Now the Curate, apart from a tendency to lose his head on occasion,
was a perfectly normal individual. There was nothing myopic about
him. The human mind is so constituted that it can only receive certain
impressions of abnormal phenomena slowly and through the proper
channels. All sorts of fantastic ideas, intuitions, apprehensions and
vague suspicions had been dancing upon the floor of the Curate's brain
as he noticed certain peculiarities about his companion. But he would
probably not have given them another thought if it had not been for
what now happened.
It would require a mathematical diagram to describe the incident with
absolute accuracy. The Curate, of course, had heard nothing about the
Clockwork man's other performances; he had scarcely heeded the hints
thrown out about the possibility of movement in other dimensions. It
seemed to him, in the uncertain light of their surroundings, that the
Clockwork man's right arm gradually disappeared into space. There was
no arm there at all. Afterwards, he remembered a brief moment when
the arm had begun to grow vague and transparent; it was moving very
rapidly, in some direction, neither up nor down, nor this way or that,
but along some shadowy plane. Then it went into nothing, evaporated
from view. And just as suddenly, it swung back into the plane of the
curate's vision, and the hand at the end of it grasped a silk hat.
The Curate's heart thumped slowly. "But how did you do it?" he gasped.
"And your arm, you know--it wasn't there!"
So far as the Clockwork man's features were capable of change, there
passed across them a faint expression of triumph and satisfaction.
"I perceive," he remarked, "that I have indeed lapsed into a world
of curiously insufficient and inefficent beings. I have fallen
amongst the Unclocked. They cannot perceive _Nowhere_. They do not
understand _Nowhen_. They lack senses and move about on a single plane.
Henceforth, I shall act with greater confidence."
He threw the hat into infinity and produced a parrot cage with parrot.
"Stop it!" the Curate gasped. "My heart, you know--I have been
warned--sudden shocks." He staggered to the wall and groped blindly for
an emergency exit, which he knew to be there somewhere. He found it,
forced the door open and fell limply upon the pavement outside.
The Clockwork man turned slowly and surveyed the prostrate figure. "A
rudimentary race," he soliloquised, with his finger nosewards, "half
blind, and painfully restricted in their movements. Evidently they
have only a few senses--five at the most." He passed out into the
street, carefully avoiding the body. "They have a certain freedom,"
he continued, still nursing his nose, "within narrow limits. But they
soon grow limp. And when they fall down, or lose balance, they have no
choice but to embrace the earth."
He waddled along, with his head stuck jauntily to one side. "I have
nothing to fear," he added, "from such a rudimentary race of beings."
V
"Evidently," his thoughts ran on, "they must regard me as an
extraordinary being. And, of course, _I am_--and far superior. I am a
superior being suffering from a nervous breakdown."
He stopped himself abruptly, as though this view of the matter solved a
good many problems.
"I must get myself seen to," he mused, "because, of course, that
accounts for everything; my lapse into this defunct order of things and
my inability to move about freely in the usual, multiform manner. And
it accounts for my absurd behaviour just now."
He turned slowly, as though considering whether to return and explain
matters to the curate. "I must have frightened him," he whispered,
almost audibly, "but I only wanted to show him, and the parrot cage
happened to be handy."
He trundled forward again and lurched into the middle of the street.
"Death," he reflected, "that was _death_, I suppose. They still die."