"And then he tried to show me what he called the 'involution of Space,'
by taking two points on a piece of paper. The points were a foot away
when the paper was flat, they coincided when it was doubled up. He
said that there were no gaps between the figures, for the medium was
continuous, and he took as an illustration the loops on a cord. You
are to think of a cord always looping and unlooping itself according to
certain mathematical laws. Oh, I tell you, I gave up trying to follow
him. And he was so desperately in earnest all the time. By his
account Space was a sort of mathematical pandemonium."
Leithen stopped to refill his pipe, and I mused upon the ironic fate
which had compelled a mathematical genius to make his sole confidant of
a philistine lawyer, and induced that lawyer to repeat it confusedly to
an ignoramus at twilight on a Scotch hill. As told by Leithen it was a
very halting tale.
"But there was one thing I could see very clearly," Leithen went on,
"and that was Hollond's own case. This crowded world of Space was
perfectly real to him. How he had got to it I do not know. Perhaps
his mind, dwelling constantly on the problem, had unsealed some
atrophied cell and restored the old instinct. Anyhow, he was living
his daily life with a foot in each world.
"He often came to see me, and after the first hectic discussions he
didn't talk much. There was no noticeable change in him--a little more
abstracted perhaps. He would walk in the street or come into a room
with a quick look round him, and sometimes for no earthly reason he
would swerve. Did you ever watch a cat crossing a room? It sidles
along by the furniture and walks over an open space of carpet as if it
were picking its way among obstacles. Well, Hollond behaved like that,
but he had always been counted a little odd, and nobody noticed it but
me.
"I knew better than to chaff him, and had stopped argument, so there
wasn't much to be said. But sometimes he would give me news about his
experiences. The whole thing was perfectly clear and scientific and
above board, and nothing creepy about it. You know how I hate the
washy supernatural stuff they give us nowadays. Hollond was well and
fit, with an appetite like a hunter. But as he talked,
sometimes--well, you know I haven't much in the way of nerves or
imagination--but I used to get a little eerie. Used to feel the solid
earth dissolving round me. It was the opposite of vertigo, if you
understand me--a sense of airy realities crowding in on you-crowding
the mind, that is, not the body.
"I gathered from Hollond that he was always conscious of corridors and
halls and alleys in Space, shifting, but shifting according to
inexorable laws. I never could get quite clear as to what this
consciousness was like. When I asked he used to look puzzled and
worried and helpless. I made out from him that one landmark involved a
sequence, and once given a bearing from an object you could keep the
direction without a mistake. He told me he could easily, if he wanted,
go in a dirigible from the top of Mont Blanc to the top of Snowdon in
the thickest fog and without a compass, if he were given the proper
angle to start from. I confess I didn't follow that myself. Material
objects had nothing to do with the Spacial forms, for a table or a bed
in our world might be placed across a corridor of Space. The forms
played their game independent of our kind of reality. But the worst of
it was, that if you kept your mind too much in one world you were apt
to forget about the other and Hollond was always barking his shins on
stones and chairs and things.
"He told me all this quite simply and frankly. Remember his mind and
no other part of him lived in his new world. He said it gave him an
odd sense of detachment to sit in a room among people, and to know that
nothing there but himself had any relation at all to the infinite
strange world of Space that flowed around them. He would listen, he
said, to a great man talking, with one eye on the cat on the rug,
thinking to himself how much more the cat knew than the man."
"How long was it before he went mad?" I asked.
It was a foolish question, and made Leithen cross. "He never went mad
in your sense. My dear fellow, you're very much wrong if you think
there was anything pathological about him--then. The man was
brilliantly sane. His mind was as keen is a keen sword. I couldn't
understand him, but I could judge of his sanity right enough."