ACROSS THE THRESHOLD
After breakfast Professor Marmion, according to his practice on fine
days, lit his pipe, and went out for a stroll on the Common to put in a
little hard thinking, while Miss Nitocris, after seeing to certain
household matters, sat down in his study and read the papers, in order
that she might be able to give him a synopsis of the world's news at
lunch. He did not read the newspapers himself, except, perhaps, in the
train, when he had nothing better to do. He took no interest in
politics, for one thing, and he had still less interest in professional
cricket and football, racing, and what is generally called sport. He had
a fixed opinion that all the events happening in the world which really
mattered, not even excepting the proceedings of learned societies and
the criminal and civil Law Courts, could be adequately recorded on a
couple of sheets of notepaper. In other words, he had an absolute
contempt for everything that makes a newspaper sell, and therefore his
daughter had very soon learnt to omit these fascinating items entirely.
Curiously enough, his mind seemed to be running on this subject of all
things that morning. He had been reading an article in the _Fortnightly_
on the growing sensationalism, and therefore the general decadence of
the English Press a day or two before, and this had got connected up in
his thoughts with the amazing happenings of the last twelve hours, and
he asked himself what would happen if he were to give the narrative of
his experiences in a letter to the _Times_, supported by the authority
of his own distinguished and irreproachable name.
Certainly it would be the most sensational communication that had ever
appeared in a newspaper. In a day or two, granted always that the
_Times_ had no doubts as to his sanity and printed the letter, the whole
Press would be ablaze with it; Wimbledon would be besieged by reporters
eager to see miracles; and then they would go away and write lurid
articles, some about the miracles, if they saw them, and some about an
absolutely new form of conjuring that he had invented. Then the
scientific Press would take it up, and a very merry battle of wits would
begin. He smiled gravely as he thought of the inkshed that would come to
pass in a _combat à l'outrance_ between the Three Dimensionists and the
Four Dimensionists, and how the distinguished scientists on each side
would hurl their ponderous thunderbolts of wisdom against each other.
Then there would be the religious folk to deal with, for naturally no
theologian of any enterprise or self-respect could see a fight like that
going on without taking a hand in it. The Churches, of course, had a
monopoly of miracles, or at least the traditions of them. The Christian
Scientists, blatantly, claimed to work them now, but their subjects died
with disgusting regularity. So he quickly came to the conclusion that,
if he were once to state in plain English that he could accomplish the
seemingly impossible; that he, a mere mortal, could make himself
independent of the ordinary conditions of time and space and break with
impunity all the laws which govern the physical universe, he would
simply make himself the centre of a vortex of frenzied disputation which
would shake the social, religious, and scientific worlds to their
foundations, and that would certainly not be a pleasant position for an
eminent and respected scientist, who was already a certain number of
years past middle age--to say nothing of the very real harm that might
be done.
Of course, he could settle all the disputes instantly, and dazzle the
whole world into the bargain by simply delivering a lecture, say, before
the Royal Society, on the existence of a world of four dimensions, and
then proving by ocular demonstration that it does exist; but what would
happen then? Simply intellectual anarchy.
Every belief that man had held for ages would be negatived. For
instance, if there is one dogma to which humanity has clung with
unanimous consistency, it is to the dogma that two and two make four.
What if he were to prove--as, of course, he could do now that this
mysterious hand, outstretched through the mists of the far past, had led
him across the horizon which divides the two states of Existence--that,
under certain circumstances, they would also make three or five? What if
he demonstrated that even the axioms of Euclid could, under different
conditions, be both true and false at the same time?
No, the thought of overthrowing such a venerable authority and plunging
the scientific world into a hopeless state of intellectual chaos sent a
shudder through his nerves. He could not do it.
And yet it was only the bare, solid truth that he did possess these
powers. The dream of the death-bridal of Nitocris might possibly have
been nothing more than just a dream, or possibly the revival of an
episode in a past existence; but the other experiences certainly were
not. He had taken off his ring without unbending his finger. Yes, he
could do it again now; it was just as easy as taking it off in the
ordinary way. He certainly had not been dreaming when the Mummy had
become Queen Nitocris and given him the wine. He could not have been mad
or dreaming, because his daughter was there. The episode of the strange
stealers who had come into his house--that too was real, for they had
left their lamp and the man's shoes behind them, and the Mummy was gone!
He took a piece of string out of his pocket, tied the two ends, and then
with the greatest ease tied another knot in the string without undoing
the first.
A motor-car came humming along the road towards him, and he began to
think what this place was like a thousand years before motors were heard
of. That instant the motor vanished, and he found himself standing in a
little glade surrounded by huge forest trees with not so much as a
foot-track in sight. He made his way through the trees in what he
remembered to be the direction of the road, and presently, through an
opening avenue, he saw the sun glittering upon something moving, and
heard voices; and then past the end of the avenue half a dozen armoured
knights, followed by their squires and a string of men-at-arms guarding
a covered waggon, and after these came a motley little crowd of
travellers, some on horseback and some on foot, evidently taking
advantage of the escort to protect them from robbers.
"Dear me!" said the Professor to himself, not without a little shiver of
apprehension, "this is very interesting. I seem to have put myself back
into the tenth century. Yes, that is certainly tenth-century armour that
they're wearing. I mustn't let them see me, or there's no telling what
they'd think of an elderly gentleman in a soft hat and a
twentieth-century morning suit. But perhaps," he went on with his
reasoning, "they can't see me at all. My condition is N to the fourth
now. There's a thousand years between us; I forgot that. At any rate,
I'll try it."
He walked quickly down the avenue, and stood by the side of the rugged
path looking at the strange spectacle. No one took the slightest notice
of him. And then a chill of awful loneliness struck him. Although he
could see and move and hear, and, no doubt, eat and drink in this world,
he was unexistent as regards the inhabitants of it, and yet he knew
perfectly well he was standing by the side of the road where the
motor-car ought to be, and over there, a few hundred yards away, Niti
would be sitting in her room or walking in the garden--and she wouldn't
be born for nearly a thousand years yet.
It was certainly somewhat disquieting, this power of living in two
existences and different ages, but it was a matter that would take some
little time to get accustomed to.
The next instant the cavalcade and the forest had vanished, and there
was the motor-car, just spinning past him. He was on the Wimbledon
Common of the twentieth century once more. He stroked his clean-shaven
chin with his finger and thumb, and walked slowly along the path by the
side of the road, and then across the grass towards the flagstaff.
"I think I begin to see it now," he murmured. "Of course, life, that is
to say real, intellectual, or, as some would say, spiritual life, is,
after all, the coefficient of that totally unexplainable thing called
thought which enables us to explain most things except itself. Time and
space and location are only realities to us in so far that we can see
them. A human being born blind, dumb, deaf, and without feeling would
still, I suppose, be a human being, because it would be conscious of
existence; it would breathe and know that its heart was beating, but
without sight or sensation there could be no idea of space--time, to it,
would be a meaningless series of breaths or heartbeats. Without touch or
sight it could have no idea of form or size, which are merely conditions
of space, and both the past and the future would be absolutely
non-existent for it."
He paused, and walked on a little way in silence, arguing silently with
himself as to the correctness of these premises. Then he began aloud
again:
"Yes, I think that's about right. And now, suppose that such a being
became endowed with the natural senses, one by one. It would go through
all the processes of the physical and mental evolution of humanity until
it reached the highest of human attributes--the ability to think, and
therefore to reason. In other words, from a merely living organism it
would, in the old Scriptural language, have become a living soul. That
is, obviously, what the words in Genesis were really intended to mean.
It would then become capable of development, of proceeding from the
partly-known to the more fully known, until, granted perfect physical
and mental health, it reached what are generally called the limits of
human knowledge."
The Professor's thumb and finger went up to his chin again. He walked
another two or three hundred yards in silence; then he recommenced his
spoken argument with himself:
"Limits of human knowledge? Yes, that sounds all very well in ordinary
language, but are there any? Who was it said that a man trying to reach
those limits was like the child who saw a rainbow for the first time,
and started out to find the place where it rested? The simile is not
bad, not by any means. Just in the same way, we try to imagine the
limits of time and space, and we can't do it. Only infinity of space and
duration are possible, and yet we can't grasp them; still, they are the
only possible states in which we can exist. And now, as I have had a
glimpse of the past, I wonder what this place would be like in ten
thousand years?
"Good heavens, how cold it is!" He shivered, and buttoned up his coat,
and continued, looking about him on the vast snow-field dotted with
hummocks of ice which lay bleak and lifeless about him: "Ah, I suppose
either the Gulf Stream has got diverted, or the earth's axis has shifted
and we are in another glacial epoch.
"WE!"
Again the shock of utter isolation struck him, but it seemed to hit him
harder this time. The world that he had been born in lay ten thousand
years behind him. For all he knew, he might be standing upon what was
now the earth's North Pole. Civilisation, as he had known it, might have
been wiped off the face of the earth, and the remnants of humanity flung
back into savagery. He looked up at the sun, and saw that it was almost
exactly where it had been, and that it had not perceptibly diminished in
power.
The idea was not at all pleasant to him, and very naturally his thoughts
turned back once more to his cosy home that had been on the edge of
Wimbledon Common ten thousand years ago. He remembered, with a curious
sort of thrill, some notes which he had to complete that morning for his
lecture--and in the same instant he was walking back across the turf
towards his house through the warm May sunshine.
"Yes," he said to himself, as he drew a deep breath of the sweet spring
air. "I was right; that's it. The fourth dimension is a form of duration
in some way correlated with space. I shall have to work that out in the
light of the greater knowledge, which Her vanished Majesty has given me,
and which I almost attained to in Egypt. Wherefore, existence in a state
of four dimensions, or the world of N4, as I have always called it, is,
roughly speaking, one. Time and space are, as it were, two sides of the
same shield, and a person living in that world can see both of them at
once. Wherefore, past, present, future, length, breadth, thickness, here
and there are all the same thing to him. It's a great pity there isn't a
fourth dimensional language as well, so that one could state these
things a little more precisely. But that, of course, is out of the
question.
"Really, I can hardly make myself understand it as far as words and
phrases are concerned; still, there it is; and now the question arises:
Having got this power, as I certainly have, of transferring myself from
one existence to another by a mere effort of thought, because it is very
evident that this power is really only an extension or an
exaltation--confound the language of the third dimension--I can't say
it! Although I understand what it is, it won't go into words. What am I
to do with it? Its possibilities are, of course, a little
appalling--that is to say, from the point of view of N3. I have not the
slightest desire to shake the fabric of Society to pieces, as I could
do, and still less have I taste for spending the rest of my scientific
career in what the world would very easily believe to be conjuring
tricks. I hope I am not going to be another of the unnumbered proofs of
Solomon's wisdom when he said, 'Whoso getteth knowledge, getteth
sorrow.' I wonder what sort of advice Her late Majesty of Egypt----
"Dear me, what nonsense I am talking! Her late Majesty? That won't do at
all--she has reached the Higher Plane too, so, of course, she can't be
dead----"
And then with the force of a powerful electric shock, the terrible fact
struck him that, for those who had reached that plane, there was no
death! Here was a new light on the weird problem which he had somehow
been called upon to deal with.
"I wonder what Her Majesty would really think of it?" he murmured, after
a few moments of mental bewilderment. "Dear me, who's that?"
He looked up, and, to his utter amazement, he saw Queen Nitocris,
arrayed exactly as she had been on that terrible night of her bridal
with Menkau-Ra, walking towards him; a perfect incarnation of beauty,
but----
"Oh dear me!" said the Professor, "this will never do. Good heavens!
everybody in Wimbledon knows me, and--well, of course, Her Majesty is
very lovely and all that; but what on earth would people think if any
one saw me strolling across the Common in company with an Egyptian
Queen--to say nothing of the costume--and the image of my own daughter,
too!"
The figure approached, and the Queen, dazzlingly and bewilderingly
beautiful, held out her hands to him, and their eyes met and they looked
at each other across the gulf of fifty centuries. Impelled by an
irresistible impulse coming from whence he knew not, he clasped them in
his, and said, apparently by no volition of his own, in the Ancient
Tongue:
"Ma-Rim[=o]n greets Nitocris, the Queen! What hath he done that he
should be once more so highly honoured?"
At that moment a carriage came by along the road quite close to them.
Two of its occupants were looking straight towards them. They passed
without taking the slightest notice, as they must have done had they
seen such a marvellous figure as that of the Queen. And then he
remembered that, unless she willed it, no one in the world of N3 could
see her, since it was for her, as it was for him now, to make herself
visible or invisible as she chose to pass on to or beyond the lower
Plane of Existence. These things were quickly becoming more plain to his
comprehension, although, as will be readily understood, it was not a
lesson to be learnt very easily.
"Welcome, Ma-Rim[=o]n," replied the Queen, in a voice which filled him
with many distant and strange memories, "but let there be no talk
between us of honour, for in this state there is neither honour nor
dishonour, neither ruler nor subject, neither good nor evil, since all
these are absorbed in the Perfect Knowledge. Yet it is the will of the
High Gods that I should help thee and guide thee in that new world whose
threshold thou hast so lately crossed. It was my hand led thee from the
path of Light to the path of Darkness, and for that I have paid the
penalty as well as thou.
"For many ages, as time is counted in that other world, we have toiled,
sometimes together, sometimes apart, sometimes in honour, sometimes in
dishonour, yet ever struggling on to regain the heights which then we
had so nearly won. The High Gods permitted me to reach them first, and
therefore it was my hand which was stretched out to lead thee across the
Border.
"Now, my message to thee is this: Thou hast powers which no other man
living in that lower state possesses; see to it that they be used
rightly. Forget not that in that other world sin and shame, oppression
and misery, are as rife as, within the limits of time, they have ever
been. Make it thy concern that the forces of evil shall be weaker and
not stronger for the use of these powers to which thou hast attained.
"We shall meet often in that other world, and that living other-self of
mine, thy daughter in the flesh and bearer of my name, through every
moment of her time-life, I shall watch and guard her, for she,
too--although she knows it not--is approaching the light never seen by
the Eye of Flesh, and, though strange things should befall her, it will
be for thee in that other state, knowing what thou dost in the Higher
Life, to help me in this task as in others. Now, farewell, Ma-Rim[=o]n,"
she said, holding out her hands again.
As he took them, they melted in his grasp, two lustrous eyes looked at
him for a moment and grew dim, and he was once more alone on Wimbledon
Common.
"I think I'll be getting home," he said, looking at his watch, and he
turned and walked slowly with bent head and hands clasped behind his
back to the house.