I
I should never have thought it of a man not only called John Robinson,
but who looked the name so completely. True, he had been born abroad
in a land of mystery, but with that he had nothing to do. Owing to
a series of circumstances over which Robinson exerted no control
whatever, he first saw daylight on a Thibetan tableland, and, what is
more, did not return to his mother-country until he was one-and-twenty
years of age; but there was little to suggest these facts about him. He
had the most purely British middle-class manners, instincts, appetites
and mould of mind that ever I saw. For ten years I knew him intimately,
and never guessed that anything in the least uncommon lurked beneath
his fat exterior. I even respected him. He dwelt alone with an
unmarried sister but little older than himself and he went to business
in the City daily. After travelling upon the same omnibus with him
every morning, winter and summer, for five years, the English reserve
of the man thawed, and we grew acquainted. He was a giant in stature,
I am undersized; he had an extraordinary amount of physical courage,
I possess none; he, indeed, differed from me in a thousand ways, and
that was doubtless the reason why we became such firm friends. Our
political opinions, moreover, were tinged by the same morning journal,
and when similar views on great questions of the day bind men together,
it often happens that warm if not lasting friendships are the result.
Of course, I never asked for the key of Robinson’s mystery; I did not
so much as dream that he had a mystery. Once only might I have read
some indication of a side to his character that I had not guessed
at; but I never really grasped the significance of certain remarks
uttered by him on his way to town one morning, though they surprised
me at the time. Having read, with some interest, a leading article
on occult theosophy--which approached that belief in a disrespectful
spirit--Robinson spoke.
“What fools men are!” he said. “How can this poor penny-a-liner
possibly know what he is talking about? Just listen: ‘Mahatmas are a
figment to bolster a cause which human wisdom has agreed to pronounce
unsound.’ There’s bosh for you!”