_In which Professor Higginson goes on tasting
them._
Professor Higginson was glad to get back to his lodgings on that
Thursday night; he was beginning to feel the weariness of the Lion.
I will not deny that some vanity had arisen in him, for he felt the
approach of a little local fame. Now vanity, especially when it is
connected with the approach of a little local fame, is not good for
Professors, even in this world; for their chances in the next it is
fatal. It is a foible only too acceptable as an instrument to the Enemy
of Souls.
Full of this vague sensation of well-being, it was a shock to Professor
Higginson to find George Babcock waiting for him in his rooms.
Hidden in the right-hand pocket of George Babcock’s coat was the
letter. It was not type-written. It was a familiar letter. It was
signed by a single uninitialed name, for its author was a peer.
Higginson came into the room nervously, less and less pleased to see
who his visitor was, but that visitor had something very definite to do.
“I say, Higginson,” he cried suddenly, rising as suddenly at his
colleague’s entry into the room, “you know I don’t believe a word of
it!”
“A word of what?” said Higginson tartly.
“Oh, you know,” said Babcock, sitting down again as did Higginson
also, and fixing the psychologist with his strong eyes. “You’ve told
everybody, and everybody’s talking. All this ‘psychical experience,’
Higginson! All these—damn it, why you’re talking _ghosts_ now!”
He sat back and waited.
“Babcock,” said Higginson, in much the same tones as he had used to
fire upon the less defended Mr. Garden, “Babcock, you won’t believe a
plain human tale? The Evidence of a witness? _True_ evidence, Babcock?”
“Oh, I believe you had some—some, well, let’s say some mental
experience, all right; but I don’t believe in all that monkey
business.... No!... I’m interested, Higginson. That’s why I’ve come.”
He leant forward. “I’m _really_ interested.”
“You don’t believe that I saw ... what I say I saw?” said Higginson
solemnly.
“Why, my dear Higginson, you know—one _sees_ things when one’s asleep.
Simple?”
“You don’t believe,” reiterated Higginson, “that I heard what I _say_ I
heard?”
“Oh, I believe that right enough,” answered Babcock impatiently.
“What’s ‘hearing’? My dear fellow, for one case of optical suggestion
there are ten cases of aural!”
“Suggestion be ——!” cried Professor Higginson too suddenly.
“It’s a funny thing, Higginson,” said Babcock, looking curiously at him
and pinning his colleague down with that look, “it’s a funny thing that
you spook Johnnies don’t seem to know what evidence is.... Ever heard a
clever counsel briefed in _Poison_?... I have.”
“I——” began Professor Higginson, but Babcock interrupted.
“Now, I knew a fellow once in Italy, not like you, my dear Higginson,
not half so honest a man, but he _had_ got hold of what convinces
people.... It’s not what’s true, it’s what convinces.”
Babcock smiled oddly as he said this.
“He didn’t publish it ... and” (this more slowly) “I will tell you
what it was, for it impressed me. He came into my room early one
morning—I knew him well enough—and he told me the whole story of Adowa.
The telegraph hadn’t brought it, Higginson” (shaking a finger). “We
hadn’t heard of it. No one in Europe, no one in Egypt. The fight was
... well, ’lowing for longitude ... not twelve hours old. And, mind
you, he didn’t give a sort of hint; he didn’t work your telepathy
stunt.” Babcock began to emphasise. “He described the whole thing quite
clearly: with little men and bushes and hot sand standing clear, like
three or four little _coloured_ pictures. Eh? _Coloured._ Painted. You
could _smell_ the heat. And he saw a sort of local storm on the scrub
in the valley; he did!—least, he _said_ he did! He saw the poor fellows
left behind—the wounded, you know: he saw the faces of the torturers.”
Babcock stopped a second and changed his tone. He looked unpleasantly
in earnest. “He told me I might make money over it,” he went on. “I was
in touch with one of the English papers. Like a fool, I didn’t believe
him. After that the telegrams came in....”
Professor Higginson was watching his colleague; his head stood forward
on his long neck. He was fascinated and a little frightened.
“Well,” said Babcock, sitting down again and speaking with less
apparent purpose, “that’s all. I think he was a charlatan. I don’t
know how he got the thing. I’ve known news spread in Africa among
savages a thousand miles in half a day.... Anyhow, that sort of thing
_might_ convince. To tell you the honest truth, Higginson, _your story
doesn’t_.”
Poor Mr. Higginson flushed. He did not like to be talked to like that.
Babcock waited for his reply. It came at last, and came in the expected
form.
“I can tell you, Babcock,” began Higginson slowly, “something I’ve told
no one else. You’ve driven me to do it. You know—you’ve heard—that ...
that, well, that I _saw_: that I not only heard singing, but _saw_? I
saw a multitude of men—and women, Babcock.”
He passed his hand over his face and wished himself well out of it—but
Sin is a hard master.
“Well?” asked Babcock, quite unchanged in face.
“Well,” proceeded Professor Higginson, still more slowly, “this is
what I have got to tell you. Many, all of those faces—and mind you
they talked to me, Babcock, they _talked_ to me” (the Professor was
warming to his work)—“I didn’t know. But I knew one, Babcock,” and
here Higginson’s voice fell (as his trick had grown to be during these
recitals) to a deeper tone. “Do you know who it was?... It was poor
Morris!”
Babcock rose again and came and stood over the wretched Philosopher.
The Philosopher looked up like a child, an erring child.
“Good Heavens!” sighed Babcock. “What extraordinary ideas you have!
_That’s_ not what people notice. Why, men can do that in their sleep.”
Then with sudden vigour, “What _else_ did you see, Higginson? Something
you couldn’t have known? Something nobody knew?”
Professor Higginson thought. Detailed imaginative fiction had never
been in his line, though he had dealt in it pretty freely all that day.
He thought hard and confusedly; but what he said at the end of the
process was startling enough.
“Very well, Babcock, listen to this. There was in that crowd a figure
very different from the others—a mad figure, you will say. Most
mournful eyes, Babcock, and—well, it’s unpleasant, but it smelt of
seaweed.”
“Oh!” said Babcock. “Was it dressed?”
Mr. Higginson thought a minute.
“Yes, it was _dressed_,” he ventured, groping his way. “Yes, it _was_
dressed.... It was very _oddly_ dressed. You know ... you see ... it
had dripping wet clothes on, dark blue. But, Babcock” (here Higginson
had an inspiration, and very proud of it he was), “_it had no arms_!”
“Oh,” said Babcock, musing, “it had no arms.”
There was a gap in their conversation, an end to Babcock’s pushing, an
end to Higginson’s lying. A let up. An interval of repose.
It was Babcock who broke it.
“Well,” he sighed, “I can’t make head or tail of all this, Higginson!
Anyhow, I must be going. It’s interesting. I know you _think_ you had
these experiences, but, frankly, all that kind of thing’s beyond me.
I don’t think it’s _there_. I think it floats in men’s brains—false,
like dreams,” and he got up to go.
[Illustration: “_But, Babcock, it had no arms!_”]
But for the next half hour he was at the telephone again, talking to
London and to the Ancient Aristocracy of Britain and to _The Howl_.
When he rose from the machine it was just eleven. _The Howl_ prints
news up to two o’clock. Smart Rag!
Next morning (Friday), when he came downstairs, Professor Higginson
received a slight but very unpleasant shock. It was a shock of a kind
one does not often receive.
Like all the rest of the world, Professor Higginson read _The Howl_ at
breakfast. _The Howl_ is very well edited; it gives you your thrill in
a short compass, and every day has some new Portent to present.
That day the Portent was Sleeping Sickness on a Huge Scale in London.
Ten millionaires were down with it and a politician was threatened.
It wasn’t true, and there was a leader on it. But true or false, it
was of less consequence to Mr. Higginson than one fairly prominent but
short item upon the front page. It was not the chief item on it; the
chief item was some rubbish about a man it called “the Kaiser.” It was
perhaps the second or the third piece of news in importance.
END OF A MYSTERIOUS CAREER.
NOBLEMAN FOUND DROWNED ON
BRETON COAST.
ROMANTIC STORY.
BREST, _Thursday, May 5th_.
Fishermen from the remote and old-world village of Karamel report a
gruesome discovery upon their rock-bound coast. The Count Michaelis
de Quersaint, a well-known eccentric character in this district,
evidently lost his life by shipwreck some few days ago in the
neighbourhood. It was the Count’s habit to cruise up and down this
coast during the summer months _incognito_, in a small ten-tonner,
with a couple of men for crew, the unfortunate man having been
born without arms, like a certain famous Irish landlord of the
last generation, and being very sensitive upon the point. The boat
has not been found, but the bodies of three men, one of which is
undoubtedly the Count, have been washed up on the rocks. The features
are unrecognisable, but there can be no doubt of Count Michaelis’s
identity. The corpse was clothed in the blue-serge yachting suit
which the Count habitually wore on these expeditions, and the body
was that of a man without arms. In the opinion of Dr. Relebecque,
whom the Government has dispatched to Karamel, the disaster must have
taken place about four days ago, and most probably during the gale of
last Monday night.
The corpse was dressed in blue. It was drowned. It had no arms—a sort
of monster.
Professor Higginson was unhappy, very unhappy indeed. He also felt sick.
Gusts of fear swept over his simple soul. There were moments when he
almost smelt the pit, and he groaned in spirit.
So powerful was the effect upon him, that he was half persuaded of some
connection between his foolish lie and doubtful superhuman powers. He
didn’t like it. It gave him a sense of possession. It left him not his
own master.
He would not take up the paper again. He left it folded upon his table,
and went out a little groggily to walk up the street to College and to
take his class.
But when Professor Higginson appeared before his class he was nervously
conscious that a great number of young eyes were watching him with
quite as much amusement as interest.
Not that he was stared at. Provincials are too polite for that, and
the earnest provincials who attend their Universities are perhaps the
politest class in England. But whenever he looked up from his notes he
met the glance shy and suddenly withdrawn, now from the left, now from
the right, which told him that of the fifty or sixty students before
him not one was ignorant of the Great Adventure.
His subject that morning was The Hypergraphical Concatenation of the
Major Sensory Criteria and Psycho-hylomorphic Phenomena in their
Relation of the Subjective to the Objective Aspects of Reflex Actions—a
fascinating theme! And one which, upon any other day, he would have
analysed with the mouldy bravura that he had cultivated.
But that morning something flagged. The interest of the class was
elsewhere, and Professor Higginson knew only too well where it was! His
misfortune or accident was already so much public property that the
youths and maidens and the respectful dependants and servitors of the
University as well were universally acquainted with it. He felt again
that touch of vanity in the midst of his embarrassment!
The great clock of the University buildings boomed out noon. He shut
his notes, looked with his weary eyes at the young faces before him,
now lifted to his own, and said—
“Next time we will take the Automatic Functions of Guest and Bunny. It
is new ground, and I think it will interest you.”
A timid, fair-haired girl to the rear of the left centre asked whether
they need buy the third edition; she only had the second. He said, full
of thought for her purse, that there was no necessity to do such a
thing, whereat the student added—
“But, Professor Higginson, it deals with the Subliminal Phenomena of a
Loss of Mem——”
“That’ll do! That’ll do!” cried Professor Higginson sharply.
He could have sworn that he heard a titter! He looked up wearily at the
window as his class tramped out.
It was raining.
When he had changed his Cap and Gown for the bowler hat, umbrella and
mackintosh of his civilisation, he stepped out under the archway into
the street, glad to be rid of his duties for the day, profoundly glad
to be alone. He had fallen, as his habit was, into a conversation
with himself, half aloud, happily oblivious of the suspicious glances
of passers-by, which he would have imagined to be testimony to his
unhappily growing fame, when he received a sharp blow upon the back
from the open hand of some vigorous person, and turned round with an
exclamation to see no less than Babcock—again.
Professor Higginson turned under his umbrella to catch that figure at
his side, and saw beyond it a very different figure—a figure draped
entirely in a long raincoat of some sort trailing almost to the ground;
peeping above the front of that coat was a clerical dog-collar, and
above the clerical dog-collar a long face, the eyes of which always
looked towards some spot far off.
“Well, Higginson,” said Babcock, “you’ve done it now!”
“Done what?” said Professor Higginson, knowing only too well what he
had done.
“Made yourself famous,” said George Babcock shortly.
“I don’t know that!” said Professor Higginson, and he nervously
wondered whether the drip upon his back were from his own umbrella or
his neighbour’s. “Of course, a thing like that will be talked about.”
“It’s what you said about the heavenly singing that did it,” said
George Babcock brutally; and as he said it Professor Higginson,
glancing at him sideways, saw a definite curl downwards upon the big,
loose lips.
As they passed the door of the University Common Room, Babcock halted
and said—
“Well, I’m going in! Are you coming with me, Higginson?”
“No!” said Professor Higginson, with singular determination.
“All right,” said Babcock, not insisting. “Charles will see you home.
I ought to have told you, this is my wife’s brother Charles; he’s
a parson,” he added rudely, as though the external signs of that
profession were absent. “You go with him, Charles. It’s on your way.
Tell Clara I’m coming. Back before one.”
And George Babcock the strong pushed through the swing-doors of the
Club, and left his brother-in-law and his colleague in the rain outside.
Professor Higginson and the religious person walked for a few minutes
in silence. For one thing the Philosopher did not know the name of the
minister, and it was the minister who first broke that silence.
“You’ve heard singing!” he said abruptly, and as he said it he still
stared in front of him as at some distant point beyond this world, and
steered himself by his great nose. He did not look at his companion,
and he repeated in tones of subdued wonder, “You heard singing. I read
it in the Ormeston paper to-day.”
Professor Higginson had never in his life been rude to a man at the
first meeting. He did not know how it was done.
“Yes,” he said ... “after a fashion.”
“Ah!” said the Reverend Charles, and they went on another fifty yards
in silence through the rain. The streets were quite deserted.
Professor Higginson was appalled to find his companion’s hand laid
firmly upon his shoulder; the other hand held the umbrella above. The
parson looked immensely into his eyes.
“I wish I were you,” he said, “or, rather, I don’t wish I were you.”
Then he loosed hold, and they walked on together again.
Professor Higginson was profoundly uncomfortable. He was Professor
of Subliminal Psychology, and far be it from him to fall into the
vulgar errors of the materialist, but the man did seem to him a
little cracked; and when he whispered for the third time, “You heard
singing!” Professor Higginson was in that mood wherein weak men run.
Now Professor Higginson prided himself that he was not a weak man.
The Reverend Charles began talking very loudly to himself, not in the
half-tones of self-communion common to the academic temper, but quite
out loud, almost as though he were preaching.
“Singing! ‘Lovely chaunting voices, singing to the sound of harps,
and in that light which dieth not, for they that stand in it are the
inheritors of the world to come.’... That’s from Pearson,” he added
abruptly, changing to a perfectly natural tone. “Do you know Pearson’s
work?”
“No,” said Professor Higginson, immensely relieved at the change in the
tone. “No, to tell the truth, I do not.”
“He saw what you saw,” said the Reverend gentleman, nodding gravely
under his umbrella as he strode forward; “but he hadn’t your chance of
convincing the world. No!”
And here he shook his head as gravely as he had nodded it.
The rain still fell. The wet street still stretched out before them.
“It has been given to many men,” began the Reverend Charles again in a
totally different tone, this time the intellectual interrogative, “to
see the hidden places, but your chance?”
Professor Higginson said nothing, he was beginning to feel
uncomfortable again. He was not a materialist—what man of his great
attainments could be? But on the other hand there was such a thing as
going too far in the other direction. Then he reasoned with himself.
The Reverend Charles had no weapon. He, the Professor, was a tall man,
and—hang it all! he had no right to be certain that the man was mad.
They had come to Professor Higginson’s door. There, in the pouring
rain, Professor Higginson put in the latch key, opened the door, and
asked in common courtesy whether his colleague’s brother-in-law would
come in.
His colleague’s brother-in-law half shut a dripping umbrella, held out
a huge and bony hand, fixed the embarrassed Don with luminous, distant
eyes, grasped his nervously offered hand in return, and said sadly,
with a world of meaning—
“No! I will not come in! I will leave you to Those Voices of the Great
Peace!”
Then it was that Professor Higginson noticed, standing in the mean
little hall humbly enough, a mean little man, short, wearing a
threadbare coat, and a drenched bowler hat.
“Professor Higginson,” said this apparition gently, “Professor
Higginson, I presume?”
“What?” snapped the Professor, still holding the Parson’s hand, like
the handle of a pump.
“May I see you a moment? I represent _The Sunday Machine_.”
“No,” thundered Professor Higginson, dropping the reverend hand in his
excitement. “I’m tired, it’s not lunch time yet, I don’t know what you
mean!”
The little man was at once flabbergasted and hurt. The Reverend Charles
smiled a cadaverous smile, but one as luminous as his eyes.
“May I supply the place?” he said in a voice that was musical in two
tones.
He stood there winningly in the open doorway with his dripping umbrella
and his huge, unoccupied right hand still held out.
The little reporter, not quite understanding what he should do, grasped
that great hand, just as Professor Higginson hand grasped it, and then
stood helpless.
Professor Higginson was at the end of his patience. He said sharply—
“You must come again! You must come again! This isn’t the moment.”
In another minute he would have apologised for his abruptness, but
the little journalist had pride and had already gone out, without an
umbrella, thrusting his pathetic little note-book into his threadbare
pocket; and the Reverend brother-in-law, after giving one great
revealing look into the darkness of the hall, had gone out also.
Professor Higginson heard the door slam behind him: His curiosity
prompted him to gaze upon them out of a window. They were going off
together through the rain, into the heart of the town, and it seemed
to the Philosopher that the Parson was more animated than before. He
turned to his companion continually, and his gestures were broad. More
fame was brewing!
All that Friday afternoon he kept his room. He forbade Mrs. Randle to
admit a soul. He went to bed early and slept ill. The wages of sin is
death.
Professor Higginson came down next morning in a very miserable mood. A
vast pile of letters stood beside his plate, and there also he saw _The
Howl_, folded, keeping its dreadful secret—he was sure it had one for
him.
The sheet, with its harmless outer cover, its advertisements of patent
poisons and its bold title menaced him. It fascinated him too. He
hesitated, reached for it, opened it, and the blow fell.
To his horror, there stared him in the face two great lines—nay, three,
of huge block headline type, counting more in the front page of that
day than the sleeping sickness, than the might of Germany, or the
turpitude of Kalamazoo.
They ran thus—
EVIDENCE OF A FUTURE LIFE!
REVELATIONS OF A GREAT PSYCHOLOGIST.
PROFESSOR HIGGINSON TESTIFIES TO
SUPERNATURAL EXPERIENCES.
RECOGNITION OF THE DEAD.
There are parts of the body that grow cold under excitement of an
unpleasant type. Among these may be noted the forehead, certain muscles
upon either side of the vertebræ, and the region of the knees.
Had Professor Higginson been free to note these interesting phenomena
proceeding in his own person, it might have been of advantage to
science. All he knew was that he felt extremely ill. He pushed his
breakfast plate away from him, folded the paper into two, rose from the
table, and stood bending over the mantelpiece with his head upon his
hand. Then he mastered himself, sat down, and began to read this—
Ormeston, _May 5th_, Friday.
(From our Special Correspondent.)
I am authorised to publish an experience altogether unique which
has befallen one of the most respected members of the Guelph
University, Ormeston, and one, moreover, whose peculiar functions at
the University give him an unchallenged authority on the matter in
question.
Professor Higginson, who holds the Chair of Subliminal Psychology in
the University, is in the possession, through a recent experience,
of undoubted proofs of the existence of the soul of beings of
human origin in a state of consciousness of other than terrestrial
conditions.
What followed, and what his pained eyes most wearily discerned, was the
nature of the proof: the impossibility that anyone in Ormeston should
have heard of that drowned thing upon the French coast; the hour in
which Professor Higginson had told a colleague of the experience—fully
four hours before the discovery itself was made—five hours before
the belated Breton telegram had reached _The Howl_ from its Paris
office. The whole thing was a convincing chain. And with that dreadful
knowledge men have that they are in for it, Professor Higginson laid
the paper down, and wondered how much must be endured before the
blessed touch of death.