while B is turned into something very like a lunatic
after he has drunk three glasses?”
“It is a question of idiosyncrasy,” said the doctor.
“Is idiosyncrasy Greek for ‘I don’t know’?” asked Remnant.
“Not at all,” said Lewis, smiling blandly. “I mean that in some
diatheses whisky—as you have mentioned whisky—appears not to be
pathogenic, or at all events not immediately pathogenic. In other
cases, as you very justly observed, there seems to be a very marked
cachexia associated with the exhibition of the spirit in question, even
in comparatively small doses.”
Under this cloud of professional verbiage Lewis escaped from the Club
and from Remnant. He did not want to hear any more about that Dreadful
Ray, because he felt sure that the Ray was all nonsense. But asking
himself why he felt this certitude in the matter he had to confess that
he didn’t know. An aeroplane, he reflected, was all nonsense before it
was made; and he remembered talking in the early nineties to a friend
of his about the newly discovered X Rays. The friend laughed
incredulously, evidently didn’t believe a word of it, till Lewis told
him that there was an article on the subject in the current number of
the _Saturday Review_; whereupon the unbeliever said, “Oh, is that so?
Oh, really. I _see_,” and was converted on the X Ray faith on the spot.
Lewis, remembering this talk, marveled at the strange processes of the
human mind, its illogical and yet all-compelling _ergos_, and wondered
whether he himself was only waiting for an article on the Z Ray in the
_Saturday Review_ to become a devout believer in the doctrine of
Remnant.
But he wondered with far more fervor as to the extraordinary thing he
had seen in his own garden with his own eyes. The tree that changed all
its shape for an hour or two of the night, the growth of strange
boughs, the apparition of secret fires among them, the sparkling of
emerald and ruby lights: how could one fail to be afraid with great
amazement at the thought of such a mystery?
Dr. Lewis’s thoughts were distracted from the incredible adventure of
the tree by the visit of his sister and her husband. Mr. and Mrs.
Merritt lived in a well-known manufacturing town of the Midlands, which
was now, of course, a center of munition work. On the day of their
arrival at Porth, Mrs. Merritt, who was tired after the long, hot
journey, went to bed early, and Merritt and Lewis went into the room by
the garden for their talk and tobacco. They spoke of the year that had
passed since their last meeting, of the weary dragging of the war, of
friends that had perished in it, of the hopelessness of an early ending
of all this misery. Lewis said nothing of the terror that was on the
land. One does not greet a tired man who is come to a quiet, sunny
place for relief from black smoke and work and worry with a tale of
horror. Indeed, the doctor saw that his brother-in-law looked far from
well. And he seemed “jumpy”; there was an occasional twitch of his
mouth that Lewis did not like at all.
“Well,” said the doctor, after an interval of silence and port wine, “I
am glad to see you here again. Porth always suits you. I don’t think
you’re looking quite up to your usual form. But three weeks of Meirion
air will do wonders.”
“Well, I hope it will,” said the other. “I am not up to the mark.
Things are not going well at Midlingham.”
“Business is all right, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Business is all right. But there are other things that are all
wrong. We are living under a reign of terror. It comes to that.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Well, I suppose I may tell you what I know. It’s not much. I didn’t
dare write it. But do you know that at every one of the munition works
in Midlingham and all about it there’s a guard of soldiers with drawn
bayonets and loaded rifles day and night? Men with bombs, too. And
machine-guns at the big factories.”
“German spies?”
“You don’t want Lewis guns to fight spies with. Nor bombs. Nor a
platoon of men. I woke up last night. It was the machine-gun at
Benington’s Army Motor Works. Firing like fury. And then bang! bang!
bang! That was the hand bombs.”
“But what against?”
“Nobody knows.”
“Nobody knows what is happening,” Merritt repeated, and he went on to
describe the bewilderment and terror that hung like a cloud over the
great industrial city in the Midlands, how the feeling of concealment,
of some intolerable secret danger that must not be named, was worst of
all.
“A young fellow I know,” he said, “was on short leave the other day
from the front, and he spent it with his people at Belmont—that’s about
four miles out of Midlingham, you know. ‘Thank God,’ he said to me, ‘I
am going back to-morrow. It’s no good saying that the Wipers salient is
nice, because it isn’t. But it’s a damned sight better than this. At
the front you know what you’re up against anyhow.’ At Midlingham
everybody has the feeling that we’re up against something awful and we
don’t know what; it’s that that makes people inclined to whisper.
There’s terror in the air.”
Merritt made a sort of picture of the great town cowering in its fear
of an unknown danger.
“People are afraid to go about alone at nights in the outskirts. They
make up parties at the stations to go home together if it’s anything
like dark, or if there are any lonely bits on their way.”
“But why? I don’t understand. What are they afraid of?”
“Well, I told you about my being awakened up the other night with the
machine-guns at the motor works rattling away, and the bombs exploding
and making the most terrible noise. That sort of thing alarms one, you
know. It’s only natural.”
“Indeed, it must be very terrifying. You mean, then, there is a general
nervousness about, a vague sort of apprehension that makes people
inclined to herd together?”
“There’s that, and there’s more. People have gone out that have never
come back. There were a couple of men in the train to Holme, arguing
about the quickest way to get to Northend, a sort of outlying part of
Holme where they both lived. They argued all the way out of Midlingham,
one saying that the high road was the quickest though it was the
longest way. ‘It’s the quickest going because it’s the cleanest going,’
he said.”
“The other chap fancied a short cut across the fields, by the canal.
‘It’s half the distance,’ he kept on. ‘Yes, if you don’t lose your
way,’ said the other. Well, it appears they put an even half-crown on
it, and each was to try his own way when they got out of the train. It
was arranged that they were to meet at the ‘Wagon’ in Northend. ‘I
shall be at the “Wagon” first,’ said the man who believed in the short
cut, and with that he climbed over the stile and made off across the
fields. It wasn’t late enough to be really dark, and a lot of them
thought he might win the stakes. But he never turned up at the Wagon—or
anywhere else for the matter of that.”
“What happened to him?”
“He was found lying on his back in the middle of a field—some way from
the path. He was dead. The doctors said he’d been suffocated. Nobody
knows how. Then there have been other cases. We whisper about them at
Midlingham, but we’re afraid to speak out.”
Lewis was ruminating all this profoundly. Terror in Meirion and terror
far away in the heart of England; but at Midlingham, so far as he could
gather from these stories of soldiers on guard, of crackling
machine-guns, it was a case of an organized attack on the munitioning
of the army. He felt that he did not know enough to warrant his
deciding that the terror of Meirion and of Stratfordshire were one.
Then Merritt began again:
“There’s a queer story going about, when the door’s shut and the
curtain’s drawn, that is, as to a place right out in the country over
the other side of Midlingham; on the opposite side to Dunwich. They’ve
built one of the new factories out there, a great red brick town of
sheds they tell me it is, with a tremendous chimney. It’s not been
finished more than a month or six weeks. They plumped it down right in
the middle of the fields, by the line, and they’re building huts for
the workers as fast as they can but up to the present the men are
billeted all about, up and down the line.
“About two hundred yards from this place there’s an old footpath,
leading from the station and the main road up to a small hamlet on the
hillside. Part of the way this path goes by a pretty large wood, most
of it thick undergrowth. I should think there must be twenty acres of
wood, more or less. As it happens, I used this path once long ago; and
I can tell you it’s a black place of nights.
“A man had to go this way one night. He got along all right till he
came to the wood. And then he said his heart dropped out of his body.
It was awful to hear the noises in that wood. Thousands of men were in
it, he swears that. It was full of rustling, and pattering of feet
trying to go dainty, and the crack of dead boughs lying on the ground
as some one trod on them, and swishing of the grass, and some sort of
chattering speech going on, that sounded, so he said, as if the dead
sat in their bones and talked! He ran for his life, anyhow; across
fields, over hedges, through brooks. He must have run, by his tale, ten
miles out of his way before he got home to his wife, and beat at the
door, and broke in, and bolted it behind him.”.
“There is something rather alarming about any wood at night,” said Dr.
Lewis.
Merritt shrugged his shoulders.
“People say that the Germans have landed, and that they are hiding in
underground places all over the country.”