ON THE EDGE OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS
Jimbo had fallen on his head. Inside that head lay the mass of highly
sensitive matter called the brain, on which were recorded, of course,
the impressions of everything that had yet come to him in life. A severe
shock, such as he had just sustained, was bound to throw these
impressions into confusion and disorder, jumbling them up into new and
strange combinations, obliterating some, and exaggerating others. Jimbo
himself was helpless in the matter; he could exercise no control over
their antics until the doctors had once again reduced them to order; he
would have to wander, lost and lonely, through the comparative chaos of
disproportioned visions, generally known as the region of delirium,
until the doctor, assisted by mother nature, restored him once more to
normal consciousness.
For a time everything was a blank, but presently he stirred uneasily in
the grass, and the pictures graven on the tablets of his mind began to
come back to him line by line.
Yet, with certain changes: the bull, for instance, had so far vanished
into the background of his thoughts that it had practically disappeared
altogether, and he recalled nothing of it but the wings--the huge,
flapping wings. Of the creature to whom the wings belonged he had no
recollection beyond that it was very large, and that it was chasing him
from the Empty House. The pain in his shoulders had also gone; but what
remained with undiminished vividness were the sensations of flight
without escape, the breathless race up into the sky, and the swift,
tumbling drop again through the air on to the lawn.
This impression of rushing through space--short though the actual
distance had been--was the dominating memory. All else was apparently
oblivion. He forgot where he came from, and he forgot what he had been
doing. The events leading up to the catastrophe, indeed everything
connected with his existence previously as "Master James," had entirely
vanished; and the slate of memory had been wiped so clean that he had
forgotten even his own name!
Jimbo was lying, so to speak, on the edge of unconsciousness, and for a
time it seemed uncertain whether he would cross the line into the region
of delirium and dreams, or fall back again into his natural world.
Terror, assisted by the horns of the black bull, had tossed him into the
borderland.
His last scream, however, had reached the ears of the ubiquitous
gardener, and help was near at hand. He heard voices that seemed to come
from beyond the stars, and was aware that shadowy forms were standing
over him and talking in whispers. But it was all very unreal; one minute
the voices sounded up in the sky, and the next in his very ears, while
the figures moved about, sometimes bending over him, sometimes
retreating and melting away like shadows on a shifting screen.
Suddenly a blaze of light flashed upon him, and his eyes flew open; he
tumbled back for a moment into his normal world. He wasn't on the grass
at all, but was lying upon his own bed in the night nursery. His mother
was bending over him with a very white face, and a tall man dressed in
black stood beside her, holding some kind of shining instrument in his
fingers. A little behind them he saw Nixie, shading a lamp with her
hand. Then the white face came close over the pillow, and a voice full
of tenderness whispered, "My darling boy, don't you know me? It's
mother! No one will hurt you. Speak to me, if you can, dear."
She stretched out her hands, and Jimbo knew her and made an effort to
answer. But it seemed to him as if his whole body had suddenly become a
solid mass of iron, and he could control no part of it; his lips and his
hands both refused to move. Before he could make a sign that he had
understood and was trying to reply, a fierce flame rushed between them
and blinded him, his eyes closed, and he dropped back again into utter
darkness. The walls flew asunder and the ceiling melted into air, while
the bed sank away beneath him, down, down, down into an abyss of
shadows. The lamp in Nixie's hands dwindled into a star, and his
mother's anxious face became a tiny patch of white in the distance,
blurred out of all semblance of a human countenance. For a time the man
in black seemed to hover over the bed as it sank, as though he were
trying to follow it down; but it, too, presently joined the general
enveloping blackness and lost its outline. The pain had blotted out
everything, and the return to consciousness had been only momentary.
Not all the doctors in the world could have made things otherwise. Jimbo
was off on his travels at last--travels in which the chief incidents
were directly traceable to the causes and details of his accident: the
terror of the Empty House, the pursuit of its Inmate, the pain of the
bull's horns, and, above all, the flight through the air.
For everything in his subsequent adventures found its inspiration in the
events described, and a singular parallel ran ever between the Jimbo
upon the bed in the night-nursery and the other emancipated Jimbo
wandering in the regions of unconsciousness and delirium.