"At first I think it made him uncomfortable. He was restless because
he knew too much and too little. The unknown pressed in on his mind as
bad air weighs on the lungs. Then it lightened and he accepted the new
world in the same sober practical way that he took other things. I
think that the free exercise of his mind in a pure medium gave him a
feeling of extraordinary power and ease. His eyes used to sparkle when
he talked. And another odd thing he told me. He was a keen
rockclimber, but, curiously enough, he had never a very good head.
Dizzy heights always worried him, though he managed to keep hold on
himself. But now all that had gone. The sense of the fulness of Space
made him as happy--happier I believe--with his legs dangling into
eternity, as sitting before his own study fire.
"I remember saying that it was all rather like the mediaeval wizards
who made their spells by means of numbers and figures.
"He caught me up at once. 'Not numbers,' he said. "Number has no
place in Nature. It is an invention of the human mind to atone for a
bad memory. But figures are a different matter. All the mysteries of
the world are in them, and the old magicians knew that at least, if
they knew no more.'
"He had only one grievance. He complained that it was terribly lonely.
'It is the Desolation,' he would quote, 'spoken of by Daniel the
prophet.' He would spend hours travelling those eerie shifting
corridors of Space with no hint of another human soul. How could there
be? It was a world of pure reason, where human personality had no
place. What puzzled me was why he should feel the absence of this. One
wouldn't you know, in an intricate problem of geometry or a game of
chess. I asked him, but he didn't understand the question. I puzzled
over it a good deal, for it seemed to me that if Hollond felt lonely,
there must be more in this world of his than we imagined. I began to
wonder if there was any truth in fads like psychical research. Also, I
was not so sure that he was as normal as I had thought: it looked as
if his nerves might be going bad.
"Oddly enough, Hollond was getting on the same track himself. He had
discovered, so he said, that in sleep everybody now and then lived in
this new world of his. You know how one dreams of triangular railway
platforms with trains running simultaneously down all three sides and
not colliding. Well, this sort of cantrip was 'common form,' as we say
at the Bar, in Hollond's Space, and he was very curious about the why
and wherefore of Sleep. He began to haunt psychological laboratories,
where they experiment with the charwoman and the odd man, and he used
to go up to Cambridge for seances. It was a foreign atmosphere to him,
and I don't think he was very happy in it. He found so many charlatans
that he used to get angry, and declare he would be better employed at
Mother's Meetings!"
From far up the Glen came the sound of the pony's hoofs. The stag had
been loaded up and the gillies were returning. Leithen looked at his
watch. "We'd better wait and see the beast," he said.
"... Well, nothing happened for more than a year. Then one evening in
May he burst into my rooms in high excitement. You understand quite
clearly that there was no suspicion of horror or fright or anything
unpleasant about this world he had discovered. It was simply a series
of interesting and difficult problems. All this time Hollond had been
rather extra well and cheery. But when he came in I thought I noticed
a different look in his eyes, something puzzled and diffident and
apprehensive.
"'There's a queer performance going on in the other world,' he said.
'It's unbelievable. I never dreamed of such a thing. I--I don't
quite know how to put it, and I don't know how to explain it, but--but
I am becoming aware that there are other beings--other minds--moving
in Space besides mine.'
"I suppose I ought to have realised then that things were beginning to
go wrong. But it was very difficult, he was so rational and anxious to
make it all clear. I asked him how he knew. 'There could, of course,
on his own showing be no CHANGE in that world, for the forms of Space
moved and existed under inexorable laws. He said he found his own mind
failing him at points. There would come over him a sense of
fear--intellectual fear--and weakness, a sense of something else, quite
alien to Space, thwarting him. Of course he could only describe his
impressions very lamely, for they were purely of the mind, and he had
no material peg to hang them on, so that I could realise them. But the
gist of it was that he had been gradually becoming conscious of what he
called 'Presences' in his world. They had no effect on Space--did not
leave footprints in its corridors, for instance--but they affected his
mind. There was some mysterious contact established between him and
them. I asked him if the affection was unpleasant and he said 'No, not
exactly.' But I could see a hint of fear in his eyes.
"Think of it. Try to realise what intellectual fear is. I can't, but
it is conceivable. To you and me fear implies pain to ourselves or
some other, and such pain is always in the last resort pain of the
flesh. Consider it carefully and you will see that it is so. But
imagine fear so sublimated and transmuted as to be the tension of pure
spirit. I can't realise it, but I think it possible. I don't pretend
to understand how Hollond got to know about these Presences. But there
was no doubt about the fact. He was positive, and he wasn't in the
least mad--not in our sense. In that very month he published his book
on Number, and gave a German professor who attacked it a most
tremendous public trouncing.
"I know what you are going to say,--that the fancy was a weakening of
the mind from within. I admit I should have thought of that but he
looked so confoundedly sane and able that it seemed ridiculous. He
kept asking me my opinion, as a lawyer, on the facts he offered. It
was the oddest case ever put before me, but I did my best for him. I
dropped all my own views of sense and nonsense. I told him that,
taking all that he had told me as fact, the Presences might be either
ordinary minds traversing Space in sleep; or minds such as his which
had independently captured the sense of Space's quality; or, finally,
the spirits of just men made perfect, behaving as psychical researchers
think they do. It was a ridiculous task to set a prosaic man, and I
wasn't quite serious. But Holland was serious enough.
"He admitted that all three explanations were conceivable, but he was
very doubtful about the first. The projection of the spirit into Space
during sleep, he thought, was a faint and feeble thing, and these were
powerful Presences. With the second and the third he was rather
impressed. I suppose I should have seen what was happening and tried
to stop it; at least, looking back that seems to have been my duty.
But it was difficult to think that anything was wrong with Hollond;
indeed the odd thing is that all this time the idea of madness never
entered my head. I rather backed him up. Somehow the thing took my
fancy, though I thought it moonshine at the bottom of my heart. I
enlarged on the pioneering before him. 'Think,' I told him, 'what may
be waiting for you. You may discover the meaning of Spirit. You may
open up a new world, as rich as the old one, but imperishable. You may
prove to mankind their immortality and deliver them for ever from the
fear of death. Why, man, you are picking at the lock of all the
world's mysteries.'
"But Hollond did not cheer up. He seemed strangely languid and
dispirited. 'That is all true enough,' he said,'if you are right, if
your alternatives are exhaustive. But suppose they are something else,
something .... What that 'something' might be he had apparently no
idea, and very soon he went away.
"He said another thing before he left. We asked me if I ever read
poetry, and I said, not often. Nor did he: but he had picked up a
little book somewhere and found a man who knew about the Presences. I
think his name was Traherne, one of the seventeenth-century fellows.
He quoted a verse which stuck to my fly-paper memory. It ran something
like
'Within the region of the air,
Compassed about with Heavens fair,
Great tracts of lands there may be found,
Where many numerous hosts,
In those far distant coasts,
For other great and glorious ends
Inhabit, my yet unknown friends.'
Hollond was positive he did not mean angels or anything of the sort. I
told him that Traherne evidently took a cheerful view of them. He
admitted that, but added: 'He had religion, you see. He believed that
everything was for the best. I am not a man of faith, and can only
take comfort from what I understand. I'm in the dark, I tell you...'
"Next week I was busy with the Chilian Arbitration case, and saw nobody
for a couple of months. Then one evening I ran against Hollond on the
Embankment, and thought him looking horribly ill. He walked back with
me to my rooms, and hardly uttered one word all the way. I gave him a
stiff whisky-and-soda, which he gulped down absent-mindedly. There was
that strained, hunted look in his eyes that you see in a frightened
animal's. He was always lean, but now he had fallen away to skin and
bone.
"'I can't stay long,' he told me, 'for I'm off to the Alps to-morrow
and I have a lot to do.' Before then he used to plunge readily into
his story, but now he seemed shy about beginning. Indeed I had to ask
him a question.
"'Things are difficult,' he said hesitatingly, and rather distressing.
Do you know, Leithen, I think you were wrong about--about what I spoke
to you of. You said there must be one of three explanations. I am
beginning to think that there is a fourth.
"He stopped for a second or two, then suddenly leaned forward and
gripped my knee so fiercely that I cried out. 'That world is the
Desolation,' he said in a choking voice, 'and perhaps I am getting near
the Abomination of the Desolation that the old prophet spoke of. I
tell you, man, I am on the edge of a terror, a terror,' he almost
screamed, 'that no mortal can think of and live.'
You can imagine that I was considerably startled. It was lightning out
of a clear sky. How the devil could one associate horror with
mathematics? I don't see it yet... At any rate, I--You may be sure I
cursed my folly for ever pretending to take him seriously. The only
way would have been to have laughed him out of it at the start. And
yet I couldn't, you know--it was too real and reasonable. Anyhow, I
tried a firm tone now, and told him the whole thing was arrant raving
bosh. I bade him be a man and pull himself together. I made him dine
with me, and took him home, and got him into a better state of mind
before he went to bed. Next morning I saw him off at Charing Cross,
very haggard still, but better. He promised to write to me pretty
often....
The pony, with a great eleven-pointer lurching athwart its back, was
abreast of us, and from the autumn mist came the sound of soft Highland
voices. Leithen and I got up to go, when we heard that the rifle had
made direct for the Lodge by a short cut past the Sanctuary. In the
wake of the gillies we descended the Correi road into a glen all
swimming with dim purple shadows. The pony minced and boggled; the
stag's antlers stood out sharp on the rise against a patch of sky,
looking like a skeleton tree. Then we dropped into a covert of birches
and emerged on the white glen highway.
Leithen's story had bored and puzzled me at the start, but now it had
somehow gripped my fancy. Space a domain of endless corridors and
Presences moving in them! The world was not quite the same as an hour
ago. It was the hour, as the French say, "between dog and wolf," when
the mind is disposed to marvels. I thought of my stalking on the
morrow, and was miserably conscious that I would miss my stag. Those
airy forms would get in the way. Confound Leithen and his yarns!
"I want to hear the end of your story," I told him, as the lights of
the Lodge showed half a mile distant.
"The end was a tragedy," he said slowly. "I don't much care to talk
about it. But how was I to know? I couldn't see the nerve going. You
see I couldn't believe it was all nonsense. If I could I might have
seen. But I still think there was something in it--up to a point. Oh,
I agree he went mad in the end. It is the only explanation. Something
must have snapped in that fine brain, and he saw the little bit more
which we call madness. Thank God, you and I are prosaic fellows...
"I was going out to Chamonix myself a week later. But before I started
I got a post-card from Hollond, the only word from him. He had printed
my name and address, and on the other side had scribbled six words--'I
know at last--God's mercy.--H.G.H' The handwriting was like a sick man
of ninety. I knew that things must be pretty bad with my friend.
"I got to Chamonix in time for his funeral. An ordinary climbing
accident--you probably read about it in the papers. The Press talked
about the toll which the Alps took from intellectuals--the usual rot.
There was an inquiry, but the facts were quite simple. The body was
only recognised by the clothes. He had fallen several thousand feet.
"It seems that he had climbed for a few days with one of the Kronigs
and Dupont, and they had done some hair-raising things on the
Aiguilles. Dupont told me that they had found a new route up the
Montanvert side of the Charmoz. He said that Hollond climbed like a
'diable fou' and if you know Dupont's standard of madness you will see
that the pace must have been pretty hot. 'But monsieur was sick,' he
added; 'his eyes were not good. And I and Franz, we were grieved for
him and a little afraid. We were glad when he left us.'
"He dismissed the guides two days before his death. The next day he
spent in the hotel, getting his affairs straight. He left everything
in perfect order, but not a line to a soul, not even to his sister.
The following day he set out alone about three in the morning for the
Grepon. He took the road up the Nantillons glacier to the Col, and
then he must have climbed the Mummery crack by himself. After that he
left the ordinary route and tried a new traverse across the Mer de
Glace face. Somewhere near the top he fell, and next day a party going
to the Dent du Requin found him on the rocks thousands of feet below.
"He had slipped in attempting the most foolhardy course on earth, and
there was a lot of talk about the dangers of guideless climbing. But I
guessed the truth, and I am sure Dupont knew, though he held his
tongue...."
We were now on the gravel of the drive, and I was feeling better. The
thought of dinner warmed my heart and drove out the eeriness of the
twilight glen. The hour between dog and wolf was passing. After all,
there was a gross and jolly earth at hand for wise men who had a mind
to comfort.
Leithen, I saw, did not share my mood. He looked glum and puzzled, as
if his tale had aroused grim memories. He finished it at the Lodge
door.
"... For, of course, he had gone out that day to die. He had seen the
something more, the little bit too much, which plucks a man from his
moorings. He had gone so far into the land of pure spirit that he must
needs go further and shed the fleshly envelope that cumbered him. God
send that he found rest! I believe that he chose the steepest cliff in
the Alps for a purpose. He wanted to be unrecognisable. He was a
brave man and a good citizen. I think he hoped that those who found
him might not see the look in his eyes."