IN THE CELLAR
I have heard patients, emerging from the chloroform swoon, describe how,
before awakening, they had seemed to view themselves lying unconscious
upon their beds, detailing the posture of their motionless bodies and
inert limbs. In this way, now, I seemed to see myself.
I am sure that was no dream of the vague borderland between death and
life. I saw the pallid face, so shrunken that the skin clung to the
edged bones, and the dry hair, the pinched lips and waxen hands. I saw
myself as if from some non-spatial point, and with singular
indifference, except that one fragment of knowledge, detached from my
serene omniscience, troubled me. I had to return within that physical
envelope; and behind me lay dim memories, quite untranslatable, but
ineffably rapturous, which made that projected incarnation an event of
dread.
Vague images of earthly things began to float upward out of the dark, as
it were, symbols of physical life whose meaning remained obscure. I
pictured a spring-board, on which a swimmer stood poised, waiting to
dive into the sea and set the plank behind him quivering, and a large
roll of some material, like a carpet, blocking a cellar door.
Gradually, through an alternation of dreams and blankness, I began to be
aware of the parched and withered body that cloaked me. The point of
consciousness had shrunk within its earthly envelope. Soon it diffused
itself throughout my members. Now I could translate my symbols into
ideas. That coiled-up substance that blocked the door was my tongue,
fallen back into the throat. And the spring-board on which the swimmer
stood—that was my heart, waiting to beat. And unless and until the
swimmer—I—made that plunge into life’s ocean, it could not. Slowly the
need of physical resurrection urged me onward.
A thousand darts were stabbing in my flesh, like purgatorial fire. No
motor nerve had yet awakened, but the capillaries, opening, pricked me
like red-hot needles. Faint memories of the past flashed through my
mind, and, though I recalled no intervening period, I was sensible that
those events had happened infinitely long before.
Suddenly I plunged. I felt as if a sword had pierced my body. I felt the
waters of that living ocean close over my face, and gasped. I breathed.
Simultaneously, with a loud click, the cap of the cylinder flew off, air
rushed in, a stabbing light broke through my closed eyelids; I fainted.
It was, of course, the gradual unscrewing of the cylinder cap as the
mechanism ran down, and the consequent admission of minute quantities of
oxygen, that had begun to restore me. I must have passed several days in
semi-consciousness before the cylinder opened. When the last thread of
the screw was traversed, the inrush of air caused the respiration to
begin.
I was breathing when I became conscious once more, and my heart was
straining in my breast. I got my eyes open. There followed hours of
light-tortured delirium, during which I struggled to regain the motor
powers. With infinite endeavor I placed one hand upon the other and
passed it up the wrist and forearm. The muscles were all gone. The ulna
and radius were perfectly distinguishable, and I could encircle either
with my fingers, after I had managed to flex them. I noticed that my
joints creaked like rusty hinges.
I tried to bend my elbows, and this next grim battle lasted an
incalculable time. Gradually I became aware of some obstacle on each
side of me. Then, for the first time since my awakening, I knew that I
was inside the cylinder. But I did not know that it had fallen upon its
side until it slid forward, and my puny struggles dislodged me and flung
me free into a pool of water. I drew in a deep breath, feeling my lungs
crackle like old parchment, and plunged my face and shoulders beneath
the surface. My skin sucked up the moisture like a sponge, and I
contrived to get a few drops past my swollen tongue. I had just sense
enough and time to turn my face upward before I became unconscious
again.
I must have slept long, for, on my next awakening, the light was
brighter and still more torturing. Memory began to stir. I recalled my
conversation with Sir Spofforth, our journey into the annex, Lazaroff’s
invitation to me to enter the cylinder. He must have shut me in for a
moment by way of a practical joke, and gone away with Esther, persuading
himself and her that I could free myself and would follow. I tried to
call him. But only a croaking gasp came from my lips. I tried again and
again, gradually regaining the power of vocal utterance. But there came
no answer, and each time that I called, the echoing, hoarse susurrus
brought me nearer to the realization of some terror at hand which I did
not dare to face.
I looked about me. Beside me lay the cylinder, almost buried in mud. I
was still within the secret vault, but a part of the brick partition had
fallen inward in such a way as to screen the few visible inches of the
steel case that had housed me, so that nobody would have suspected its
presence in the mud of the little chamber. I remembered that there had
been two more; I looked about me, but there was no sign of them.
Now I began to realize that there had been a considerable change in my
surroundings since I became unconscious. The light which had distressed
me came through a hole in the roof of the adjoining cellar, filtering
thence through the aperture in the broken wall, and was of the dimmest.
In place of the concrete floor there was a swamp of mud, with pools of
water here and there, and the dirt was heaped up in the corners and
against the walls. Moss and splotched fungi grew among the tumbled
bricks, and everywhere were spore stains and microscopic plant growth.
I was bewildered by these signs of dilapidation everywhere. The
guinea-pigs and monkeys were gone; the cellar was empty, save for some
low, rough planks of wood fitted on trestles and set about the floor. On
the wall at the far end hung something that gradually took form as I
strained my aching eyes to a focus.
It was a crucifix. The cellar had become a subterranean chapel. The
cross was hewn coarsely of pine, and the figure that hung upon it
grotesquely carven; yet there was the pathos of wistful, ignorant effort
in the workmanship that bespoke the sincerity of the artist.
[Illustration:
I made my difficult way toward the stairs
]
I made my difficult way upon hands and knees through the gap in the
wall, across the mud floor of the cellar, toward the stairs, resting
several times from weariness before I reached my destination. But when I
arrived at the far end, where the stairs should have been, I received a
shock that totally unnerved me. The stairs were gone. In place of them
was a debris of rubble and broken stones, as firmly set as if workmen
had built it into the wall. The mass must have been there for years,
because, out of the thin soil that had drifted in, a little oak tree
sprang, twisting its spindling stem to rear its crown toward the patch
of daylight.
At last I understood. I had come to realize the fact that my sleep had
been a prolonged one; it might have lasted weeks—even months, I had
thought, as with cataleptics; but an entire century! that idea had been
too incredibly grotesque for consideration. That Sir Spofforth, with
whom, it seemed, I had dined almost yesterday, had gone, ages ago, to
his long home; Lazaroff; Esther, whom I loved; that generations had come
into birth and died ... it seemed too cruel a jest. I wept. I raved and
called for Esther. Surely a hundred years had never passed, turning her
brown hair to gray, lining her gentle face, bringing at last the gift of
death to her, while I lay underground, encased in steel and air!
I cried aloud in terror. I hammered helplessly upon the walls. Again I
called Esther, Lazaroff, George. There was no answer of any kind.
Presently a ray of light quivered through the hole, falling upon the
heap of debris that blocked the stairway. The yellow beam moved onward,
and now it bathed the thin branches of the little twisted tree that, by
the aid of those few minutes of sunlight daily, had ventured into life.
It had grown cunningly sidewise, so as to expose the maximum of wood to
the light. I watched the ray till it went out; I wanted to show the
plant to Lazaroff, to ask him whether the mechanics of heliotropism
could suffice to answer the problem of the tree’s brainless
consciousness; and my chagrin that this whim could not be fulfilled
assumed an absurd significance. It was, in fact, the realization of this
loss of responsiveness to the reality of the situation that constantly
urged me to find some way of escape when I might have relapsed otherwise
into an acquiescence which would have brought insanity and death.
The stairs being gone, I turned my consideration to the cellar roof. To
reach this it would be necessary to drag one of the planks beneath the
hole and scramble up, clinging to the sides with my fingers and bracing
my feet against the wall. This feat was not a difficult one for a normal
man, but for me clearly impossible. I must wait until I became stronger.
It is a strange thing, but I had not associated the need of waiting with
the idea of food until I found the box of biscuit. I stumbled upon the
box by the accident of scratching my wrist against the edge as I crawled
along the wall. I saw the corner projecting from a mound of earth, and,
scraping some of the dirt away, I lifted the pine-wood lid.
Inside the box I found a quantity of biscuit which seemed to have been
baked recently. It was crisp, and too hard for me to break. I dipped a
piece in the stagnant water, and, as I swallowed the first morsels,
became aware of my ravenous hunger.
I can hardly estimate the duration of the imprisonment that followed. It
was of days and nights which succeeded each the other in monotonous
succession, during which, like a hibernating beast, I crouched and
groped within the cellar, dozing and shivering, and gnawing incessantly
at my food. Only those few minutes of sunshine daily saved my reason, I
am convinced now. My evening clothes, which at first had appeared to
have suffered no injury during my century of sleep, had begun to
disintegrate, and hung upon me in tattered fragments. It was a period of
despair, with very little alternating hope. Sometimes I prayed wildly
beneath the crucifix, sometimes, in an access of madness, I cried for
Esther and Lazaroff again. And for whole hours I convinced myself that
this was a dream.
But my strength returned with amazing swiftness. As in the case of a
typhoid convalescent, every particle of food seemed to build up my body.
I must have put on pounds each day. The barrel framework of my ribs
filled out, the muscles showed their old outlines beneath the skin, the
fluid rushed into the joints and restored their suppleness. And daily I
practiced exercises. I managed to drag one of the benches beneath the
hole at last, and, standing on this, tried often to draw myself up; but
on each occasion my struggles only brought down a shower of earth and
stones, and I resigned myself to a period of further waiting, watching
for dawn like a troglodyte, and for the sun like a fire-worshiper.
In the end my escape developed in a manner the least imaginable. It
began with my discovery of a second box in another of the mounds. I
opened it hastily, in the greedy anticipation of finding something more
palatable than biscuit.
Instead of this I found a number of strange batons of wood. They
resembled policemen’s truncheons, but each had a tiny rounded plate of
glass near the head, and there evidently was some sort of mechanism near
the handle, for there was a push-button, fitted with a heavy guard of
brass, so strong that I could not raise it with my fingers. It was
indeed providential that I was unable to do so.
I carried the strange implement beneath the hole in the roof and laid it
on the bench, intending to examine it more carefully as soon as the sun
appeared. Meanwhile, this being the time for my daily exercise, I
mounted the bench and tried to pull myself up. I failed; yet I detected
a considerable improvement in my muscular power, and, becoming
exhausted, I prepared to descend. Inadvertently, but without
anticipating any serious result, I placed my foot against the truncheon
in such a way as to elevate the guard.
I heard it click as it rose into position, and, in setting down my foot
again, depressed the push-button.
The truncheon tipped to the ground, pointing upward. I saw a ray of
blinding light, of intense whiteness tipped with mauve, shoot from the
head, and, with a crash, a shower of stones fell on me, bearing me to
the ground and enveloping me in a cloud of dust.
I must have lain half stunned for some minutes. I was aroused by feeling
the sunlight on my eyelids. I started to my feet. The hole in the roof
was nearly twice the former size, and a heap of fallen stones and pieces
of brick afforded me a perfect stepway. I was scratched by the falling
debris, but happily the explosion, as I deemed it, seemed to have been
in an upward direction.
In a moment I was scrambling up the stones. I slipped and clutched and
struggled; I got my head and shoulders in the air and pulled my body
after me; I trod upon leaves; I looked about me.
I was standing in the midst of what appeared to be an ancient forest of
oak and beech trees, whose bare boughs, covered with snow, shook under a
gray sky above a carpet of withered, snow-spread leaves, and under these
were endless heaps of disintegrating bricks. In vain I looked about me
for the Institute. There was no sign of it, nor of Sir Spofforth’s
house. Nowhere was anything to be seen but the same forest growth, the
dead leaves scurrying before the chill wind, and the vast brick piles. I
had emerged from the cellar into a trackless wilderness.
And now at last my final doubt, which had bred hope, was gone. I ran
through the forest, on and on, shouting like a madman and beating my
breast, stumbling over the brick heaps that lay everywhere, plunging
through thorny undergrowth, heedless of any course. I must have been
running for ten minutes when my strength failed me, and I collapsed
beside an ancient road, overgrown with shrubs and saplings, yet
discernible in its course between the tall trees that bordered it.
Before me, far away through the vista line, I saw a white bank against
the gray horizon.
I flung myself upon my face and prayed, with all my will, to die.