Project Gutenberg's Three More John Silence Stories, by Algernon Blackwood
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Title: Three More John Silence Stories
Author: Algernon Blackwood
Release Date: January 9, 2004 [EBook #10659]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE MORE JOHN SILENCE STORIES ***
Produced by Suzanne Shell, Dave Morgan and PG Distributed Proofreaders
Three More John Silence Stories
BY ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
To M.L.W. The Original of John Silence
and
My Companion in Many Adventures
Contents
Case I: Secret Worship
Case II: The Camp of the Dog
Case III: A Victim of Higher Space
CASE I: SECRET WORSHIP
Harris, the silk merchant, was in South Germany on his way home from a
business trip when the idea came to him suddenly that he would take the
mountain railway from Strassbourg and run down to revisit his old school
after an interval of something more than thirty years. And it was to
this chance impulse of the junior partner in Harris Brothers of St.
Paul's Churchyard that John Silence owed one of the most curious cases
of his whole experience, for at that very moment he happened to be
tramping these same mountains with a holiday knapsack, and from
different points of the compass the two men were actually converging
towards the same inn.
Now, deep down in the heart that for thirty years had been concerned
chiefly with the profitable buying and selling of silk, this school had
left the imprint of its peculiar influence, and, though perhaps unknown
to Harris, had strongly coloured the whole of his subsequent existence.
It belonged to the deeply religious life of a small Protestant community
(which it is unnecessary to specify), and his father had sent him there
at the age of fifteen, partly because he would learn the German
requisite for the conduct of the silk business, and partly because the
discipline was strict, and discipline was what his soul and body needed
just then more than anything else.
The life, indeed, had proved exceedingly severe, and young Harris
benefited accordingly; for though corporal punishment was unknown, there
was a system of mental and spiritual correction which somehow made the
soul stand proudly erect to receive it, while it struck at the very root
of the fault and taught the boy that his character was being cleaned and
strengthened, and that he was not merely being tortured in a kind of
personal revenge.
That was over thirty years ago, when he was a dreamy and impressionable
youth of fifteen; and now, as the train climbed slowly up the winding
mountain gorges, his mind travelled back somewhat lovingly over the
intervening period, and forgotten details rose vividly again before him
out of the shadows. The life there had been very wonderful, it seemed to
him, in that remote mountain village, protected from the tumults of the
world by the love and worship of the devout Brotherhood that ministered
to the needs of some hundred boys from every country in Europe. Sharply
the scenes came back to him. He smelt again the long stone corridors,
the hot pinewood rooms, where the sultry hours of summer study were
passed with bees droning through open windows in the sunshine, and
German characters struggling in the mind with dreams of English
lawns--and then the sudden awful cry of the master in German--
"Harris, stand up! You sleep!"
And he recalled the dreadful standing motionless for an hour, book in
hand, while the knees felt like wax and the head grew heavier than a
cannon-ball.
The very smell of the cooking came back to him--the daily _Sauerkraut_,
the watery chocolate on Sundays, the flavour of the stringy meat served
twice a week at _Mittagessen_; and he smiled to think again of the
half-rations that was the punishment for speaking English. The very
odour of the milk-bowls,--the hot sweet aroma that rose from the soaking
peasant-bread at the six-o'clock breakfast,--came back to him pungently,
and he saw the huge _Speisesaal_ with the hundred boys in their school
uniform, all eating sleepily in silence, gulping down the coarse bread
and scalding milk in terror of the bell that would presently cut them
short--and, at the far end where the masters sat, he saw the narrow slit
windows with the vistas of enticing field and forest beyond.
And this, in turn, made him think of the great barnlike room on the top
floor where all slept together in wooden cots, and he heard in memory
the clamour of the cruel bell that woke them on winter mornings at five
o'clock and summoned them to the stone-flagged _Waschkammer_, where boys
and masters alike, after scanty and icy washing, dressed in complete
silence.
From this his mind passed swiftly, with vivid picture-thoughts, to other
things, and with a passing shiver he remembered how the loneliness of
never being alone had eaten into him, and how everything--work, meals,
sleep, walks, leisure--was done with his "division" of twenty other boys
and under the eyes of at least two masters. The only solitude possible
was by asking for half an hour's practice in the cell-like music rooms,
and Harris smiled to himself as he recalled the zeal of his violin
studies.
Then, as the train puffed laboriously through the great pine forests
that cover these mountains with a giant carpet of velvet, he found the
pleasanter layers of memory giving up their dead, and he recalled with
admiration the kindness of the masters, whom all addressed as Brother,
and marvelled afresh at their devotion in burying themselves for years
in such a place, only to leave it, in most cases, for the still rougher
life of missionaries in the wild places of the world.
He thought once more of the still, religious atmosphere that hung over
the little forest community like a veil, barring the distressful world;
of the picturesque ceremonies at Easter, Christmas, and New Year; of the
numerous feast-days and charming little festivals. The _Beschehr-Fest_,
in particular, came back to him,--the feast of gifts at Christmas,--when
the entire community paired off and gave presents, many of which had
taken weeks to make or the savings of many days to purchase. And then he
saw the midnight ceremony in the church at New Year, with the shining
face of the _Prediger_ in the pulpit,--the village preacher who, on the
last night of the old year, saw in the empty gallery beyond the organ
loft the faces of all who were to die in the ensuing twelve months, and
who at last recognised himself among them, and, in the very middle of
his sermon, passed into a state of rapt ecstasy and burst into a torrent
of praise.
Thickly the memories crowded upon him. The picture of the small village
dreaming its unselfish life on the mountain-tops, clean, wholesome,
simple, searching vigorously for its God, and training hundreds of boys
in the grand way, rose up in his mind with all the power of an
obsession. He felt once more the old mystical enthusiasm, deeper than
the sea and more wonderful than the stars; he heard again the winds
sighing from leagues of forest over the red roofs in the moonlight; he
heard the Brothers' voices talking of the things beyond this life as
though they had actually experienced them in the body; and, as he sat in
the jolting train, a spirit of unutterable longing passed over his
seared and tired soul, stirring in the depths of him a sea of emotions
that he thought had long since frozen into immobility.
And the contrast pained him,--the idealistic dreamer then, the man of
business now,--so that a spirit of unworldly peace and beauty known only
to the soul in meditation laid its feathered finger upon his heart,
moving strangely the surface of the waters.
Harris shivered a little and looked out of the window of his empty
carriage. The train had long passed Hornberg, and far below the streams
tumbled in white foam down the limestone rocks. In front of him, dome
upon dome of wooded mountain stood against the sky. It was October, and
the air was cool and sharp, woodsmoke and damp moss exquisitely mingled
in it with the subtle odours of the pines. Overhead, between the tips of
the highest firs, he saw the first stars peeping, and the sky was a
clean, pale amethyst that seemed exactly the colour all these memories
clothed themselves with in his mind.
He leaned back in his corner and sighed. He was a heavy man, and he had
not known sentiment for years; he was a big man, and it took much to
move him, literally and figuratively; he was a man in whom the dreams of
God that haunt the soul in youth, though overlaid by the scum that
gathers in the fight for money, had not, as with the majority, utterly
died the death.
He came back into this little neglected pocket of the years, where so
much fine gold had collected and lain undisturbed, with all his
semispiritual emotions aquiver; and, as he watched the mountain-tops
come nearer, and smelt the forgotten odours of his boyhood, something
melted on the surface of his soul and left him sensitive to a degree he
had not known since, thirty years before, he had lived here with his
dreams, his conflicts, and his youthful suffering.
A thrill ran through him as the train stopped with a jolt at a tiny
station and he saw the name in large black lettering on the grey stone
building, and below it, the number of metres it stood above the level of
the sea.
"The highest point on the line!" he exclaimed. "How well I remember
it--Sommerau--Summer Meadow. The very next station is mine!"
And, as the train ran downhill with brakes on and steam shut off, he put
his head out of the window and one by one saw the old familiar landmarks
in the dusk. They stared at him like dead faces in a dream. Queer, sharp
feelings, half poignant, half sweet, stirred in his heart.
"There's the hot, white road we walked along so often with the two
Brüder always at our heels," he thought; "and there, by Jove, is the
turn through the forest to '_Die Galgen_,' the stone gallows where they
hanged the witches in olden days!"
He smiled a little as the train slid past.
"And there's the copse where the Lilies of the Valley powdered the
ground in spring; and, I swear,"--he put his head out with a sudden
impulse--"if that's not the very clearing where Calame, the French boy,
chased the swallow-tail with me, and Bruder Pagel gave us half-rations
for leaving the road without permission, and for shouting in our mother
tongues!" And he laughed again as the memories came back with a rush,
flooding his mind with vivid detail.
The train stopped, and he stood on the grey gravel platform like a man
in a dream. It seemed half a century since he last waited there with
corded wooden boxes, and got into the train for Strassbourg and home
after the two years' exile. Time dropped from him like an old garment
and he felt a boy again. Only, things looked so much smaller than his
memory of them; shrunk and dwindled they looked, and the distances
seemed on a curiously smaller scale.
He made his way across the road to the little Gasthaus, and, as he went,
faces and figures of former schoolfellows,--German, Swiss, Italian,
French, Russian,--slipped out of the shadowy woods and silently
accompanied him. They flitted by his side, raising their eyes
questioningly, sadly, to his. But their names he had forgotten. Some of
the Brothers, too, came with them, and most of these he remembered by
name--Bruder Röst, Bruder Pagel, Bruder Schliemann, and the bearded face
of the old preacher who had seen himself in the haunted gallery of those
about to die--Bruder Gysin. The dark forest lay all about him like a sea
that any moment might rush with velvet waves upon the scene and sweep
all the faces away. The air was cool and wonderfully fragrant, but with
every perfumed breath came also a pallid memory....
Yet, in spite of the underlying sadness inseparable from such an
experience, it was all very interesting, and held a pleasure peculiarly
its own, so that Harris engaged his room and ordered supper feeling well
pleased with himself, and intending to walk up to the old school that
very evening. It stood in the centre of the community's village, some
four miles distant through the forest, and he now recollected for the
first time that this little Protestant settlement dwelt isolated in a
section of the country that was otherwise Catholic. Crucifixes and
shrines surrounded the clearing like the sentries of a beleaguering
army. Once beyond the square of the village, with its few acres of field
and orchard, the forest crowded up in solid phalanxes, and beyond the
rim of trees began the country that was ruled by the priests of another
faith. He vaguely remembered, too, that the Catholics had showed
sometimes a certain hostility towards the little Protestant oasis that
flourished so quietly and benignly in their midst. He had quite
forgotten this. How trumpery it all seemed now with his wide experience
of life and his knowledge of other countries and the great outside
world. It was like stepping back, not thirty years, but three hundred.
There were only two others besides himself at supper. One of them, a
bearded, middle-aged man in tweeds, sat by himself at the far end, and
Harris kept out of his way because he was English. He feared he might be
in business, possibly even in the silk business, and that he would
perhaps talk on the subject. The other traveller, however, was a
Catholic priest. He was a little man who ate his salad with a knife, yet
so gently that it was almost inoffensive, and it was the sight of "the
cloth" that recalled his memory of the old antagonism. Harris mentioned
by way of conversation the object of his sentimental journey, and the
priest looked up sharply at him with raised eyebrows and an expression
of surprise and suspicion that somehow piqued him. He ascribed it to his
difference of belief.
"Yes," went on the silk merchant, pleased to talk of what his mind was
so full, "and it was a curious experience for an English boy to be
dropped down into a school of a hundred foreigners. I well remember the
loneliness and intolerable Heimweh of it at first." His German was very
fluent.
The priest opposite looked up from his cold veal and potato salad and
smiled. It was a nice face. He explained quietly that he did not belong
here, but was making a tour of the parishes of Wurttemberg and Baden.
"It was a strict life," added Harris. "We English, I remember, used to
call it _Gefängnisleben_--prison life!"
The face of the other, for some unaccountable reason, darkened. After a
slight pause, and more by way of politeness than because he wished to
continue the subject, he said quietly--
"It was a flourishing school in those days, of course. Afterwards, I
have heard--" He shrugged his shoulders slightly, and the odd look--it
almost seemed a look of alarm--came back into his eyes. The sentence
remained unfinished.
Something in the tone of the man seemed to his listener uncalled for--in
a sense reproachful, singular. Harris bridled in spite of himself.
"It has changed?" he asked. "I can hardly believe--"
"You have not heard, then?" observed the priest gently, making a gesture
as though to cross himself, yet not actually completing it. "You have
not heard what happened there before it was abandoned--?"
It was very childish, of course, and perhaps he was overtired and
overwrought in some way, but the words and manner of the little priest
seemed to him so offensive--so disproportionately offensive--that he
hardly noticed the concluding sentence. He recalled the old bitterness
and the old antagonism, and for a moment he almost lost his temper.
"Nonsense," he interrupted with a forced laugh, "_Unsinn_! You must
forgive me, sir, for contradicting you. But I was a pupil there myself.
I was at school there. There was no place like it. I cannot believe that
anything serious could have happened to--to take away its character. The
devotion of the Brothers would be difficult to equal anywhere--"
He broke off suddenly, realising that his voice had been raised unduly
and that the man at the far end of the table might understand German;
and at the same moment he looked up and saw that this individual's eyes
were fixed upon his face intently. They were peculiarly bright. Also
they were rather wonderful eyes, and the way they met his own served in
some way he could not understand to convey both a reproach and a
warning. The whole face of the stranger, indeed, made a vivid impression
upon him, for it was a face, he now noticed for the first time, in whose
presence one would not willingly have said or done anything unworthy.
Harris could not explain to himself how it was he had not become
conscious sooner of its presence.
But he could have bitten off his tongue for having so far forgotten
himself. The little priest lapsed into silence. Only once he said,
looking up and speaking in a low voice that was not intended to be
overheard, but that evidently _was_ overheard, "You will find it
different." Presently he rose and left the table with a polite bow that
included both the others.
And, after him, from the far end rose also the figure in the tweed suit,
leaving Harris by himself.
He sat on for a bit in the darkening room, sipping his coffee and
smoking his fifteen-pfennig cigar, till the girl came in to light the
oil lamps. He felt vexed with himself for his lapse from good manners,
yet hardly able to account for it. Most likely, he reflected, he had
been annoyed because the priest had unintentionally changed the pleasant
character of his dream by introducing a jarring note. Later he must seek
an opportunity to make amends. At present, however, he was too impatient
for his walk to the school, and he took his stick and hat and passed out
into the open air.
And, as he crossed before the Gasthaus, he noticed that the priest and
the man in the tweed suit were engaged already in such deep conversation
that they hardly noticed him as he passed and raised his hat.
He started off briskly, well remembering the way, and hoping to reach
the village in time to have a word with one of the Brüder. They might
even ask him in for a cup of coffee. He felt sure of his welcome, and
the old memories were in full possession once more. The hour of return
was a matter of no consequence whatever.
It was then just after seven o'clock, and the October evening was
drawing in with chill airs from the recesses of the forest. The road
plunged straight from the railway clearing into its depths, and in a
very few minutes the trees engulfed him and the clack of his boots fell
dead and echoless against the serried stems of a million firs. It was
very black; one trunk was hardly distinguishable from another. He walked
smartly, swinging his holly stick. Once or twice he passed a peasant on
his way to bed, and the guttural "Gruss Got," unheard for so long,
emphasised the passage of time, while yet making it seem as nothing. A
fresh group of pictures crowded his mind. Again the figures of former
schoolfellows flitted out of the forest and kept pace by his side,
whispering of the doings of long ago. One reverie stepped hard upon the
heels of another. Every turn in the road, every clearing of the forest,
he knew, and each in turn brought forgotten associations to life. He
enjoyed himself thoroughly.
He marched on and on. There was powdered gold in the sky till the moon
rose, and then a wind of faint silver spread silently between the earth
and stars. He saw the tips of the fir trees shimmer, and heard them
whisper as the breeze turned their needles towards the light. The
mountain air was indescribably sweet. The road shone like the foam of a
river through the gloom. White moths flitted here and there like silent
thoughts across his path, and a hundred smells greeted him from the
forest caverns across the years.
Then, when he least expected it, the trees fell away abruptly on both
sides, and he stood on the edge of the village clearing.
He walked faster. There lay the familiar outlines of the houses, sheeted
with silver; there stood the trees in the little central square with the
fountain and small green lawns; there loomed the shape of the church
next to the Gasthof der Brüdergemeinde; and just beyond, dimly rising
into the sky, he saw with a sudden thrill the mass of the huge school
building, blocked castlelike with deep shadows in the moonlight,
standing square and formidable to face him after the silences of more
than a quarter of a century.
He passed quickly down the deserted village street and stopped close
beneath its shadow, staring up at the walls that had once held him
prisoner for two years--two unbroken years of discipline and
homesickness. Memories and emotions surged through his mind; for the
most vivid sensations of his youth had focused about this spot, and it
was here he had first begun to live and learn values. Not a single
footstep broke the silence, though lights glimmered here and there
through cottage windows; but when he looked up at the high walls of the
school, draped now in shadow, he easily imagined that well-known faces
crowded to the windows to greet him--closed windows that really
reflected only moonlight and the gleam of stars.
This, then, was the old school building, standing foursquare to the
world, with its shuttered windows, its lofty, tiled roof, and the spiked
lightning-conductors pointing like black and taloned fingers from the
corners. For a long time he stood and stared. Then, presently, he came
to himself again, and realised to his joy that a light still shone in
the windows of the Bruderstube.
He turned from the road and passed through the iron railings; then
climbed the twelve stone steps and stood facing the black wooden door
with the heavy bars of iron, a door he had once loathed and dreaded with
the hatred and passion of an imprisoned soul, but now looked upon
tenderly with a sort of boyish delight.
Almost timorously he pulled the rope and listened with a tremor of
excitement to the clanging of the bell deep within the building. And the
long-forgotten sound brought the past before him with such a vivid sense
of reality that he positively shivered. It was like the magic bell in
the fairy-tale that rolls back the curtain of Time and summons the
figures from the shadows of the dead. He had never felt so sentimental
in his life. It was like being young again. And, at the same time, he
began to bulk rather large in his own eyes with a certain spurious
importance. He was a big man from the world of strife and action. In
this little place of peaceful dreams would he, perhaps, not cut
something of a figure?
"I'll try once more," he thought after a long pause, seizing the iron
bell-rope, and was just about to pull it when a step sounded on the
stone passage within, and the huge door slowly swung open.
A tall man with a rather severe cast of countenance stood facing him in
silence.
"I must apologise--it is somewhat late," he began a trifle pompously,
"but the fact is I am an old pupil. I have only just arrived and really
could not restrain myself." His German seemed not quite so fluent as
usual. "My interest is so great. I was here in '70."
The other opened the door wider and at once bowed him in with a smile of
genuine welcome.
"I am Bruder Kalkmann," he said quietly in a deep voice. "I myself was a
master here about that time. It is a great pleasure always to welcome a
former pupil." He looked at him very keenly for a few seconds, and then
added, "I think, too, it is splendid of you to come--very splendid."
"It is a very great pleasure," Harris replied, delighted with his
reception.
The dimly lighted corridor with its flooring of grey stone, and the
familiar sound of a German voice echoing through it,--with the peculiar
intonation the Brothers always used in speaking,--all combined to lift
him bodily, as it were, into the dream-atmosphere of long-forgotten
days. He stepped gladly into the building and the door shut with the
familiar thunder that completed the reconstruction of the past. He
almost felt the old sense of imprisonment, of aching nostalgia, of
having lost his liberty.
Harris sighed involuntarily and turned towards his host, who returned
his smile faintly and then led the way down the corridor.
"The boys have retired," he explained, "and, as you remember, we keep
early hours here. But, at least, you will join us for a little while in
the _Bruderstube_ and enjoy a cup of coffee." This was precisely what
the silk merchant had hoped, and he accepted with an alacrity that he
intended to be tempered by graciousness. "And to-morrow," continued the
Bruder, "you must come and spend a whole day with us. You may even find
acquaintances, for several pupils of your day have come back here as
masters."
For one brief second there passed into the man's eyes a look that made
the visitor start. But it vanished as quickly as it came. It was
impossible to define. Harris convinced himself it was the effect of a
shadow cast by the lamp they had just passed on the wall. He dismissed
it from his mind.
"You are very kind, I'm sure," he said politely. "It is perhaps a
greater pleasure to me than you can imagine to see the place again.
Ah,"--he stopped short opposite a door with the upper half of glass and
peered in--"surely there is one of the music rooms where I used to
practise the violin. How it comes back to me after all these years!"
Bruder Kalkmann stopped indulgently, smiling, to allow his guest a
moment's inspection.
"You still have the boys' orchestra? I remember I used to play 'zweite
Geige' in it. Bruder Schliemann conducted at the piano. Dear me, I can
see him now with his long black hair and--and--" He stopped abruptly.
Again the odd, dark look passed over the stern face of his companion.
For an instant it seemed curiously familiar.
"We still keep up the pupils' orchestra," he said, "but Bruder
Schliemann, I am sorry to say--" he hesitated an instant, and then
added, "Bruder Schliemann is dead."
"Indeed, indeed," said Harris quickly. "I am sorry to hear it." He was
conscious of a faint feeling of distress, but whether it arose from the
news of his old music teacher's death, or--from something else--he could
not quite determine. He gazed down the corridor that lost itself among
shadows. In the street and village everything had seemed so much smaller
than he remembered, but here, inside the school building, everything
seemed so much bigger. The corridor was loftier and longer, more
spacious and vast, than the mental picture he had preserved. His
thoughts wandered dreamily for an instant.
He glanced up and saw the face of the Bruder watching him with a smile
of patient indulgence.
"Your memories possess you," he observed gently, and the stern look
passed into something almost pitying.
"You are right," returned the man of silk, "they do. This was the most
wonderful period of my whole life in a sense. At the time I hated
it--" He hesitated, not wishing to hurt the Brother's feelings.
"According to English ideas it seemed strict, of course," the other said
persuasively, so that he went on.
"--Yes, partly that; and partly the ceaseless nostalgia, and the
solitude which came from never being really alone. In English schools
the boys enjoy peculiar freedom, you know."
Bruder Kalkmann, he saw, was listening intently.
"But it produced one result that I have never wholly lost," he
continued self-consciously, "and am grateful for."
"_Ach! Wie so, denn?_"
"The constant inner pain threw me headlong into your religious life, so
that the whole force of my being seemed to project itself towards the
search for a deeper satisfaction--a real resting-place for the soul.
During my two years here I yearned for God in my boyish way as perhaps I
have never yearned for anything since. Moreover, I have never quite lost
that sense of peace and inward joy which accompanied the search. I can
never quite forget this school and the deep things it taught me."
He paused at the end of his long speech, and a brief silence fell
between them. He feared he had said too much, or expressed himself
clumsily in the foreign language, and when Bruder Kalkmann laid a hand
upon his shoulder, he gave a little involuntary start.
"So that my memories perhaps do possess me rather strongly," he added
apologetically; "and this long corridor, these rooms, that barred and
gloomy front door, all touch chords that--that--" His German failed
him and he glanced at his companion with an explanatory smile and
gesture. But the Brother had removed the hand from his shoulder and was
standing with his back to him, looking down the passage.
"Naturally, naturally so," he said hastily without turning round.
"_Es ist doch selbstverständlich_. We shall all understand."
Then he turned suddenly, and Harris saw that his face had turned most
oddly and disagreeably sinister. It may only have been the shadows again
playing their tricks with the wretched oil lamps on the wall, for the
dark expression passed instantly as they retraced their steps down the
corridor, but the Englishman somehow got the impression that he had said
something to give offence, something that was not quite to the other's
taste. Opposite the door of the _Bruderstube_ they stopped. Harris
realised that it was late and he had possibly stayed talking too long.
He made a tentative effort to leave, but his companion would not hear of
it.
"You must have a cup of coffee with us," he said firmly as though he
meant it, "and my colleagues will be delighted to see you. Some of them
will remember you, perhaps."
The sound of voices came pleasantly through the door, men's voices
talking together. Bruder Kalkmann turned the handle and they entered a
room ablaze with light and full of people.
"Ah,--but your name?" he whispered, bending down to catch the reply;
"you have not told me your name yet."
"Harris," said the Englishman quickly as they went in. He felt nervous
as he crossed the threshold, but ascribed the momentary trepidation to
the fact that he was breaking the strictest rule of the whole
establishment, which forbade a boy under severest penalties to come near
this holy of holies where the masters took their brief leisure.
"Ah, yes, of course--Harris," repeated the other as though he remembered
it. "Come in, Herr Harris, come in, please. Your visit will be immensely
appreciated. It is really very fine, very wonderful of you to have come
in this way."
The door closed behind them and, in the sudden light which made his
sight swim for a moment, the exaggeration of the language escaped his
attention. He heard the voice of Bruder Kalkmann introducing him. He
spoke very loud, indeed, unnecessarily,--absurdly loud, Harris thought.
"Brothers," he announced, "it is my pleasure and privilege to introduce
to you Herr Harris from England. He has just arrived to make us a little
visit, and I have already expressed to him on behalf of us all the
satisfaction we feel that he is here. He was, as you remember, a pupil
in the year '70."
It was a very formal, a very German introduction, but Harris rather
liked it. It made him feel important and he appreciated the tact that
made it almost seem as though he had been expected.
The black forms rose and bowed; Harris bowed; Kalkmann bowed. Every one
was very polite and very courtly. The room swam with moving figures; the
light dazzled him after the gloom of the corridor, there was thick cigar
smoke in the atmosphere. He took the chair that was offered to him
between two of the Brothers, and sat down, feeling vaguely that his
perceptions were not quite as keen and accurate as usual. He felt a
trifle dazed perhaps, and the spell of the past came strongly over him,
confusing the immediate present and making everything dwindle oddly to
the dimensions of long ago. He seemed to pass under the mastery of a
great mood that was a composite reproduction of all the moods of his
forgotten boyhood.
Then he pulled himself together with a sharp effort and entered into the
conversation that had begun again to buzz round him. Moreover, he
entered into it with keen pleasure, for the Brothers--there were perhaps
a dozen of them in the little room--treated him with a charm of manner
that speedily made him feel one of themselves. This, again, was a very
subtle delight to him. He felt that he had stepped out of the greedy,
vulgar, self-seeking world, the world of silk and markets and
profit-making--stepped into the cleaner atmosphere where spiritual
ideals were paramount and life was simple and devoted. It all charmed
him inexpressibly, so that he realised--yes, in a sense--the degradation
of his twenty years' absorption in business. This keen atmosphere under
the stars where men thought only of their souls, and of the souls of
others, was too rarefied for the world he was now associated with. He
found himself making comparisons to his own disadvantage,--comparisons
with the mystical little dreamer that had stepped thirty years before
from the stern peace of this devout community, and the man of the world
that he had since become,--and the contrast made him shiver with a keen
regret and something like self-contempt.
He glanced round at the other faces floating towards him through tobacco
smoke--this acrid cigar smoke he remembered so well: how keen they were,
how strong, placid, touched with the nobility of great aims and
unselfish purposes. At one or two he looked particularly. He hardly knew
why. They rather fascinated him. There was something so very stern and
uncompromising about them, and something, too, oddly, subtly, familiar,
that yet just eluded him. But whenever their eyes met his own they held
undeniable welcome in them; and some held more--a kind of perplexed
admiration, he thought, something that was between esteem and deference.
This note of respect in all the faces was very flattering to his vanity.
Coffee was served presently, made by a black-haired Brother who sat in
the corner by the piano and bore a marked resemblance to Bruder
Schliemann, the musical director of thirty years ago. Harris exchanged
bows with him when he took the cup from his white hands, which he
noticed were like the hands of a woman. He lit a cigar, offered to him
by his neighbour, with whom he was chatting delightfully, and who, in
the glare of the lighted match, reminded him sharply for a moment of
Bruder Pagel, his former room-master.
"_Es ist wirklich merkwürdig_," he said, "how many resemblances I see,
or imagine. It is really _very_ curious!"
"Yes," replied the other, peering at him over his coffee cup, "the spell
of the place is wonderfully strong. I can well understand that the old
faces rise before your mind's eye--almost to the exclusion of ourselves
perhaps."
They both laughed presently. It was soothing to find his mood understood
and appreciated. And they passed on to talk of the mountain village, its
isolation, its remoteness from worldly life, its peculiar fitness for
meditation and worship, and for spiritual development--of a certain
kind.
"And your coming back in this way, Herr Harris, has pleased us all so
much," joined in the Bruder on his left. "We esteem you for it most
highly. We honour you for it."
Harris made a deprecating gesture. "I fear, for my part, it is only a
very selfish pleasure," he said a trifle unctuously.
"Not all would have had the courage," added the one who resembled
Bruder Pagel.
"You mean," said Harris, a little puzzled, "the disturbing memories--?"
Bruder Pagel looked at him steadily, with unmistakable admiration and
respect. "I mean that most men hold so strongly to life, and can give up
so little for their beliefs," he said gravely.
The Englishman felt slightly uncomfortable. These worthy men really made
too much of his sentimental journey. Besides, the talk was getting a
little out of his depth. He hardly followed it.
"The worldly life still has _some_ charms for me," he replied smilingly,
as though to indicate that sainthood was not yet quite within his grasp.
"All the more, then, must we honour you for so freely coming," said the
Brother on his left; "so unconditionally!"
A pause followed, and the silk merchant felt relieved when the
conversation took a more general turn, although he noted that it never
travelled very far from the subject of his visit and the wonderful
situation of the lonely village for men who wished to develop their
spiritual powers and practise the rites of a high worship. Others joined
in, complimenting him on his knowledge of the language, making him feel
utterly at his ease, yet at the same time a little uncomfortable by the
excess of their admiration. After all, it was such a very small thing to
do, this sentimental journey.
The time passed along quickly; the coffee was excellent, the cigars soft
and of the nutty flavour he loved. At length, fearing to outstay his
welcome, he rose reluctantly to take his leave. But the others would not
hear of it. It was not often a former pupil returned to visit them in
this simple, unaffected way. The night was young. If necessary they
could even find him a corner in the great _Schlafzimmer_ upstairs. He
was easily persuaded to stay a little longer. Somehow he had become the
centre of the little party. He felt pleased, flattered, honoured.
"And perhaps Bruder Schliemann will play something for us--now."
It was Kalkmann speaking, and Harris started visibly as he heard the
name, and saw the black-haired man by the piano turn with a smile. For
Schliemann was the name of his old music director, who was dead. Could
this be his son? They were so exactly alike.
"If Bruder Meyer has not put his Amati to bed, I will accompany him,"
said the musician suggestively, looking across at a man whom Harris had
not yet noticed, and who, he now saw, was the very image of a former
master of that name.
Meyer rose and excused himself with a little bow, and the Englishman
quickly observed that he had a peculiar gesture as though his neck had a
false join on to the body just below the collar and feared it might
break. Meyer of old had this trick of movement. He remembered how the
boys used to copy it.
He glanced sharply from face to face, feeling as though some silent,
unseen process were changing everything about him. All the faces seemed
oddly familiar. Pagel, the Brother he had been talking with, was of
course the image of Pagel, his former room-master, and Kalkmann, he now
realised for the first time, was the very twin of another master whose
name he had quite forgotten, but whom he used to dislike intensely in
the old days. And, through the smoke, peering at him from the corners of
the room, he saw that all the Brothers about him had the faces he had
known and lived with long ago--Röst, Fluheim, Meinert, Rigel, Gysin.
He stared hard, suddenly grown more alert, and everywhere saw, or
fancied he saw, strange likenesses, ghostly resemblances,--more, the
identical faces of years ago. There was something queer about it all,
something not quite right, something that made him feel uneasy. He shook
himself, mentally and actually, blowing the smoke from before his eyes
with a long breath, and as he did so he noticed to his dismay that every
one was fixedly staring. They were watching him.
This brought him to his senses. As an Englishman, and a foreigner, he
did not wish to be rude, or to do anything to make himself foolishly
conspicuous and spoil the harmony of the evening. He was a guest, and a
privileged guest at that. Besides, the music had already begun. Bruder
Schliemann's long white fingers were caressing the keys to some purpose.
He subsided into his chair and smoked with half-closed eyes that yet saw
everything.
But the shudder had established itself in his being, and, whether he
would or not, it kept repeating itself. As a town, far up some inland
river, feels the pressure of the distant sea, so he became aware that
mighty forces from somewhere beyond his ken were urging themselves up
against his soul in this smoky little room. He began to feel exceedingly
ill at ease.
And as the music filled the air his mind began to clear. Like a lifted
veil there rose up something that had hitherto obscured his vision. The
words of the priest at the railway inn flashed across his brain
unbidden: "You will find it different." And also, though why he could
not tell, he saw mentally the strong, rather wonderful eyes of that
other guest at the supper-table, the man who had overheard his
conversation, and had later got into earnest talk with the priest. He
took out his watch and stole a glance at it. Two hours had slipped by.
It was already eleven o'clock.
Schliemann, meanwhile, utterly absorbed in his music, was playing a
solemn measure. The piano sang marvellously. The power of a great
conviction, the simplicity of great art, the vital spiritual message of
a soul that had found itself--all this, and more, were in the chords,
and yet somehow the music was what can only be described as
impure--atrociously and diabolically impure. And the piece itself,
although Harris did not recognise it as anything familiar, was surely
the music of a Mass--huge, majestic, sombre? It stalked through the
smoky room with slow power, like the passage of something that was
mighty, yet profoundly intimate, and as it went there stirred into each
and every face about him the signature of the enormous forces of which
it was the audible symbol. The countenances round him turned sinister,
but not idly, negatively sinister: they grew dark with purpose. He
suddenly recalled the face of Bruder Kalkmann in the corridor earlier in
the evening. The motives of their secret souls rose to the eyes, and
mouths, and foreheads, and hung there for all to see like the black
banners of an assembly of ill-starred and fallen creatures. Demons--was
the horrible word that flashed through his brain like a sheet of fire.
When this sudden discovery leaped out upon him, for a moment he lost his
self-control. Without waiting to think and weigh his extraordinary
impression, he did a very foolish but a very natural thing. Feeling
himself irresistibly driven by the sudden stress to some kind of action,
he sprang to his feet--and screamed! To his own utter amazement he stood
up and shrieked aloud!
But no one stirred. No one, apparently, took the slightest notice of his
absurdly wild behaviour. It was almost as if no one but himself had
heard the scream at all--as though the music had drowned it and
swallowed it up--as though after all perhaps he had not really screamed
as loudly as he imagined, or had not screamed at all.
Then, as he glanced at the motionless, dark faces before him, something
of utter cold passed into his being, touching his very soul.... All
emotion cooled suddenly, leaving him like a receding tide. He sat down
again, ashamed, mortified, angry with himself for behaving like a fool
and a boy. And the music, meanwhile, continued to issue from the white
and snakelike fingers of Bruder Schliemann, as poisoned wine might issue
from the weirdly fashioned necks of antique phials.
And, with the rest of them, Harris drank it in.
Forcing himself to believe that he had been the victim of some kind of
illusory perception, he vigorously restrained his feelings. Then the
music presently ceased, and every one applauded and began to talk at
once, laughing, changing seats, complimenting the player, and behaving
naturally and easily as though nothing out of the way had happened. The
faces appeared normal once more. The Brothers crowded round their
visitor, and he joined in their talk and even heard himself thanking the
gifted musician.
But, at the same time, he found himself edging towards the door, nearer
and nearer, changing his chair when possible, and joining the groups
that stood closest to the way of escape.
"I must thank you all _tausendmal_ for my little reception and the great
pleasure--the very great honour you have done me," he began in decided
tones at length, "but I fear I have trespassed far too long already on
your hospitality. Moreover, I have some distance to walk to my inn."
A chorus of voices greeted his words. They would not hear of his
going,--at least not without first partaking of refreshment. They
produced pumpernickel from one cupboard, and rye-bread and sausage from
another, and all began to talk again and eat. More coffee was made,
fresh cigars lighted, and Bruder Meyer took out his violin and began to
tune it softly.
"There is always a bed upstairs if Herr Harris will accept it," said
one.
"And it is difficult to find the way out now, for all the doors are
locked," laughed another loudly.
"Let us take our simple pleasures as they come," cried a third. "Bruder
Harris will understand how we appreciate the honour of this last visit
of his."
They made a dozen excuses. They all laughed, as though the politeness of
their words was but formal, and veiled thinly--more and more thinly--a
very different meaning.
"And the hour of midnight draws near," added Bruder Kalkmann with a
charming smile, but in a voice that sounded to the Englishman like the
grating of iron hinges.
Their German seemed to him more and more difficult to understand. He
noted that they called him "Bruder" too, classing him as one of
themselves.
And then suddenly he had a flash of keener perception, and realised with
a creeping of his flesh that he had all along misinterpreted--grossly
misinterpreted all they had been saying. They had talked about the
beauty of the place, its isolation and remoteness from the world, its
peculiar fitness for certain kinds of spiritual development and
worship--yet hardly, he now grasped, in the sense in which he had taken
the words. They had meant something different. Their spiritual powers,
their desire for loneliness, their passion for worship, were not the
powers, the solitude, or the worship that _he_ meant and understood. He
was playing a part in some horrible masquerade; he was among men who
cloaked their lives with religion in order to follow their real purposes
unseen of men.
What did it all mean? How had he blundered into so equivocal a
situation? Had he blundered into it at all? Had he not rather been led
into it, deliberately led? His thoughts grew dreadfully confused, and
his confidence in himself began to fade. And why, he suddenly thought
again, were they so impressed by the mere fact of his coming to revisit
his old school? What was it they so admired and wondered at in his
simple act? Why did they set such store upon his having the courage to
come, to "give himself so freely," "unconditionally" as one of them had
expressed it with such a mockery of exaggeration?
Fear stirred in his heart most horribly, and he found no answer to any
of his questionings. Only one thing he now understood quite clearly: it
was their purpose to keep him here. They did not intend that he should
go. And from this moment he realised that they were sinister, formidable
and, in some way he had yet to discover, inimical to himself, inimical
to his life. And the phrase one of them had used a moment ago--"this
_last_ visit of his"--rose before his eyes in letters of flame.
Harris was not a man of action, and had never known in all the course of
his career what it meant to be in a situation of real danger. He was not
necessarily a coward, though, perhaps, a man of untried nerve. He
realised at last plainly that he was in a very awkward predicament
indeed, and that he had to deal with men who were utterly in earnest.
What their intentions were he only vaguely guessed. His mind, indeed,
was too confused for definite ratiocination, and he was only able to
follow blindly the strongest instincts that moved in him. It never
occurred to him that the Brothers might all be mad, or that he himself
might have temporarily lost his senses and be suffering under some
terrible delusion. In fact, nothing occurred to him--he realised
nothing--except that he meant to escape--and the quicker the better. A
tremendous revulsion of feeling set in and overpowered him.
Accordingly, without further protest for the moment, he ate his
pumpernickel and drank his coffee, talking meanwhile as naturally and
pleasantly as he could, and when a suitable interval had passed, he rose
to his feet and announced once more that he must now take his leave. He
spoke very quietly, but very decidedly. No one hearing him could doubt
that he meant what he said. He had got very close to the door by this
time.
"I regret," he said, using his best German, and speaking to a hushed
room, "that our pleasant evening must come to an end, but it is now
time for me to wish you all good-night." And then, as no one said
anything, he added, though with a trifle less assurance, "And I thank
you all most sincerely for your hospitality."
"On the contrary," replied Kalkmann instantly, rising from his chair and
ignoring the hand the Englishman had stretched out to him, "it is we who
have to thank you; and we do so most gratefully and sincerely."
And at the same moment at least half a dozen of the Brothers took up
their position between himself and the door.
"You are very good to say so," Harris replied as firmly as he could
manage, noticing this movement out of the corner of his eye, "but really
I had no conception that--my little chance visit could have afforded you
so much pleasure." He moved another step nearer the door, but Bruder
Schliemann came across the room quickly and stood in front of him. His
attitude was uncompromising. A dark and terrible expression had come
into his face.
"But it was _not_ by chance that you came, Bruder Harris," he said so
that all the room could hear; "surely we have not misunderstood your
presence here?" He raised his black eyebrows.
"No, no," the Englishman hastened to reply, "I was--I am delighted to be
here. I told you what pleasure it gave me to find myself among you. Do
not misunderstand me, I beg." His voice faltered a little, and he had
difficulty in finding the words. More and more, too, he had difficulty
in understanding _their_ words.
"Of course," interposed Bruder Kalkmann in his iron bass, "_we_ have not
misunderstood. You have come back in the spirit of true and unselfish
devotion. You offer yourself freely, and we all appreciate it. It is
your willingness and nobility that have so completely won our veneration
and respect." A faint murmur of applause ran round the room. "What we
all delight in--what our great Master will especially delight in--is the
value of your spontaneous and voluntary--"
He used a word Harris did not understand. He said "_Opfer_." The
bewildered Englishman searched his brain for the translation, and
searched in vain. For the life of him he could not remember what it
meant. But the word, for all his inability to translate it, touched his
soul with ice. It was worse, far worse, than anything he had imagined.
He felt like a lost, helpless creature, and all power to fight sank out
of him from that moment.
"It is magnificent to be such a willing--" added Schliemann, sidling
up to him with a dreadful leer on his face. He made use of the same
word--"_Opfer_."
"God! What could it all mean?" "Offer himself!" "True spirit of
devotion!" "Willing," "unselfish," "magnificent!" _Opfer, Opfer, Opfer!_
What in the name of heaven did it mean, that strange, mysterious word
that struck such terror into his heart?
He made a valiant effort to keep his presence of mind and hold his
nerves steady. Turning, he saw that Kalkmann's face was a dead white.
Kalkmann! He understood that well enough. _Kalkmann_ meant "Man of
Chalk": he knew that. But what did "_Opfer_" mean? That was the real key
to the situation. Words poured through his disordered mind in an endless
stream--unusual, rare words he had perhaps heard but once in his
life--while "_Opfer_," a word in common use, entirely escaped him. What
an extraordinary mockery it all was!
Then Kalkmann, pale as death, but his face hard as iron, spoke a few low
words that he did not catch, and the Brothers standing by the walls at
once turned the lamps down so that the room became dim. In the half
light he could only just discern their faces and movements.
"It is time," he heard Kalkmann's remorseless voice continue just behind
him. "The hour of midnight is at hand. Let us prepare. He comes! He
comes; Bruder Asmodelius comes!" His voice rose to a chant.
And the sound of that name, for some extraordinary reason, was
terrible--utterly terrible; so that Harris shook from head to foot as he
heard it. Its utterance filled the air like soft thunder, and a hush
came over the whole room. Forces rose all about him, transforming the
normal into the horrible, and the spirit of craven fear ran through all
his being, bringing him to the verge of collapse.
_Asmodelius! Asmodelius!_ The name was appalling. For he understood at
last to whom it referred and the meaning that lay between its great
syllables. At the same instant, too, he suddenly understood the meaning
of that unremembered word. The import of the word "_Opfer_" flashed upon
his soul like a message of death.
He thought of making a wild effort to reach the door, but the weakness
of his trembling knees, and the row of black figures that stood between,
dissuaded him at once. He would have screamed for help, but remembering
the emptiness of the vast building, and the loneliness of the situation,
he understood that no help could come that way, and he kept his lips
closed. He stood still and did nothing. But he knew now what was coming.
Two of the Brothers approached and took him gently by the arm.
"Bruder Asmodelius accepts you," they whispered; "are you ready?"
Then he found his tongue and tried to speak. "But what have I to do with
this Bruder Asm--Asmo--?" he stammered, a desperate rush of words
crowding vainly behind the halting tongue.
The name refused to pass his lips. He could not pronounce it as they
did. He could not pronounce it at all. His sense of helplessness then
entered the acute stage, for this inability to speak the name produced
a fresh sense of quite horrible confusion in his mind, and he became
extraordinarily agitated.
"I came here for a friendly visit," he tried to say with a great effort,
but, to his intense dismay, he heard his voice saying something quite
different, and actually making use of that very word they had all used:
"I came here as a willing _Opfer_," he heard his own voice say, "and _I
am quite ready_."
He was lost beyond all recall now! Not alone his mind, but the very
muscles of his body had passed out of control. He felt that he was
hovering on the confines of a phantom or demon-world,--a world in which
the name they had spoken constituted the Master-name, the word of
ultimate power.
What followed he heard and saw as in a nightmare.
"In the half light that veils all truth, let us prepare to worship and
adore," chanted Schliemann, who had preceded him to the end of the room.
"In the mists that protect our faces before the Black Throne, let us
make ready the willing victim," echoed Kalkmann in his great bass.
They raised their faces, listening expectantly, as a roaring sound, like
the passing of mighty projectiles, filled the air, far, far away, very
wonderful, very forbidding. The walls of the room trembled.
"He comes! He comes! He comes!" chanted the Brothers in chorus.
The sound of roaring died away, and an atmosphere of still and utter
cold established itself over all. Then Kalkmann, dark and unutterably
stern, turned in the dim light and faced the rest.
"Asmodelius, our _Hauptbruder_, is about us," he cried in a voice that
even while it shook was yet a voice of iron; "Asmodelius is about us.
Make ready."
There followed a pause in which no one stirred or spoke. A tall Brother
approached the Englishman; but Kalkmann held up his hand.
"Let the eyes remain uncovered," he said, "in honour of so freely giving
himself." And to his horror Harris then realised for the first time that
his hands were already fastened to his sides.
The Brother retreated again silently, and in the pause that followed all
the figures about him dropped to their knees, leaving him standing
alone, and as they dropped, in voices hushed with mingled reverence and
awe, they cried, softly, odiously, appallingly, the name of the Being
whom they momentarily expected to appear.
Then, at the end of the room, where the windows seemed to have
disappeared so that he saw the stars, there rose into view far up
against the night sky, grand and terrible, the outline of a man. A kind
of grey glory enveloped it so that it resembled a steel-cased statue,
immense, imposing, horrific in its distant splendour; while, at the same
time, the face was so spiritually mighty, yet so proudly, so austerely
sad, that Harris felt as he stared, that the sight was more than his
eyes could meet, and that in another moment the power of vision would
fail him altogether, and he must sink into utter nothingness.
So remote and inaccessible hung this figure that it was impossible to
gauge anything as to its size, yet at the same time so strangely close,
that when the grey radiance from its mightily broken visage, august and
mournful, beat down upon his soul, pulsing like some dark star with the
powers of spiritual evil, he felt almost as though he were looking into
a face no farther removed from him in space than the face of any one of
the Brothers who stood by his side.
And then the room filled and trembled with sounds that Harris understood
full well were the failing voices of others who had preceded him in a
long series down the years. There came first a plain, sharp cry, as of a
man in the last anguish, choking for his breath, and yet, with the very
final expiration of it, breathing the name of the Worship--of the dark
Being who rejoiced to hear it. The cries of the strangled; the short,
running gasp of the suffocated; and the smothered gurgling of the
tightened throat, all these, and more, echoed back and forth between the
walls, the very walls in which he now stood a prisoner, a sacrificial
victim. The cries, too, not alone of the broken bodies, but--far
worse--of beaten, broken souls. And as the ghastly chorus rose and fell,
there came also the faces of the lost and unhappy creatures to whom they
belonged, and, against that curtain of pale grey light, he saw float
past him in the air, an array of white and piteous human countenances
that seemed to beckon and gibber at him as though he were already one of
themselves.
Slowly, too, as the voices rose, and the pallid crew sailed past, that
giant form of grey descended from the sky and approached the room that
contained the worshippers and their prisoner. Hands rose and sank about
him in the darkness, and he felt that he was being draped in other
garments than his own; a circlet of ice seemed to run about his head,
while round the waist, enclosing the fastened arms, he felt a girdle
tightly drawn. At last, about his very throat, there ran a soft and
silken touch which, better than if there had been full light, and a
mirror held to his face, he understood to be the cord of sacrifice--and
of death.
At this moment the Brothers, still prostrate upon the floor, began again
their mournful, yet impassioned chanting, and as they did so a strange
thing happened. For, apparently without moving or altering its position,
the huge Figure seemed, at once and suddenly, to be inside the room,
almost beside him, and to fill the space around him to the exclusion of
all else.
He was now beyond all ordinary sensations of fear, only a drab feeling
as of death--the death of the soul--stirred in his heart. His thoughts
no longer even beat vainly for escape. The end was near, and he knew it.
The dreadfully chanting voices rose about him in a wave: "We worship! We
adore! We offer!" The sounds filled his ears and hammered, almost
meaningless, upon his brain.
Then the majestic grey face turned slowly downwards upon him, and his
very soul passed outwards and seemed to become absorbed in the sea of
those anguished eyes. At the same moment a dozen hands forced him to his
knees, and in the air before him he saw the arm of Kalkmann upraised,
and felt the pressure about his throat grow strong.
It was in this awful moment, when he had given up all hope, and the help
of gods or men seemed beyond question, that a strange thing happened.
For before his fading and terrified vision there slid, as in a dream of
light,--yet without apparent rhyme or reason--wholly unbidden and
unexplained,--the face of that other man at the supper table of the
railway inn. And the sight, even mentally, of that strong, wholesome,
vigorous English face, inspired him suddenly with a new courage.
It was but a flash of fading vision before he sank into a dark and
terrible death, yet, in some inexplicable way, the sight of that face
stirred in him unconquerable hope and the certainty of deliverance. It
was a face of power, a face, he now realised, of simple goodness such as
might have been seen by men of old on the shores of Galilee; a face, by
heaven, that could conquer even the devils of outer space.
And, in his despair and abandonment, he called upon it, and called with
no uncertain accents. He found his voice in this overwhelming moment to
some purpose; though the words he actually used, and whether they were
in German or English, he could never remember. Their effect,
nevertheless, was instantaneous. The Brothers understood, and that grey
Figure of evil understood.
For a second the confusion was terrific. There came a great shattering
sound. It seemed that the very earth trembled. But all Harris remembered
afterwards was that voices rose about him in the clamour of terrified
alarm--
"A man of power is among us! A man of God!"
The vast sound was repeated--the rushing through space as of huge
projectiles--and he sank to the floor of the room, unconscious. The
entire scene had vanished, vanished like smoke over the roof of a
cottage when the wind blows.
And, by his side, sat down a slight un-German figure,--the figure of the
stranger at the inn,--the man who had the "rather wonderful eyes."
* * * * *
When Harris came to himself he felt cold. He was lying under the open
sky, and the cool air of field and forest was blowing upon his face. He
sat up and looked about him. The memory of the late scene was still
horribly in his mind, but no vestige of it remained. No walls or ceiling
enclosed him; he was no longer in a room at all. There were no lamps
turned low, no cigar smoke, no black forms of sinister worshippers, no
tremendous grey Figure hovering beyond the windows.
Open space was about him, and he was lying on a pile of bricks and
mortar, his clothes soaked with dew, and the kind stars shining brightly
overhead. He was lying, bruised and shaken, among the heaped-up débris
of a ruined building.
He stood up and stared about him. There, in the shadowy distance, lay
the surrounding forest, and here, close at hand, stood the outline of
the village buildings. But, underfoot, beyond question, lay nothing but
the broken heaps of stones that betokened a building long since crumbled
to dust. Then he saw that the stones were blackened, and that great
wooden beams, half burnt, half rotten, made lines through the general
débris. He stood, then, among the ruins of a burnt and shattered
building, the weeds and nettles proving conclusively that it had lain
thus for many years.
The moon had already set behind the encircling forest, but the stars
that spangled the heavens threw enough light to enable him to make quite
sure of what he saw. Harris, the silk merchant, stood among these broken
and burnt stones and shivered.
Then he suddenly became aware that out of the gloom a figure had risen
and stood beside him. Peering at him, he thought he recognised the face
of the stranger at the railway inn.
"Are _you_ real?" he asked in a voice he hardly recognised as his own.
"More than real--I'm friendly," replied the stranger; "I followed you up
here from the inn."
Harris stood and stared for several minutes without adding anything. His
teeth chattered. The least sound made him start; but the simple words in
his own language, and the tone in which they were uttered, comforted him
inconceivably.
"You're English too, thank God," he said inconsequently. "These German
devils--" He broke off and put a hand to his eyes. "But what's become
of them all--and the room--and--and--" The hand travelled down to his
throat and moved nervously round his neck. He drew a long, long breath
of relief. "Did I dream everything--everything?" he said distractedly.
He stared wildly about him, and the stranger moved forward and took his
arm. "Come," he said soothingly, yet with a trace of command in the
voice, "we will move away from here. The high-road, or even the woods
will be more to your taste, for we are standing now on one of the most
haunted--and most terribly haunted--spots of the whole world."
He guided his companion's stumbling footsteps over the broken masonry
until they reached the path, the nettles stinging their hands, and
Harris feeling his way like a man in a dream. Passing through the
twisted iron railing they reached the path, and thence made their way to
the road, shining white in the night. Once safely out of the ruins,
Harris collected himself and turned to look back.
"But, how is it possible?" he exclaimed, his voice still shaking. "How
can it be possible? When I came in here I saw the building in the
moonlight. They opened the door. I saw the figures and heard the voices
and touched, yes touched their very hands, and saw their damned black
faces, saw them far more plainly than I see you now." He was deeply
bewildered. The glamour was still upon his eyes with a degree of reality
stronger than the reality even of normal life. "Was I so utterly
deluded?"
Then suddenly the words of the stranger, which he had only half heard or
understood, returned to him.
"Haunted?" he asked, looking hard at him; "haunted, did you say?" He
paused in the roadway and stared into the darkness where the building of
the old school had first appeared to him. But the stranger hurried him
forward.
"We shall talk more safely farther on," he said. "I followed you from
the inn the moment I realised where you had gone. When I found you it
was eleven o'clock--"
"Eleven o'clock," said Harris, remembering with a shudder.
"--I saw you drop. I watched over you till you recovered consciousness
of your own accord, and now--now I am here to guide you safely back to
the inn. I have broken the spell--the glamour--"
"I owe you a great deal, sir," interrupted Harris again, beginning to
understand something of the stranger's kindness, "but I don't understand
it all. I feel dazed and shaken." His teeth still chattered, and spells
of violent shivering passed over him from head to foot. He found that he
was clinging to the other's arm. In this way they passed beyond the
deserted and crumbling village and gained the high-road that led
homewards through the forest.
"That school building has long been in ruins," said the man at his side
presently; "it was burnt down by order of the Elders of the community at
least ten years ago. The village has been uninhabited ever since. But
the simulacra of certain ghastly events that took place under that roof
in past days still continue. And the 'shells' of the chief participants
still enact there the dreadful deeds that led to its final destruction,
and to the desertion of the whole settlement. They were
devil-worshippers!"
Harris listened with beads of perspiration on his forehead that did not
come alone from their leisurely pace through the cool night. Although he
had seen this man but once before in his life, and had never before
exchanged so much as a word with him, he felt a degree of confidence and
a subtle sense of safety and well-being in his presence that were the
most healing influences he could possibly have wished after the
experience he had been through. For all that, he still felt as if he
were walking in a dream, and though he heard every word that fell from
his companion's lips, it was only the next day that the full import of
all he said became fully clear to him. The presence of this quiet
stranger, the man with the wonderful eyes which he felt now, rather than
saw, applied a soothing anodyne to his shattered spirit that healed him
through and through. And this healing influence, distilled from the dark
figure at his side, satisfied his first imperative need, so that he
almost forgot to realise how strange and opportune it was that the man
should be there at all.
It somehow never occurred to him to ask his name, or to feel any undue
wonder that one passing tourist should take so much trouble on behalf of
another. He just walked by his side, listening to his quiet words, and
allowing himself to enjoy the very wonderful experience after his recent
ordeal, of being helped, strengthened, blessed. Only once, remembering
vaguely something of his reading of years ago, he turned to the man
beside him, after some more than usually remarkable words, and heard
himself, almost involuntarily it seemed, putting the question: "Then are
you a Rosicrucian, sir, perhaps?" But the stranger had ignored the
words, or possibly not heard them, for he continued with his talk as
though unconscious of any interruption, and Harris became aware that
another somewhat unusual picture had taken possession of his mind, as
they walked there side by side through the cool reaches of the forest,
and that he had found his imagination suddenly charged with the
childhood memory of Jacob wrestling with an angel,--wrestling all night
with a being of superior quality whose strength eventually became his
own.
"It was your abrupt conversation with the priest at supper that first
put me upon the track of this remarkable occurrence," he heard the
man's quiet voice beside him in the darkness, "and it was from him I
learned after you left the story of the devil-worship that became
secretly established in the heart of this simple and devout little
community."
"Devil-worship! Here--!" Harris stammered, aghast.
"Yes--here;--conducted secretly for years by a group of Brothers before
unexplained disappearances in the neighbourhood led to its discovery.
For where could they have found a safer place in the whole wide world
for their ghastly traffic and perverted powers than here, in the very
precincts--under cover of the very shadow of saintliness and holy
living?"
"Awful, awful!" whispered the silk merchant, "and when I tell you the
words they used to me--"
"I know it all," the stranger said quietly. "I saw and heard everything.
My plan first was to wait till the end and then to take steps for their
destruction, but in the interest of your personal safety,"--he spoke
with the utmost gravity and conviction,--"in the interest of the safety
of your soul, I made my presence known when I did, and before the
conclusion had been reached--"
"My safety! The danger, then, was real. They were alive and--" Words
failed him. He stopped in the road and turned towards his companion, the
shining of whose eyes he could just make out in the gloom.
"It was a concourse of the shells of violent men, spiritually developed
but evil men, seeking after death--the death of the body--to prolong
their vile and unnatural existence. And had they accomplished their
object you, in turn, at the death of your body, would have passed into
their power and helped to swell their dreadful purposes."
Harris made no reply. He was trying hard to concentrate his mind upon
the sweet and common things of life. He even thought of silk and St.
Paul's Churchyard and the faces of his partners in business.
"For you came all prepared to be caught," he heard the other's voice
like some one talking to him from a distance; "your deeply introspective
mood had already reconstructed the past so vividly, so intensely, that
you were _en rapport_ at once with any forces of those days that chanced
still to be lingering. And they swept you up all unresistingly."
Harris tightened his hold upon the stranger's arm as he heard. At the
moment he had room for one emotion only. It did not seem to him odd that
this stranger should have such intimate knowledge of his mind.
"It is, alas, chiefly the evil emotions that are able to leave their
photographs upon surrounding scenes and objects," the other added, "and
who ever heard of a place haunted by a noble deed, or of beautiful and
lovely ghosts revisiting the glimpses of the moon? It is unfortunate.
But the wicked passions of men's hearts alone seem strong enough to
leave pictures that persist; the good are ever too lukewarm."
The stranger sighed as he spoke. But Harris, exhausted and shaken as he
was to the very core, paced by his side, only half listening. He moved
as in a dream still. It was very wonderful to him, this walk home under
the stars in the early hours of the October morning, the peaceful forest
all about them, mist rising here and there over the small clearings, and
the sound of water from a hundred little invisible streams filling in
the pauses of the talk. In after life he always looked back to it as
something magical and impossible, something that had seemed too
beautiful, too curiously beautiful, to have been quite true. And, though
at the time he heard and understood but a quarter of what the stranger
said, it came back to him afterwards, staying with him till the end of
his days, and always with a curious, haunting sense of unreality, as
though he had enjoyed a wonderful dream of which he could recall only
faint and exquisite portions.
But the horror of the earlier experience was effectually dispelled; and
when they reached the railway inn, somewhere about three o'clock in the
morning, Harris shook the stranger's hand gratefully, effusively,
meeting the look of those rather wonderful eyes with a full heart, and
went up to his room, thinking in a hazy, dream-like way of the words
with which the stranger had brought their conversation to an end as they
left the confines of the forest--
"And if thought and emotion can persist in this way so long after the
brain that sent them forth has crumbled into dust, how vitally important
it must be to control their very birth in the heart, and guard them with
the keenest possible restraint."
But Harris, the silk merchant, slept better than might have been
expected, and with a soundness that carried him half-way through the
day. And when he came downstairs and learned that the stranger had
already taken his departure, he realised with keen regret that he had
never once thought of asking his name.
"Yes, he signed the visitors' book," said the girl in reply to his
question.
And he turned over the blotted pages and found there, the last entry, in
a very delicate and individual handwriting--
"_John Silence_, London."
CASE II: THE CAMP OF THE DOG
I
Islands of all shapes and sizes troop northward from Stockholm by the
hundred, and the little steamer that threads their intricate mazes in
summer leaves the traveller in a somewhat bewildered state as regards
the points of the compass when it reaches the end of its journey at
Waxholm. But it is only after Waxholm that the true islands begin, so to
speak, to run wild, and start up the coast on their tangled course of a
hundred miles of deserted loveliness, and it was in the very heart of
this delightful confusion that we pitched our tents for a summer
holiday. A veritable wilderness of islands lay about us: from the mere
round button of a rock that bore a single fir, to the mountainous
stretch of a square mile, densely wooded, and bounded by precipitous
cliffs; so close together often that a strip of water ran between no
wider than a country lane, or, again, so far that an expanse stretched
like the open sea for miles.
Although the larger islands boasted farms and fishing stations, the
majority were uninhabited. Carpeted with moss and heather, their
coast-lines showed a series of ravines and clefts and little sandy bays,
with a growth of splendid pine-woods that came down to the water's edge
and led the eye through unknown depths of shadow and mystery into the
very heart of primitive forest.
The particular islands to which we had camping rights by virtue of
paying a nominal sum to a Stockholm merchant lay together in a
picturesque group far beyond the reach of the steamer, one being a mere
reef with a fringe of fairy-like birches, and two others, cliff-bound
monsters rising with wooded heads out of the sea. The fourth, which we
selected because it enclosed a little lagoon suitable for anchorage,
bathing, night-lines, and what-not, shall have what description is
necessary as the story proceeds; but, so far as paying rent was
concerned, we might equally well have pitched our tents on any one of a
hundred others that clustered about us as thickly as a swarm of bees.
It was in the blaze of an evening in July, the air clear as crystal, the
sea a cobalt blue, when we left the steamer on the borders of
civilisation and sailed away with maps, compasses, and provisions for
the little group of dots in the Skägård that were to be our home for the
next two months. The dinghy and my Canadian canoe trailed behind us,
with tents and dunnage carefully piled aboard, and when the point of
cliff intervened to hide the steamer and the Waxholm hotel we realised
for the first time that the horror of trains and houses was far behind
us, the fever of men and cities, the weariness of streets and confined
spaces. The wilderness opened up on all sides into endless blue reaches,
and the map and compasses were so frequently called into requisition
that we went astray more often than not and progress was enchantingly
slow. It took us, for instance, two whole days to find our
crescent-shaped home, and the camps we made on the way were so
fascinating that we left them with difficulty and regret, for each
island seemed more desirable than the one before it, and over all lay
the spell of haunting peace, remoteness from the turmoil of the world,
and the freedom of open and desolate spaces.
And so many of these spots of world-beauty have I sought out and dwelt
in, that in my mind remains only a composite memory of their faces, a
true map of heaven, as it were, from which this particular one stands
forth with unusual sharpness because of the strange things that happened
there, and also, I think, because anything in which John Silence played
a part has a habit of fixing itself in the mind with a living and
lasting quality of vividness.
For the moment, however, Dr. Silence was not of the party. Some private
case in the interior of Hungary claimed his attention, and it was not
till later--the 15th of August, to be exact--that I had arranged to meet
him in Berlin and then return to London together for our harvest of
winter work. All the members of our party, however, were known to him
more or less well, and on this third day as we sailed through the narrow
opening into the lagoon and saw the circular ridge of trees in a gold
and crimson sunset before us, his last words to me when we parted in
London for some unaccountable reason came back very sharply to my
memory, and recalled the curious impression of prophecy with which I had
first heard them:
"Enjoy your holiday and store up all the force you can," he had said as
the train slipped out of Victoria; "and we will meet in Berlin on the
15th--unless you should send for me sooner."
And now suddenly the words returned to me so clearly that it seemed I
almost heard his voice in my ear: "Unless you should send for me
sooner"; and returned, moreover, with a significance I was wholly at a
loss to understand that touched somewhere in the depths of my mind a
vague sense of apprehension that they had all along been intended in the
nature of a prophecy.
In the lagoon, then, the wind failed us this July evening, as was only
natural behind the shelter of the belt of woods, and we took to the
oars, all breathless with the beauty of this first sight of our island
home, yet all talking in somewhat hushed voices of the best place to
land, the depth of water, the safest place to anchor, to put up the
tents in, the most sheltered spot for the camp-fires, and a dozen things
of importance that crop up when a home in the wilderness has actually to
be made.
And during this busy sunset hour of unloading before the dark, the souls
of my companions adopted the trick of presenting themselves very vividly
anew before my mind, and introducing themselves afresh.
In reality, I suppose, our party was in no sense singular. In the
conventional life at home they certainly seemed ordinary enough, but
suddenly, as we passed through these gates of the wilderness, I saw them
more sharply than before, with characters stripped of the atmosphere of
men and cities. A complete change of setting often furnishes a
startlingly new view of people hitherto held for well-known; they
present another facet of their personalities. I seemed to see my own
party almost as new people--people I had not known properly hitherto,
people who would drop all disguises and henceforth reveal themselves as
they really were. And each one seemed to say: "Now you will see me as I
am. You will see me here in this primitive life of the wilderness
without clothes. All my masks and veils I have left behind in the abodes
of men. So, look out for surprises!"
The Reverend Timothy Maloney helped me to put up the tents, long
practice making the process easy, and while he drove in pegs and
tightened ropes, his coat off, his flannel collar flying open without a
tie, it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that he was cut out for
the life of a pioneer rather than the church. He was fifty years of age,
muscular, blue-eyed and hearty, and he took his share of the work, and
more, without shirking. The way he handled the axe in cutting down
saplings for the tent-poles was a delight to see, and his eye in judging
the level was unfailing.
Bullied as a young man into a lucrative family living, he had in turn
bullied his mind into some semblance of orthodox beliefs, doing the
honours of the little country church with an energy that made one think
of a coal-heaver tending china; and it was only in the past few years
that he had resigned the living and taken instead to cramming young men
for their examinations. This suited him better. It enabled him, too, to
indulge his passion for spells of "wild life," and to spend the summer
months of most years under canvas in one part of the world or another
where he could take his young men with him and combine "reading" with
open air.
His wife usually accompanied him, and there was no doubt she enjoyed
the trips, for she possessed, though in less degree, the same joy of the
wilderness that was his own distinguishing characteristic. The only
difference was that while he regarded it as the real life, she regarded
it as an interlude. While he camped out with his heart and mind, she
played at camping out with her clothes and body. None the less, she made
a splendid companion, and to watch her busy cooking dinner over the fire
we had built among the stones was to understand that her heart was in
the business for the moment and that she was happy even with the detail.
Mrs. Maloney at home, knitting in the sun and believing that the world
was made in six days, was one woman; but Mrs. Maloney, standing with
bare arms over the smoke of a wood fire under the pine trees, was
another; and Peter Sangree, the Canadian pupil, with his pale skin, and
his loose, though not ungainly figure, stood beside her in very
unfavourable contrast as he scraped potatoes and sliced bacon with
slender white fingers that seemed better suited to hold a pen than a
knife. She ordered him about like a slave, and he obeyed, too, with
willing pleasure, for in spite of his general appearance of debility he
was as happy to be in camp as any of them.
But more than any other member of the party, Joan Maloney, the daughter,
was the one who seemed a natural and genuine part of the landscape, who
belonged to it all just in the same way that the trees and the moss and
the grey rocks running out into the water belonged to it. For she was
obviously in her right and natural setting, a creature of the wilds, a
gipsy in her own home.
To any one with a discerning eye this would have been more or less
apparent, but to me, who had known her during all the twenty-two years
of her life and was familiar with the ins and outs of her primitive,
utterly un-modern type, it was strikingly clear. To see her there made
it impossible to imagine her again in civilisation. I lost all
recollection of how she looked in a town. The memory somehow evaporated.
This slim creature before me, flitting to and fro with the grace of the
woodland life, swift, supple, adroit, on her knees blowing the fire, or
stirring the frying-pan through a veil of smoke, suddenly seemed the
only way I had ever really seen her. Here she was at home; in London she
became some one concealed by clothes, an artificial doll overdressed and
moving by clockwork, only a portion of her alive. Here she was alive all
over.
I forget altogether how she was dressed, just as I forget how any
particular tree was dressed, or how the markings ran on any one of the
boulders that lay about the Camp. She looked just as wild and natural
and untamed as everything else that went to make up the scene, and more
than that I cannot say.
Pretty, she was decidedly not. She was thin, skinny, dark-haired, and
possessed of great physical strength in the form of endurance. She had,
too, something of the force and vigorous purpose of a man, tempestuous
sometimes and wild to passionate, frightening her mother, and puzzling
her easy-going father with her storms of waywardness, while at the same
time she stirred his admiration by her violence. A pagan of the pagans
she was besides, and with some haunting suggestion of old-world pagan
beauty about her dark face and eyes. Altogether an odd and difficult
character, but with a generosity and high courage that made her very
lovable.
In town life she always seemed to me to feel cramped, bored, a devil in
a cage, in her eyes a hunted expression as though any moment she dreaded
to be caught. But up in these spacious solitudes all this disappeared.
Away from the limitations that plagued and stung her, she would show at
her best, and as I watched her moving about the Camp I repeatedly found
myself thinking of a wild creature that had just obtained its freedom
and was trying its muscles.
Peter Sangree, of course, at once went down before her. But she was so
obviously beyond his reach, and besides so well able to take care of
herself, that I think her parents gave the matter but little thought,
and he himself worshipped at a respectful distance, keeping admirable
control of his passion in all respects save one; for at his age the eyes
are difficult to master, and the yearning, almost the devouring,
expression often visible in them was probably there unknown even to
himself. He, better than any one else, understood that he had fallen in
love with something most hard of attainment, something that drew him to
the very edge of life, and almost beyond it. It, no doubt, was a secret
and terrible joy to him, this passionate worship from afar; only I think
he suffered more than any one guessed, and that his want of vitality was
due in large measure to the constant stream of unsatisfied yearning that
poured for ever from his soul and body. Moreover, it seemed to me, who
now saw them for the first time together, that there was an unnamable
something--an elusive quality of some kind--that marked them as
belonging to the same world, and that although the girl ignored him she
was secretly, and perhaps unknown to herself, drawn by some attribute
very deep in her own nature to some quality equally deep in his.
This, then, was the party when we first settled down into our two
months' camp on the island in the Baltic Sea. Other figures flitted from
time to time across the scene, and sometimes one reading man, sometimes
another, came to join us and spend his four hours a day in the
clergyman's tent, but they came for short periods only, and they went
without leaving much trace in my memory, and certainly they played no
important part in what subsequently happened.
The weather favoured us that night, so that by sunset the tents were up,
the boats unloaded, a store of wood collected and chopped into lengths,
and the candle-lanterns hung round ready for lighting on the trees.
Sangree, too, had picked deep mattresses of balsam boughs for the
women's beds, and had cleared little paths of brushwood from their tents
to the central fireplace. All was prepared for bad weather. It was a
cosy supper and a well-cooked one that we sat down to and ate under the
stars, and, according to the clergyman, the only meal fit to eat we had
seen since we left London a week before.
The deep stillness, after that roar of steamers, trains, and tourists,
held something that thrilled, for as we lay round the fire there was no
sound but the faint sighing of the pines and the soft lapping of the
waves along the shore and against the sides of the boat in the lagoon.
The ghostly outline of her white sails was just visible through the
trees, idly rocking to and fro in her calm anchorage, her sheets
flapping gently against the mast. Beyond lay the dim blue shapes of
other islands floating in the night, and from all the great spaces about
us came the murmur of the sea and the soft breathing of great woods. The
odours of the wilderness--smells of wind and earth, of trees and water,
clean, vigorous, and mighty--were the true odours of a virgin world
unspoilt by men, more penetrating and more subtly intoxicating than any
other perfume in the whole world. Oh!--and dangerously strong, too, no
doubt, for some natures!
"Ahhh!" breathed out the clergyman after supper, with an indescribable
gesture of satisfaction and relief. "Here there is freedom, and room for
body and mind to turn in. Here one can work and rest and play. Here one
can be alive and absorb something of the earth-forces that never get
within touching distance in the cities. By George, I shall make a
permanent camp here and come when it is time to die!"
The good man was merely giving vent to his delight at being under
canvas. He said the same thing every year, and he said it often. But it
more or less expressed the superficial feelings of us all. And when, a
little later, he turned to compliment his wife on the fried potatoes,
and discovered that she was snoring, with her back against a tree, he
grunted with content at the sight and put a ground-sheet over her feet,
as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to fall asleep
after dinner, and then moved back to his own corner, smoking his pipe
with great satisfaction.
And I, smoking mine too, lay and fought against the most delicious
sleep imaginable, while my eyes wandered from the fire to the stars
peeping through the branches, and then back again to the group about me.
The Rev. Timothy soon let his pipe go out, and succumbed as his wife had
done, for he had worked hard and eaten well. Sangree, also smoking,
leaned against a tree with his gaze fixed on the girl, a depth of
yearning in his face that he could not hide, and that really distressed
me for him. And Joan herself, with wide staring eyes, alert, full of the
new forces of the place, evidently keyed up by the magic of finding
herself among all the things her soul recognised as "home," sat rigid by
the fire, her thoughts roaming through the spaces, the blood stirring
about her heart. She was as unconscious of the Canadian's gaze as she
was that her parents both slept. She looked to me more like a tree, or
something that had grown out of the island, than a living girl of the
century; and when I spoke across to her in a whisper and suggested a
tour of investigation, she started and looked up at me as though she
heard a voice in her dreams.
Sangree leaped up and joined us, and without waking the others we three
went over the ridge of the island and made our way down to the shore
behind. The water lay like a lake before us still coloured by the
sunset. The air was keen and scented, wafting the smell of the wooded
islands that hung about us in the darkening air. Very small waves
tumbled softly on the sand. The sea was sown with stars, and everywhere
breathed and pulsed the beauty of the northern summer night. I confess I
speedily lost consciousness of the human presences beside me, and I have
little doubt Joan did too. Only Sangree felt otherwise, I suppose, for
presently we heard him sighing; and I can well imagine that he absorbed
the whole wonder and passion of the scene into his aching heart, to
swell the pain there that was more searching even than the pain at the
sight of such matchless and incomprehensible beauty.
The splash of a fish jumping broke the spell.
"I wish we had the canoe now," remarked Joan; "we could paddle out to
the other islands."
"Of course," I said; "wait here and I'll go across for it," and was
turning to feel my way back through the darkness when she stopped me in
a voice that meant what it said.
"No; Mr. Sangree will get it. We will wait here and cooee to guide him."
The Canadian was off in a moment, for she had only to hint of her wishes
and he obeyed.
"Keep out from shore in case of rocks," I cried out as he went, "and
turn to the right out of the lagoon. That's the shortest way round by
the map."
My voice travelled across the still waters and woke echoes in the
distant islands that came back to us like people calling out of space.
It was only thirty or forty yards over the ridge and down the other side
to the lagoon where the boats lay, but it was a good mile to coast round
the shore in the dark to where we stood and waited. We heard him
stumbling away among the boulders, and then the sounds suddenly ceased
as he topped the ridge and went down past the fire on the other side.
"I didn't want to be left alone with him," the girl said presently in a
low voice. "I'm always afraid he's going to say or do something--" She
hesitated a moment, looking quickly over her shoulder towards the ridge
where he had just disappeared--"something that might lead to
unpleasantness."
She stopped abruptly.
"_You_ frightened, Joan!" I exclaimed, with genuine surprise. "This is a
new light on your wicked character. I thought the human being who could
frighten you did not exist." Then I suddenly realised she was talking
seriously--looking to me for help of some kind--and at once I dropped
the teasing attitude.
"He's very far gone, I think, Joan," I added gravely. "You must be kind
to him, whatever else you may feel. He's exceedingly fond of you."
"I know, but I can't help it," she whispered, lest her voice should
carry in the stillness; "there's something about him that--that makes me
feel creepy and half afraid."
"But, poor man, it's not his fault if he is delicate and sometimes looks
like death," I laughed gently, by way of defending what I felt to be a
very innocent member of my sex.
"Oh, but it's not that I mean," she answered quickly; "it's something I
feel about him, something in his soul, something he hardly knows
himself, but that may come out if we are much together. It draws me, I
feel, tremendously. It stirs what is wild in me--deep down--oh, very
deep down,--yet at the same time makes me feel afraid."
"I suppose his thoughts are always playing about you," I said, "but he's
nice-minded and--"
"Yes, yes," she interrupted impatiently, "I can trust myself absolutely
with him. He's gentle and singularly pure-minded. But there's something
else that--" She stopped again sharply to listen. Then she came up close
beside me in the darkness, whispering--
"You know, Mr. Hubbard, sometimes my intuitions warn me a little too
strongly to be ignored. Oh, yes, you needn't tell me again that it's
difficult to distinguish between fancy and intuition. I know all that.
But I also know that there's something deep down in that man's soul that
calls to something deep down in mine. And at present it frightens me.
Because I cannot make out what it is; and I know, I _know_, he'll do
something some day that--that will shake my life to the very bottom."
She laughed a little at the strangeness of her own description.
I turned to look at her more closely, but the darkness was too great to
show her face. There was an intensity, almost of suppressed passion, in
her voice that took me completely by surprise.
"Nonsense, Joan," I said, a little severely; "you know him well. He's
been with your father for months now."
"But that was in London; and up here it's different--I mean, I feel that
it may be different. Life in a place like this blows away the restraints
of the artificial life at home. I know, oh, I know what I'm saying. I
feel all untied in a place like this; the rigidity of one's nature
begins to melt and flow. Surely _you_ must understand what I mean!"
"Of course I understand," I replied, yet not wishing to encourage her in
her present line of thought, "and it's a grand experience--for a short
time. But you're overtired to-night, Joan, like the rest of us. A few
days in this air will set you above all fears of the kind you mention."
Then, after a moment's silence, I added, feeling I should estrange her
confidence altogether if I blundered any more and treated her like a
child--
"I think, perhaps, the true explanation is that you pity him for loving
you, and at the same time you feel the repulsion of the healthy,
vigorous animal for what is weak and timid. If he came up boldly and
took you by the throat and shouted that he would force you to love
him--well, then you would feel no fear at all. You would know exactly
how to deal with him. Isn't it, perhaps, something of that kind?"
The girl made no reply, and when I took her hand I felt that it trembled
a little and was cold.
"It's not his love that I'm afraid of," she said hurriedly, for at this
moment we heard the dip of a paddle in the water, "it's something in his
very soul that terrifies me in a way I have never been terrified
before,--yet fascinates me. In town I was hardly conscious of his
presence. But the moment we got away from civilisation, it began to
come. He seems so--so _real_ up here. I dread being alone with him. It
makes me feel that something must burst and tear its way out--that he
would do something--or I should do something--I don't know exactly what
I mean, probably,--but that I should let myself go and scream--"
"Joan!"
"Don't be alarmed," she laughed shortly; "I shan't do anything silly,
but I wanted to tell you my feelings in case I needed your help. When I
have intuitions as strong as this they are never wrong, only I don't
know yet what it means exactly."
"You must hold out for the month, at any rate," I said in as
matter-of-fact a voice as I could manage, for her manner had somehow
changed my surprise to a subtle sense of alarm. "Sangree only stays the
month, you know. And, anyhow, you are such an odd creature yourself that
you should feel generously towards other odd creatures," I ended lamely,
with a forced laugh.
She gave my hand a sudden pressure. "I'm glad I've told you at any
rate," she said quickly under her breath, for the canoe was now gliding
up silently like a ghost to our feet, "and I'm glad you're here, too,"
she added as we moved down towards the water to meet it.
I made Sangree change into the bows and got into the steering seat
myself, putting the girl between us so that I could watch them both by
keeping their outlines against the sea and stars. For the intuitions of
certain folk--women and children usually, I confess--I have always felt
a great respect that has more often than not been justified by
experience; and now the curious emotion stirred in me by the girl's
words remained somewhat vividly in my consciousness. I explained it in
some measure by the fact that the girl, tired out by the fatigue of many
days' travel, had suffered a vigorous reaction of some kind from the
strong, desolate scenery, and further, perhaps, that she had been
treated to my own experience of seeing the members of the party in a new
light--the Canadian, being partly a stranger, more vividly than the rest
of us. But, at the same time, I felt it was quite possible that she had
sensed some subtle link between his personality and her own, some
quality that she had hitherto ignored and that the routine of town life
had kept buried out of sight. The only thing that seemed difficult to
explain was the fear she had spoken of, and this I hoped the wholesome
effects of camp-life and exercise would sweep away naturally in the
course of time.
We made the tour of the island without speaking. It was all too
beautiful for speech. The trees crowded down to the shore to hear us
pass. We saw their fine dark heads, bowed low with splendid dignity to
watch us, forgetting for a moment that the stars were caught in the
needled network of their hair. Against the sky in the west, where still
lingered the sunset gold, we saw the wild toss of the horizon, shaggy
with forest and cliff, gripping the heart like the motive in a symphony,
and sending the sense of beauty all a-shiver through the mind--all these
surrounding islands standing above the water like low clouds, and like
them seeming to post along silently into the engulfing night. We heard
the musical drip-drip of the paddle, and the little wash of our waves on
the shore, and then suddenly we found ourselves at the opening of the
lagoon again, having made the complete circuit of our home.
The Reverend Timothy had awakened from sleep and was singing to himself;
and the sound of his voice as we glided down the fifty yards of enclosed
water was pleasant to hear and undeniably wholesome. We saw the glow of
the fire up among the trees on the ridge, and his shadow moving about as
he threw on more wood.
"There you are!" he called aloud. "Good again! Been setting the
night-lines, eh? Capital! And your mother's still fast asleep, Joan."
His cheery laugh floated across the water; he had not been in the least
disturbed by our absence, for old campers are not easily alarmed.
"Now, remember," he went on, after we had told our little tale of travel
by the fire, and Mrs. Maloney had asked for the fourth time exactly
where her tent was and whether the door faced east or south, "every one
takes their turn at cooking breakfast, and one of the men is always out
at sunrise to catch it first. Hubbard, I'll toss you which you do in the
morning and which I do!" He lost the toss. "Then I'll catch it," I said,
laughing at his discomfiture, for I knew he loathed stirring porridge.
"And mind you don't burn it as you did every blessed time last year on
the Volga," I added by way of reminder.
Mrs. Maloney's fifth interruption about the door of her tent, and her
further pointed observation that it was past nine o'clock, set us
lighting lanterns and putting the fire out for safety.
But before we separated for the night the clergyman had a time-honoured
little ritual of his own to go through that no one had the heart to deny
him. He always did this. It was a relic of his pulpit habits. He glanced
briefly from one to the other of us, his face grave and earnest, his
hands lifted to the stars and his eyes all closed and puckered up
beneath a momentary frown. Then he offered up a short, almost inaudible
prayer, thanking Heaven for our safe arrival, begging for good weather,
no illness or accidents, plenty of fish, and strong sailing winds.
And then, unexpectedly--no one knew why exactly--he ended up with an
abrupt request that nothing from the kingdom of darkness should be
allowed to afflict our peace, and no evil thing come near to disturb us
in the night-time.
And while he uttered these last surprising words, so strangely unlike
his usual ending, it chanced that I looked up and let my eyes wander
round the group assembled about the dying fire. And it certainly seemed
to me that Sangree's face underwent a sudden and visible alteration. He
was staring at Joan, and as he stared the change ran over it like a
shadow and was gone. I started in spite of myself, for something oddly
concentrated, potent, collected, had come into the expression usually so
scattered and feeble. But it was all swift as a passing meteor, and when
I looked a second time his face was normal and he was looking among the
trees.
And Joan, luckily, had not observed him, her head being bowed and her
eyes tightly closed while her father prayed.
"The girl has a vivid imagination indeed," I thought, half laughing, as
I lit the lanterns, "if her thoughts can put a glamour upon mine in this
way"; and yet somehow, when we said good-night, I took occasion to give
her a few vigorous words of encouragement, and went to her tent to make
sure I could find it quickly in the night in case anything happened. In
her quick way the girl understood and thanked me, and the last thing I
heard as I moved off to the men's quarters was Mrs. Maloney crying that
there were beetles in her tent, and Joan's laughter as she went to help
her turn them out.
Half an hour later the island was silent as the grave, but for the
mournful voices of the wind as it sighed up from the sea. Like white
sentries stood the three tents of the men on one side of the ridge, and
on the other side, half hidden by some birches, whose leaves just
shivered as the breeze caught them, the women's tents, patches of
ghostly grey, gathered more closely together for mutual shelter and
protection. Something like fifty yards of broken ground, grey rock, moss
and lichen, lay between, and over all lay the curtain of the night and
the great whispering winds from the forests of Scandinavia.
And the very last thing, just before floating away on that mighty wave
that carries one so softly off into the deeps of forgetfulness, I again
heard the voice of John Silence as the train moved out of Victoria
Station; and by some subtle connection that met me on the very threshold
of consciousness there rose in my mind simultaneously the memory of the
girl's half-given confidence, and of her distress. As by some wizardry
of approaching dreams they seemed in that instant to be related; but
before I could analyse the why and the wherefore, both sank away out of
sight again, and I was off beyond recall.
"Unless you should send for me sooner."
II
Whether Mrs. Maloney's tent door opened south or east I think she never
discovered, for it is quite certain she always slept with the flap
tightly fastened; I only know that my own little "five by seven, all
silk" faced due east, because next morning the sun, pouring in as only
the wilderness sun knows how to pour, woke me early, and a moment later,
with a short run over soft moss and a flying dive from the granite
ledge, I was swimming in the most sparkling water imaginable.
It was barely four o'clock, and the sun came down a long vista of blue
islands that led out to the open sea and Finland. Nearer by rose the
wooded domes of our own property, still capped and wreathed with smoky
trails of fast-melting mist, and looking as fresh as though it was the
morning of Mrs. Maloney's Sixth Day and they had just issued, clean and
brilliant, from the hands of the great Architect.
In the open spaces the ground was drenched with dew, and from the sea a
cool salt wind stole in among the trees and set the branches trembling
in an atmosphere of shimmering silver. The tents shone white where the
sun caught them in patches. Below lay the lagoon, still dreaming of the
summer night; in the open the fish were jumping busily, sending musical
ripples towards the shore; and in the air hung the magic of
dawn--silent, incommunicable.
I lit the fire, so that an hour later the clergyman should find good
ashes to stir his porridge over, and then set forth upon an examination
of the island, but hardly had I gone a dozen yards when I saw a figure
standing a little in front of me where the sunlight fell in a pool among
the trees.
It was Joan. She had already been up an hour, she told me, and had
bathed before the last stars had left the sky. I saw at once that the
new spirit of this solitary region had entered into her, banishing the
fears of the night, for her face was like the face of a happy denizen of
the wilderness, and her eyes stainless and shining. Her feet were bare,
and drops of dew she had shaken from the branches hung in her
loose-flying hair. Obviously she had come into her own.
"I've been all over the island," she announced laughingly, "and there
are two things wanting."
"You're a good judge, Joan. What are they?"
"There's no animal life, and there's no--water."
"They go together," I said. "Animals don't bother with a rock like this
unless there's a spring on it."
And as she led me from place to place, happy and excited, leaping
adroitly from rock to rock, I was glad to note that my first impressions
were correct. She made no reference to our conversation of the night
before. The new spirit had driven out the old. There was no room in her
heart for fear or anxiety, and Nature had everything her own way.
The island, we found, was some three-quarters of a mile from point to
point, built in a circle, or wide horseshoe, with an opening of twenty
feet at the mouth of the lagoon. Pine-trees grew thickly all over, but
here and there were patches of silver birch, scrub oak, and
considerable colonies of wild raspberry and gooseberry bushes. The two
ends of the horseshoe formed bare slabs of smooth granite running into
the sea and forming dangerous reefs just below the surface, but the rest
of the island rose in a forty-foot ridge and sloped down steeply to the
sea on either side, being nowhere more than a hundred yards wide.
The outer shore-line was much indented with numberless coves and bays
and sandy beaches, with here and there caves and precipitous little
cliffs against which the sea broke in spray and thunder. But the inner
shore, the shore of the lagoon, was low and regular, and so well
protected by the wall of trees along the ridge that no storm could ever
send more than a passing ripple along its sandy marges. Eternal shelter
reigned there.
On one of the other islands, a few hundred yards away--for the rest of
the party slept late this first morning, and we took to the canoe--we
discovered a spring of fresh water untainted by the brackish flavour of
the Baltic, and having thus solved the most important problem of the
Camp, we next proceeded to deal with the second--fish. And in half an
hour we reeled in and turned homewards, for we had no means of storage,
and to clean more fish than may be stored or eaten in a day is no wise
occupation for experienced campers.
And as we landed towards six o'clock we heard the clergyman singing as
usual and saw his wife and Sangree shaking out their blankets in the
sun, and dressed in a fashion that finally dispelled all memories of
streets and civilisation.
"The Little People lit the fire for me," cried Maloney, looking natural
and at home in his ancient flannel suit and breaking off in the middle
of his singing, "so I've got the porridge going--and this time it's
_not_ burnt."
We reported the discovery of water and held up the fish.
"Good! Good again!" he cried. "We'll have the first decent breakfast
we've had this year. Sangree'll clean 'em in no time, and the Bo'sun's
Mate--"
"Will fry them to a turn," laughed the voice of Mrs. Maloney, appearing
on the scene in a tight blue jersey and sandals, and catching up the
frying-pan. Her husband always called her the Bo'sun's Mate in Camp,
because it was her duty, among others, to pipe all hands to meals.
"And as for you, Joan," went on the happy man, "you look like the spirit
of the island, with moss in your hair and wind in your eyes, and sun and
stars mixed in your face." He looked at her with delighted admiration.
"Here, Sangree, take these twelve, there's a good fellow, they're the
biggest; and we'll have 'em in butter in less time than you can say
Baltic island!"
I watched the Canadian as he slowly moved off to the cleaning pail. His
eyes were drinking in the girl's beauty, and a wave of passionate,
almost feverish, joy passed over his face, expressive of the ecstasy of
true worship more than anything else. Perhaps he was thinking that he
still had three weeks to come with that vision always before his eyes;
perhaps he was thinking of his dreams in the night. I cannot say. But I
noticed the curious mingling of yearning and happiness in his eyes, and
the strength of the impression touched my curiosity. Something in his
face held my gaze for a second, something to do with its intensity. That
so timid, so gentle a personality should conceal so virile a passion
almost seemed to require explanation.
But the impression was momentary, for that first breakfast in Camp
permitted no divided attentions, and I dare swear that the porridge, the
tea, the Swedish "flatbread," and the fried fish flavoured with points
of frizzled bacon, were better than any meal eaten elsewhere that day in
the whole world.
The first clear day in a new camp is always a furiously busy one, and we
soon dropped into the routine upon which in large measure the real
comfort of every one depends. About the cooking-fire, greatly improved
with stones from the shore, we built a high stockade consisting of
upright poles thickly twined with branches, the roof lined with moss and
lichen and weighted with rocks, and round the interior we made low
wooden seats so that we could lie round the fire even in rain and eat
our meals in peace. Paths, too, outlined themselves from tent to tent,
from the bathing places and the landing stage, and a fair division of
the island was decided upon between the quarters of the men and the
women. Wood was stacked, awkward trees and boulders removed, hammocks
slung, and tents strengthened. In a word, Camp was established, and
duties were assigned and accepted as though we expected to live on this
Baltic island for years to come and the smallest detail of the Community
life was important.
Moreover, as the Camp came into being, this sense of a community
developed, proving that we were a definite whole, and not merely
separate human beings living for a while in tents upon a desert island.
Each fell willingly into the routine. Sangree, as by natural selection,
took upon himself the cleaning of the fish and the cutting of the wood
into lengths sufficient for a day's use. And he did it well. The pan of
water was never without a fish, cleaned and scaled, ready to fry for
whoever was hungry; the nightly fire never died down for lack of
material to throw on without going farther afield to search.
And Timothy, once reverend, caught the fish and chopped down the trees.
He also assumed responsibility for the condition of the boat, and did it
so thoroughly that nothing in the little cutter was ever found wanting.
And when, for any reason, his presence was in demand, the first place to
look for him was--in the boat, and there, too, he was usually found,
tinkering away with sheets, sails, or rudder and singing as he tinkered.
'Nor was the "reading" neglected; for most mornings there came a sound
of droning voices form the white tent by the raspberry bushes, which
signified that Sangree, the tutor, and whatever other man chanced to be
in the party at the time, were hard at it with history or the classics.
And while Mrs. Maloney, also by natural selection, took charge of the
larder and the kitchen, the mending and general supervision of the rough
comforts, she also made herself peculiarly mistress of the megaphone
which summoned to meals and carried her voice easily from one end of the
island to the other; and in her hours of leisure she daubed the
surrounding scenery on to a sketching block with all the honesty and
devotion of her determined but unreceptive soul.
Joan, meanwhile, Joan, elusive creature of the wilds, became I know not
exactly what. She did plenty of work in the Camp, yet seemed to have no
very precise duties. She was everywhere and anywhere. Sometimes she
slept in her tent, sometimes under the stars with a blanket. She knew
every inch of the island and kept turning up in places where she was
least expected--for ever wandering about, reading her books in sheltered
corners, making little fires on sunless days to "worship by to the
gods," as she put it, ever finding new pools to dive and bathe in, and
swimming day and night in the warm and waveless lagoon like a fish in a
huge tank. She went bare-legged and bare-footed, with her hair down and
her skirts caught up to the knees, and if ever a human being turned into
a jolly savage within the compass of a single week, Joan Maloney was
certainly that human being. She ran wild.
So completely, too, was she possessed by the strong spirit of the place
that the little human fear she had yielded to so strangely on our
arrival seemed to have been utterly dispossessed. As I hoped and
expected, she made no reference to our conversation of the first
evening. Sangree bothered her with no special attentions, and after all
they were very little together. His behaviour was perfect in that
respect, and I, for my part, hardly gave the matter another thought.
Joan was ever a prey to vivid fancies of one kind or another, and this
was one of them. Mercifully for the happiness of all concerned, it had
melted away before the spirit of busy, active life and deep content
that reigned over the island. Every one was intensely alive, and peace
was upon all.
* * * * *
Meanwhile the effect of the camp-life began to tell. Always a searching
test of character, its results, sooner or later, are infallible, for it
acts upon the soul as swiftly and surely as the hypo bath upon the
negative of a photograph. A readjustment of the personal forces takes
place quickly; some parts of the personality go to sleep, others wake
up: but the first sweeping change that the primitive life brings about
is that the artificial portions of the character shed themselves one
after another like dead skins. Attitudes and poses that seemed genuine
in the city drop away. The mind, like the body, grows quickly hard,
simple, uncomplex. And in a camp as primitive and close to nature as
ours was, these effects became speedily visible.
Some folk, of course, who talk glibly about the simple life when it is
safely out of reach, betray themselves in camp by for ever peering about
for the artificial excitements of civilisation which they miss. Some get
bored at once; some grow slovenly; some reveal the animal in most
unexpected fashion; and some, the select few, find themselves in very
short order and are happy.
And, in our little party, we could flatter ourselves that we all
belonged to the last category, so far as the general effect was
concerned. Only there were certain other changes as well, varying with
each individual, and all interesting to note.
It was only after the first week or two that these changes became
marked, although this is the proper place, I think, to speak of them.
For, having myself no other duty than to enjoy a well-earned holiday, I
used to load my canoe with blankets and provisions and journey forth on
exploration trips among the islands of several days together; and it was
on my return from the first of these--when I rediscovered the party, so
to speak--that these changes first presented themselves vividly to me,
and in one particular instance produced a rather curious impression.
In a word, then, while every one had grown wilder, naturally wilder,
Sangree, it seemed to me, had grown much wilder, and what I can only
call unnaturally wilder. He made me think of a savage.
To begin with, he had changed immensely in mere physical appearance, and
the full brown cheeks, the brighter eyes of absolute health, and the
general air of vigour and robustness that had come to replace his
customary lassitude and timidity, had worked such an improvement that I
hardly knew him for the same man. His voice, too, was deeper and his
manner bespoke for the first time a greater measure of confidence in
himself. He now had some claims to be called nice-looking, or at least
to a certain air of virility that would not lessen his value in the eyes
of the opposite sex.
All this, of course, was natural enough, and most welcome. But,
altogether apart from this physical change, which no doubt had also been
going forward in the rest of us, there was a subtle note in his
personality that came to me with a degree of surprise that almost
amounted to shock.
And two things--as he came down to welcome me and pull up the
canoe--leaped up in my mind unbidden, as though connected in some way I
could not at the moment divine--first, the curious judgment formed of
him by Joan; and secondly, that fugitive expression I had caught in his
face while Maloney was offering up his strange prayer for special
protection from Heaven.
The delicacy of manner and feature--to call it by no milder term--which
had always been a distinguishing characteristic of the man, had been
replaced by something far more vigorous and decided, that yet utterly
eluded analysis. The change which impressed me so oddly was not easy to
name. The others--singing Maloney, the bustling Bo'sun's Mate, and Joan,
that fascinating half-breed of undine and salamander--all showed the
effects of a life so close to nature; but in their case the change was
perfectly natural and what was to be expected, whereas with Peter
Sangree, the Canadian, it was something unusual and unexpected.
It is impossible to explain how he managed gradually to convey to my
mind the impression that something in him had turned savage, yet this,
more or less, is the impression that he did convey. It was not that he
seemed really less civilised, or that his character had undergone any
definite alteration, but rather that something in him, hitherto dormant,
had awakened to life. Some quality, latent till now--so far, at least,
as we were concerned, who, after all, knew him but slightly--had stirred
into activity and risen to the surface of his being.
And while, for the moment, this seemed as far as I could get, it was but
natural that my mind should continue the intuitive process and
acknowledge that John Silence, owing to his peculiar faculties, and the
girl, owing to her singularly receptive temperament, might each in a
different way have divined this latent quality in his soul, and feared
its manifestation later.
On looking back to this painful adventure, too, it now seems equally
natural that the same process, carried to its logical conclusion, should
have wakened some deep instinct in me that, wholly without direction
from my will, set itself sharply and persistently upon the watch from
that very moment. Thenceforward the personality of Sangree was never
far from my thoughts, and I was for ever analysing and searching for the
explanation that took so long in coming.
"I declare, Hubbard, you're tanned like an aboriginal, and you look like
one, too," laughed Maloney.
"And I can return the compliment," was my reply, as we all gathered
round a brew of tea to exchange news and compare notes.
And later, at supper, it amused me to observe that the distinguished
tutor, once clergyman, did not eat his food quite as "nicely" as he did
at home--he devoured it; that Mrs. Maloney ate more, and, to say the
least, with less delay, than was her custom in the select atmosphere of
her English dining-room; and that while Joan attacked her tin plateful
with genuine avidity, Sangree, the Canadian, bit and gnawed at his,
laughing and talking and complimenting the cook all the while, and
making me think with secret amusement of a starved animal at its first
meal. While, from their remarks about myself, I judged that I had
changed and grown wild as much as the rest of them.
In this and in a hundred other little ways the change showed, ways
difficult to define in detail, but all proving--not the coarsening
effect of leading the primitive life, but, let us say, the more direct
and unvarnished methods that became prevalent. For all day long we were
in the bath of the elements--wind, water, sun--and just as the body
became insensible to cold and shed unnecessary clothing, the mind grew
straightforward and shed many of the disguises required by the
conventions of civilisation.
And in each, according to temperament and character, there stirred the
life-instincts that were natural, untamed, and, in a sense--savage.
III
So it came about that I stayed with our island party, putting off my
second exploring trip from day to day, and I think that this far-fetched
instinct to watch Sangree was really the cause of my postponement.
For another ten days the life of the Camp pursued its even and
delightful way, blessed by perfect summer weather, a good harvest of
fish, fine winds for sailing, and calm, starry nights. Maloney's selfish
prayer had been favourably received. Nothing came to disturb or perplex.
There was not even the prowling of night animals to vex the rest of Mrs.
Maloney; for in previous camps it had often been her peculiar affliction
that she heard the porcupines scratching against the canvas, or the
squirrels dropping fir-cones in the early morning with a sound of
miniature thunder upon the roof of her tent. But on this island there
was not even a squirrel or a mouse. I think two toads and a small and
harmless snake were the only living creatures that had been discovered
during the whole of the first fortnight. And these two toads in all
probability were not two toads, but one toad.
Then, suddenly, came the terror that changed the whole aspect of the
place--the devastating terror.
It came, at first, gently, but from the very start it made me realise
the unpleasant loneliness of our situation, our remote isolation in this
wilderness of sea and rock, and how the islands in this tideless Baltic
ocean lay about us like the advance guard of a vast besieging army. Its
entry, as I say, was gentle, hardly noticeable, in fact, to most of us:
singularly undramatic it certainly was. But, then, in actual life this
is often the way the dreadful climaxes move upon us, leaving the heart
undisturbed almost to the last minute, and then overwhelming it with a
sudden rush of horror. For it was the custom at breakfast to listen
patiently while each in turn related the trivial adventures of the
night--how they slept, whether the wind shook their tent, whether the
spider on the ridge pole had moved, whether they had heard the toad, and
so forth--and on this particular morning Joan, in the middle of a little
pause, made a truly novel announcement:
"In the night I heard the howling of a dog," she said, and then flushed
up to the roots of her hair when we burst out laughing. For the idea of
there being a dog on this forsaken island that was only able to support
a snake and two toads was distinctly ludicrous, and I remember Maloney,
half-way through his burnt porridge, capping the announcement by
declaring that he had heard a "Baltic turtle" in the lagoon, and his
wife's expression of frantic alarm before the laughter undeceived her.
But the next morning Joan repeated the story with additional and
convincing detail.
"Sounds of whining and growling woke me," she said, "and I distinctly
heard sniffing under my tent, and the scratching of paws."
"Oh, Timothy! Can it be a porcupine?" exclaimed the Bo'sun's Mate with
distress, forgetting that Sweden was not Canada.
But the girl's voice had sounded to me in quite another key, and looking
up I saw that her father and Sangree were staring at her hard. They,
too, understood that she was in earnest, and had been struck by the
serious note in her voice.
"Rubbish, Joan! You are always dreaming something or other wild," her
father said a little impatiently.
"There's not an animal of any size on the whole island," added Sangree
with a puzzled expression. He never took his eyes from her face.
"But there's nothing to prevent one swimming over," I put in briskly,
for somehow a sense of uneasiness that was not pleasant had woven itself
into the talk and pauses. "A deer, for instance, might easily land in
the night and take a look round--"
"Or a bear!" gasped the Bo'sun's Mate, with a look so portentous that we
all welcomed the laugh.
But Joan did not laugh. Instead, she sprang up and called to us to
follow.
"There," she said, pointing to the ground by her tent on the side farthest
from her mother's; "there are the marks close to my head. You can
see for yourselves."
We saw plainly. The moss and lichen--for earth there was hardly any--had
been scratched up by paws. An animal about the size of a large dog it
must have been, to judge by the marks. We stood and stared in a row.
"Close to my head," repeated the girl, looking round at us. Her face, I
noticed, was very pale, and her lip seemed to quiver for an instant.
Then she gave a sudden gulp--and burst into a flood of tears.
The whole thing had come about in the brief space of a few minutes, and
with a curious sense of inevitableness, moreover, as though it had all
been carefully planned from all time and nothing could have stopped it.
It had all been rehearsed before--had actually happened before, as the
strange feeling sometimes has it; it seemed like the opening movement in
some ominous drama, and that I knew exactly what would happen next.
Something of great moment was impending.
For this sinister sensation of coming disaster made itself felt from the
very beginning, and an atmosphere of gloom and dismay pervaded the
entire Camp from that moment forward.
I drew Sangree to one side and moved away, while Maloney took the
distressed girl into her tent, and his wife followed them, energetic and
greatly flustered.
For thus, in undramatic fashion, it was that the terror I have spoken of
first attempted the invasion of our Camp, and, trivial and unimportant
though it seemed, every little detail of this opening scene is
photographed upon my mind with merciless accuracy and precision. It
happened exactly as described. This was exactly the language used. I see
it written before me in black and white. I see, too, the faces of all
concerned with the sudden ugly signature of alarm where before had been
peace. The terror had stretched out, so to speak, a first tentative
feeler toward us and had touched the hearts of each with a horrid
directness. And from this moment the Camp changed.
Sangree in particular was visibly upset. He could not bear to see the
girl distressed, and to hear her actually cry was almost more than he
could stand. The feeling that he had no right to protect her hurt him
keenly, and I could see that he was itching to do something to help, and
liked him for it. His expression said plainly that he would tear in a
thousand pieces anything that dared to injure a hair of her head.
We lit our pipes and strolled over in silence to the men's quarters, and
it was his odd Canadian expression "Gee whiz!" that drew my attention to
a further discovery.
"The brute's been scratching round my tent too," he cried, as he pointed
to similar marks by the door and I stooped down to examine them. We both
stared in amazement for several minutes without speaking.
"Only I sleep like the dead," he added, straightening up again, "and so
heard nothing, I suppose."
We traced the paw-marks from the mouth of his tent in a direct line
across to the girl's, but nowhere else about the Camp was there a sign
of the strange visitor. The deer, dog, or whatever it was that had twice
favoured us with a visit in the night, had confined its attentions to
these two tents. And, after all, there was really nothing out of the way
about these visits of an unknown animal, for although our own island was
destitute of life, we were in the heart of a wilderness, and the
mainland and larger islands must be swarming with all kinds of
four-footed creatures, and no very prolonged swimming was necessary to
reach us. In any other country it would not have caused a moment's
interest--interest of the kind we felt, that is. In our Canadian camps
the bears were for ever grunting about among the provision bags at
night, porcupines scratching unceasingly, and chipmunks scuttling over
everything.
"My daughter is overtired, and that's the truth of it," explained
Maloney presently when he rejoined us and had examined in turn the other
paw-marks. "She's been overdoing it lately, and camp-life, you know,
always means a great excitement to her. It's natural enough, if we take
no notice she'll be all right." He paused to borrow my tobacco pouch and
fill his pipe, and the blundering way he filled it and spilled the
precious weed on the ground visibly belied the calm of his easy
language. "You might take her out for a bit of fishing, Hubbard, like a
good chap; she's hardly up to the long day in the cutter. Show her some
of the other islands in your canoe, perhaps. Eh?"
And by lunch-time the cloud had passed away as suddenly, and as
suspiciously, as it had come.
But in the canoe, on our way home, having till then purposely ignored
the subject uppermost in our minds, she suddenly spoke to me in a way
that again touched the note of sinister alarm--the note that kept on
sounding and sounding until finally John Silence came with his great
vibrating presence and relieved it; yes, and even after he came, too,
for a while.
"I'm ashamed to ask it," she said abruptly, as she steered me home, her
sleeves rolled up, her hair blowing in the wind, "and ashamed of my
silly tears too, because I really can't make out what caused them; but,
Mr. Hubbard, I want you to promise me not to go off for your long
expeditions--just yet. I beg it of you." She was so in earnest that she
forgot the canoe, and the wind caught it sideways and made us roll
dangerously. "I have tried hard not to ask this," she added, bringing
the canoe round again, "but I simply can't help myself."
It was a good deal to ask, and I suppose my hesitation was plain; for
she went on before I could reply, and her beseeching expression and
intensity of manner impressed me very forcibly.
"For another two weeks only--"
"Mr. Sangree leaves in a fortnight," I said, seeing at once what she was
driving at, but wondering if it was best to encourage her or not.
"If I knew you were to be on the island till then," she said, her face
alternately pale and blushing, and her voice trembling a little, "I
should feel so much happier."
I looked at her steadily, waiting for her to finish.
"And safer," she added almost in a whisper; "especially--at night, I
mean."
"Safer, Joan?" I repeated, thinking I had never seen her eyes so soft
and tender. She nodded her head, keeping her gaze fixed on my face.
It was really difficult to refuse, whatever my thoughts and judgment may
have been, and somehow I understood that she spoke with good reason,
though for the life of me I could not have put it into words.
"Happier--and safer," she said gravely, the canoe giving a dangerous
lurch as she leaned forward in her seat to catch my answer. Perhaps,
after all, the wisest way was to grant her request and make light of it,
easing her anxiety without too much encouraging its cause.
"All right, Joan, you queer creature; I promise," and the instant look
of relief in her face, and the smile that came back like sunlight to her
eyes, made me feel that, unknown to myself and the world, I was capable
of considerable sacrifice after all.
"But, you know, there's nothing to be afraid of," I added sharply; and
she looked up in my face with the smile women use when they know we are
talking idly, yet do not wish to tell us so.
"_You_ don't feel afraid, I know," she observed quietly.
"Of course not; why should I?"
"So, if you will just humour me this once I--I will never ask anything
foolish of you again as long as I live," she said gratefully.
"You have my promise," was all I could find to say.
She headed the nose of the canoe for the lagoon lying a quarter of a
mile ahead, and paddled swiftly; but a minute or two later she paused
again and stared hard at me with the dripping paddle across the thwarts.
"You've not heard anything at night yourself, have you?" she asked.
"I never hear anything at night," I replied shortly, "from the moment I
lie down till the moment I get up."
"That dismal howling, for instance," she went on, determined to get it
out, "far away at first and then getting closer, and stopping just
outside the Camp?"
"Certainly not."
"Because, sometimes I think I almost dreamed it."
"Most likely you did," was my unsympathetic response.
"And you don't think father has heard it either, then?"
"No. He would have told me if he had."
This seemed to relieve her mind a little. "I know mother hasn't," she
added, as if speaking to herself, "for she hears nothing--ever."
* * * * *
It was two nights after this conversation that I woke out of deep sleep
and heard sounds of screaming. The voice was really horrible, breaking
the peace and silence with its shrill clamour. In less than ten seconds
I was half dressed and out of my tent. The screaming had stopped
abruptly, but I knew the general direction, and ran as fast as the
darkness would allow over to the women's quarters, and on getting close
I heard sounds of suppressed weeping. It was Joan's voice. And just as I
came up I saw Mrs. Maloney, marvellously attired, fumbling with a
lantern. Other voices became audible in the same moment behind me, and
Timothy Maloney arrived, breathless, less than half dressed, and
carrying another lantern that had gone out on the way from being banged
against a tree. Dawn was just breaking, and a chill wind blew in from
the sea. Heavy black clouds drove low overhead.
The scene of confusion may be better imagined than described. Questions
in frightened voices filled the air against this background of
suppressed weeping. Briefly--Joan's silk tent had been torn, and the
girl was in a state bordering upon hysterics. Somewhat reassured by our
noisy presence, however,--for she was plucky at heart,--she pulled
herself together and tried to explain what had happened; and her broken
words, told there on the edge of night and morning upon this wild island
ridge, were oddly thrilling and distressingly convincing.
"Something touched me and I woke," she said simply, but in a voice
still hushed and broken with the terror of it, "something pushing
against the tent; I felt it through the canvas. There was the same
sniffing and scratching as before, and I felt the tent give a little as
when wind shakes it. I heard breathing--very loud, very heavy
breathing--and then came a sudden great tearing blow, and the canvas
ripped open close to my face."
She had instantly dashed out through the open flap and screamed at the
top of her voice, thinking the creature had actually got into the tent.
But nothing was visible, she declared, and she heard not the faintest
sound of an animal making off under cover of the darkness. The brief
account seemed to exercise a paralysing effect upon us all as we
listened to it. I can see the dishevelled group to this day, the wind
blowing the women's hair, and Maloney craning his head forward to
listen, and his wife, open-mouthed and gasping, leaning against a pine
tree.
"Come over to the stockade and we'll get the fire going," I said;
"that's the first thing," for we were all shaking with the cold in our
scanty garments. And at that moment Sangree arrived wrapped in a blanket
and carrying his gun; he was still drunken with sleep.
"The dog again," Maloney explained briefly, forestalling his questions;
"been at Joan's tent. Torn it, by Gad! this time. It's time we did
something." He went on mumbling confusedly to himself.
Sangree gripped his gun and looked about swiftly in the darkness. I saw
his eyes aflame in the glare of the flickering lanterns. He made a
movement as though to start out and hunt--and kill. Then his glance fell
on the girl crouching on the ground, her face hidden in her hands, and
there leaped into his features an expression of savage anger that
transformed them. He could have faced a dozen lions with a walking stick
at that moment, and again I liked him for the strength of his anger, his
self-control, and his hopeless devotion.
But I stopped him going off on a blind and useless chase.
"Come and help me start the fire, Sangree," I said, anxious also to
relieve the girl of our presence; and a few minutes later the ashes,
still growing from the night's fire, had kindled the fresh wood, and
there was a blaze that warmed us well while it also lit up the
surrounding trees within a radius of twenty yards.
"I heard nothing," he whispered; "what in the world do you think it is?
It surely can't be only a dog!"
"We'll find that out later," I said, as the others came up to the
grateful warmth; "the first thing is to make as big a fire as we can."
Joan was calmer now, and her mother had put on some warmer, and less
miraculous, garments. And while they stood talking in low voices
Maloney and I slipped off to examine the tent. There was little enough
to see, but that little was unmistakable. Some animal had scratched up
the ground at the head of the tent, and with a great blow of a powerful
paw--a paw clearly provided with good claws--had struck the silk and
torn it open. There was a hole large enough to pass a fist and arm
through.
"It can't be far away," Maloney said excitedly. "We'll organise a hunt
at once; this very minute."
We hurried back to the fire, Maloney talking boisterously about his
proposed hunt. "There's nothing like prompt action to dispel alarm," he
whispered in my ear; and then turned to the rest of us.
"We'll hunt the island from end to end at once," he said, with
excitement; "that's what we'll do. The beast can't be far away. And the
Bo'sun's Mate and Joan must come too, because they can't be left alone.
Hubbard, you take the right shore, and you, Sangree, the left, and I'll
go in the middle with the women. In this way we can stretch clean across
the ridge, and nothing bigger than a rabbit can possibly escape us." He
was extraordinarily excited, I thought. Anything affecting Joan, of
course, stirred him prodigiously. "Get your guns and we'll start the
drive at once," he cried. He lit another lantern and handed one each to
his wife and Joan, and while I ran to fetch my gun I heard him singing
to himself with the excitement of it all.
Meanwhile the dawn had come on quickly. It made the flickering lanterns
look pale. The wind, too, was rising, and I heard the trees moaning
overhead and the waves breaking with increasing clamour on the shore. In
the lagoon the boat dipped and splashed, and the sparks from the fire
were carried aloft in a stream and scattered far and wide.
We made our way to the extreme end of the island, measured our distances
carefully, and then began to advance. None of us spoke. Sangree and I,
with cocked guns, watched the shore lines, and all within easy touch and
speaking distance. It was a slow and blundering drive, and there were
many false alarms, but after the best part of half an hour we stood on
the farther end, having made the complete tour, and without putting up
so much as a squirrel. Certainly there was no living creature on that
island but ourselves.
"I know what it is!" cried Maloney, looking out over the dim expanse of
grey sea, and speaking with the air of a man making a discovery; "it's a
dog from one of the farms on the larger islands"--he pointed seawards
where the archipelago thickened--"and it's escaped and turned wild. Our
fires and voices attracted it, and it's probably half starved as well as
savage, poor brute!"
No one said anything in reply, and he began to sing again very low to
himself.
The point where we stood--a huddled, shivering group--faced the wider
channels that led to the open sea and Finland. The grey dawn had broken
in earnest at last, and we could see the racing waves with their angry
crests of white. The surrounding islands showed up as dark masses in the
distance, and in the east, almost as Maloney spoke, the sun came up with
a rush in a stormy and magnificent sky of red and gold. Against this
splashed and gorgeous background black clouds, shaped like fantastic and
legendary animals, filed past swiftly in a tearing stream, and to this
day I have only to close my eyes to see again that vivid and hurrying
procession in the air. All about us the pines made black splashes
against the sky. It was an angry sunrise. Rain, indeed, had already
begun to fall in big drops.
We turned, as by a common instinct, and, without speech, made our way
back slowly to the stockade, Maloney humming snatches of his songs,
Sangree in front with his gun, prepared to shoot at a moment's notice,
and the women floundering in the rear with myself and the extinguished
lanterns.
Yet it was only a dog!
Really, it was most singular when one came to reflect soberly upon it
all. Events, say the occultists, have souls, or at least that
agglomerate life due to the emotions and thoughts of all concerned in
them, so that cities, and even whole countries, have great astral shapes
which may become visible to the eye of vision; and certainly here, the
soul of this drive--this vain, blundering, futile drive--stood somewhere
between ourselves and--laughed.
All of us heard that laugh, and all of us tried hard to smother the
sound, or at least to ignore it. Every one talked at once, loudly, and
with exaggerated decision, obviously trying to say something plausible
against heavy odds, striving to explain naturally that an animal might
so easily conceal itself from us, or swim away before we had time to
light upon its trail. For we all spoke of that "trail" as though it
really existed, and we had more to go upon than the mere marks of paws
about the tents of Joan and the Canadian. Indeed, but for these, and the
torn tent, I think it would, of course, have been possible to ignore the
existence of this beast intruder altogether.
And it was here, under this angry dawn, as we stood in the shelter of
the stockade from the pouring rain, weary yet so strangely excited--it
was here, out of this confusion of voices and explanations, that--very
stealthily--the ghost of something horrible slipped in and stood among
us. It made all our explanations seem childish and untrue; the false
relation was instantly exposed. Eyes exchanged quick, anxious glances,
questioning, expressive of dismay. There was a sense of wonder, of
poignant distress, and of trepidation. Alarm stood waiting at our
elbows. We shivered.
Then, suddenly, as we looked into each other's faces, came the long,
unwelcome pause in which this new arrival established itself in our
hearts.
And, without further speech, or attempt at explanation, Maloney moved
off abruptly to mix the porridge for an early breakfast; Sangree to
clean the fish; myself to chop wood and tend the fire; Joan and her
mother to change their wet garments; and, most significant of all, to
prepare her mother's tent for its future complement of two.
Each went to his duty, but hurriedly, awkwardly, silently; and this new
arrival, this shape of terror and distress stalked, viewless, by the
side of each.
"If only I could have traced that dog," I think was the thought in the
minds of all.
But in Camp, where every one realises how important the individual
contribution is to the comfort and well-being of all, the mind speedily
recovers tone and pulls itself together.
During the day, a day of heavy and ceaseless rain, we kept more or less
to our tents, and though there were signs of mysterious conferences
between the three members of the Maloney family, I think that most of us
slept a good deal and stayed alone with his thoughts. Certainly, I did,
because when Maloney came to say that his wife invited us all to a
special "tea" in her tent, he had to shake me awake before I realised
that he was there at all.
And by supper-time we were more or less even-minded again, and almost
jolly. I only noticed that there was an undercurrent of what is best
described as "jumpiness," and that the merest snapping of a twig, or
plop of a fish in the lagoon, was sufficient to make us start and look
over our shoulders. Pauses were rare in our talk, and the fire was never
for one instant allowed to get low. The wind and rain had ceased, but
the dripping of the branches still kept up an excellent imitation of a
downpour. In particular, Maloney was vigilant and alert, telling us a
series of tales in which the wholesome humorous element was especially
strong. He lingered, too, behind with me after Sangree had gone to bed,
and while I mixed myself a glass of hot Swedish punch, he did a thing I
had never known him do before--he mixed one for himself, and then asked
me to light him over to his tent. We said nothing on the way, but I felt
that he was glad of my companionship.
I returned alone to the stockade, and for a long time after that kept
the fire blazing, and sat up smoking and thinking. I hardly knew why;
but sleep was far from me for one thing, and for another, an idea was
taking form in my mind that required the comfort of tobacco and a
bright fire for its growth. I lay against a corner of the stockade
seat, listening to the wind whispering and to the ceaseless drip-drip of
the trees. The night, otherwise, was very still, and the sea quiet as a
lake. I remember that I was conscious, peculiarly conscious, of this
host of desolate islands crowding about us in the darkness, and that we
were the one little spot of humanity in a rather wonderful kind of
wilderness.
But this, I think, was the only symptom that came to warn me of highly
strung nerves, and it certainly was not sufficiently alarming to destroy
my peace of mind. One thing, however, did come to disturb my peace, for
just as I finally made ready to go, and had kicked the embers of the
fire into a last effort, I fancied I saw, peering at me round the
farther end of the stockade wall, a dark and shadowy mass that might
have been--that strongly resembled, in fact--the body of a large animal.
Two glowing eyes shone for an instant in the middle of it. But the next
second I saw that it was merely a projecting mass of moss and lichen in
the wall of our stockade, and the eyes were a couple of wandering sparks
from the dying ashes I had kicked. It was easy enough, too, to imagine I
saw an animal moving here and there between the trees, as I picked my
way stealthily to my tent. Of course, the shadows tricked me.
And though it was after one o'clock, Maloney's light was still burning,
for I saw his tent shining white among the pines.
It was, however, in the short space between consciousness and
sleep--that time when the body is low and the voices of the submerged
region tell sometimes true--that the idea which had been all this while
maturing reached the point of an actual decision, and I suddenly
realised that I had resolved to send word to Dr. Silence. For, with a
sudden wonder that I had hitherto been so blind, the unwelcome
conviction dawned upon me all at once that some dreadful thing was
lurking about us on this island, and that the safety of at least one of
us was threatened by something monstrous and unclean that was too
horrible to contemplate. And, again remembering those last words of his
as the train moved out of the platform, I understood that Dr. Silence
would hold himself in readiness to come.
"Unless you should send for me sooner," he had said.
* * * * *
I found myself suddenly wide awake. It is impossible to say what woke
me, but it was no gradual process, seeing that I jumped from deep sleep
to absolute alertness in a single instant. I had evidently slept for an
hour and more, for the night had cleared, stars crowded the sky, and a
pallid half-moon just sinking into the sea threw a spectral light
between the trees.
I went outside to sniff the air, and stood upright. A curious
impression that something was astir in the Camp came over me, and when I
glanced across at Sangree's tent, some twenty feet away, I saw that it
was moving. He too, then, was awake and restless, for I saw the canvas
sides bulge this way and that as he moved within.
The flap pushed forward. He was coming out, like myself, to sniff
the air; and I was not surprised, for its sweetness after the rain was
intoxicating. And he came on all fours, just as I had done. I saw a head
thrust round the edge of the tent.
And then I saw that it was not Sangree at all. It was an animal. And the
same instant I realised something else too--it was _the_ animal; and its
whole presentment for some unaccountable reason was unutterably malefic.
A cry I was quite unable to suppress escaped me, and the creature turned
on the instant and stared at me with baleful eyes. I could have dropped
on the spot, for the strength all ran out of my body with a rush.
Something about it touched in me the living terror that grips and
paralyses. If the mind requires but the tenth of a second to form an
impression, I must have stood there stockstill for several seconds while
I seized the ropes for support and stared. Many and vivid impressions
flashed through my mind, but not one of them resulted in action, because
I was in instant dread that the beast any moment would leap in my
direction and be upon me. Instead, however, after what seemed a vast
period, it slowly turned its eyes from my face, uttered a low whining
sound, and came out altogether into the open.
Then, for the first time, I saw it in its entirety and noted two things:
it was about the size of a large dog, but at the same time it was
utterly unlike any animal that I had ever seen. Also, that the quality
that had impressed me first as being malefic was really only its
singular and original strangeness. Foolish as it may sound, and
impossible as it is for me to adduce proof, I can only say that the
animal seemed to me then to be--not real.
But all this passed through my mind in a flash, almost subconsciously,
and before I had time to check my impressions, or even properly verify
them, I made an involuntary movement, catching the tight rope in my hand
so that it twanged like a banjo string, and in that instant the creature
turned the corner of Sangree's tent and was gone into the darkness.
Then, of course, my senses in some measure returned to me, and I
realised only one thing: it had been inside his tent!
I dashed out, reached the door in half a dozen strides, and looked in.
The Canadian, thank God! lay upon his bed of branches. His arm was
stretched outside, across the blankets, the fist tightly clenched, and
the body had an appearance of unusual rigidity that was alarming. On his
face there was an expression of effort, almost of painful effort, so far
as the uncertain light permitted me to see, and his sleep seemed to be
very profound. He looked, I thought, so stiff, so unnaturally stiff, and
in some indefinable way, too, he looked smaller--shrunken.
I called to him to wake, but called many times in vain. Then I decided
to shake him, and had already moved forward to do so vigorously when
there came a sound of footsteps padding softly behind me, and I felt a
stream of hot breath burn my neck as I stooped. I turned sharply. The
tent door was darkened and something silently swept in. I felt a rough
and shaggy body push past me, and knew that the animal had returned. It
seemed to leap forward between me and Sangree--in fact, to leap upon
Sangree, for its dark body hid him momentarily from view, and in that
moment my soul turned sick and coward with a horror that rose from the
very dregs and depths of life, and gripped my existence at its central
source.
The creature seemed somehow to melt away into him, almost as though it
belonged to him and were a part of himself, but in the same
instant--that instant of extraordinary confusion and terror in my
mind--it seemed to pass over and behind him, and, in some utterly
unaccountable fashion, it was gone. And the Canadian woke and sat up
with a start.
"Quick! You fool!" I cried, in my excitement, "the beast has been in
your tent, here at your very throat while you sleep like the dead. Up,
man! Get your gun! Only this second it disappeared over there behind
your head. Quick! or Joan--!"
And somehow the fact that he was there, wide-awake now, to corroborate
me, brought the additional conviction to my own mind that this was no
animal, but some perplexing and dreadful form of life that drew upon my
deeper knowledge, that much reading had perhaps assented to, but that
had never yet come within actual range of my senses.
He was up in a flash, and out. He was trembling, and very white. We
searched hurriedly, feverishly, but found only the traces of paw-marks
passing from the door of his own tent across the moss to the women's.
And the sight of the tracks about Mrs. Maloney's tent, where Joan now
slept, set him in a perfect fury.
"Do you know what it is, Hubbard, this beast?" he hissed under his
breath at me; "it's a damned wolf, that's what it is--a wolf lost among
the islands, and starving to death--desperate. So help me God, I believe
it's that!"
He talked a lot of rubbish in his excitement. He declared he would
sleep by day and sit up every night until he killed it. Again his rage
touched my admiration; but I got him away before he made enough noise to
wake the whole Camp.
"I have a better plan than that," I said, watching his face closely. "I
don't think this is anything we can deal with. I'm going to send for the
only man I know who can help. We'll go to Waxholm this very morning and
get a telegram through."
Sangree stared at me with a curious expression as the fury died out of
his face and a new look of alarm took its place.
"John Silence," I said, "will know--"
"You think it's something--of that sort?" he stammered.
"I am sure of it."
There was a moment's pause. "That's worse, far worse than anything
material," he said, turning visibly paler. He looked from my face to the
sky, and then added with sudden resolution, "Come; the wind's rising.
Let's get off at once. From there you can telephone to Stockholm and get
a telegram sent without delay."
I sent him down to get the boat ready, and seized the opportunity myself
to run and wake Maloney. He was sleeping very lightly, and sprang up the
moment I put my head inside his tent. I told him briefly what I had
seen, and he showed so little surprise that I caught myself wondering
for the first time whether he himself had seen more going on than he had
deemed wise to communicate to the rest of us.
He agreed to my plan without a moment's hesitation, and my last words to
him were to let his wife and daughter think that the great psychic
doctor was coming merely as a chance visitor, and not with any
professional interest.
So, with frying-pan, provisions, and blankets aboard, Sangree and I
sailed out of the lagoon fifteen minutes later, and headed with a good
breeze for the direction of Waxholm and the borders of civilisation.
IV
Although nothing John Silence did ever took me, properly speaking, by
surprise, it was certainly unexpected to find a letter from Stockholm
waiting for me. "I have finished my Hungary business," he wrote, "and am
here for ten days. Do not hesitate to send if you need me. If you
telephone any morning from Waxholm I can catch the afternoon steamer."
My years of intercourse with him were full of "coincidences" of this
description, and although he never sought to explain them by claiming
any magical system of communication with my mind, I have never doubted
that there actually existed some secret telepathic method by which he
knew my circumstances and gauged the degree of my need. And that this
power was independent of time in the sense that it saw into the future,
always seemed to me equally apparent.
Sangree was as much relieved as I was, and within an hour of sunset that
very evening we met him on the arrival of the little coasting steamer,
and carried him off in the dinghy to the camp we had prepared on a
neighbouring island, meaning to start for home early next morning.
"Now," he said, when supper was over and we were smoking round the fire,
"let me hear your story." He glanced from one to the other, smiling.
"You tell it, Mr. Hubbard," Sangree interrupted abruptly, and went off a
little way to wash the dishes, yet not so far as to be out of earshot.
And while he splashed with the hot water, and scraped the tin plates
with sand and moss, my voice, unbroken by a single question from Dr.
Silence, ran on for the next half-hour with the best account I could
give of what had happened.
My listener lay on the other side of the fire, his face half hidden by a
big sombrero; sometimes he glanced up questioningly when a point needed
elaboration, but he uttered no single word till I had reached the end,
and his manner all through the recital was grave and attentive.
Overhead, the wash of the wind in the pine branches filled in the
pauses; the darkness settled down over the sea, and the stars came out
in thousands, and by the time I finished the moon had risen to flood the
scene with silver. Yet, by his face and eyes, I knew quite well that the
doctor was listening to something he had expected to hear, even if he
had not actually anticipated all the details.
"You did well to send for me," he said very low, with a significant
glance at me when I finished; "very well,"--and for one swift second his
eye took in Sangree,--"for what we have to deal with here is nothing
more than a werewolf--rare enough, I am glad to say, but often very sad,
and sometimes very terrible."
I jumped as though I had been shot, but the next second was heartily
ashamed of my want of control; for this brief remark, confirming as it
did my own worst suspicions, did more to convince me of the gravity of
the adventure than any number of questions or explanations. It seemed to
draw close the circle about us, shutting a door somewhere that locked us
in with the animal and the horror, and turning the key. Whatever it was
had now to be faced and dealt with.
"No one has been actually injured so far?" he asked aloud, but in a
matter-of-fact tone that lent reality to grim possibilities.
"Good heavens, no!" cried the Canadian, throwing down his dishcloths
and coming forward into the circle of firelight. "Surely there can be no
question of this poor starved beast injuring anybody, can there?"
His hair straggled untidily over his forehead, and there was a gleam in
his eyes that was not all reflection from the fire. His words made me
turn sharply. We all laughed a little short, forced laugh.
"I trust not, indeed," Dr. Silence said quietly. "But what makes you
think the creature is starved?" He asked the question with his eyes
straight on the other's face. The prompt question explained to me why I
had started, and I waited with just a tremor of excitement for the
reply.
Sangree hesitated a moment, as though the question took him by surprise.
But he met the doctor's gaze unflinchingly across the fire, and with
complete honesty.
"Really," he faltered, with a little shrug of the shoulders, "I can
hardly tell you. The phrase seemed to come out of its own accord. I have
felt from the beginning that it was in pain and--starved, though why I
felt this never occurred to me till you asked."
"You really know very little about it, then?" said the other, with a
sudden gentleness in his voice.
"No more than that," Sangree replied, looking at him with a puzzled
expression that was unmistakably genuine. "In fact, nothing at all,
really," he added, by way of further explanation.
"I am glad of that," I heard the doctor murmur under his breath, but so
low that I only just caught the words, and Sangree missed them
altogether, as evidently he was meant to do.
"And now," he cried, getting on his feet and shaking himself with a
characteristic gesture, as though to shake out the horror and the
mystery, "let us leave the problem till to-morrow and enjoy this wind
and sea and stars. I've been living lately in the atmosphere of many
people, and feel that I want to wash and be clean. I propose a swim and
then bed. Who'll second me?" And two minutes later we were all diving
from the boat into cool, deep water, that reflected a thousand moons as
the waves broke away from us in countless ripples.
We slept in blankets under the open sky, Sangree and I taking the
outside places, and were up before sunrise to catch the dawn wind.
Helped by this early start we were half-way home by noon, and then the
wind shifted to a few points behind us so that we fairly ran. In and out
among a thousand islands, down narrow channels where we lost the wind,
out into open spaces where we had to take in a reef, racing along under
a hot and cloudless sky, we flew through the very heart of the
bewildering and lonely scenery.
"A real wilderness," cried Dr. Silence from his seat in the bows where
he held the jib sheet. His hat was off, his hair tumbled in the wind,
and his lean brown face gave him the touch of an Oriental. Presently he
changed places with Sangree, and came down to talk with me by the
tiller.
"A wonderful region, all this world of islands," he said, waving his
hand to the scenery rushing past us, "but doesn't it strike you there's
something lacking?"
"It's--hard," I answered, after a moment's reflection. "It has a
superficial, glittering prettiness, without--" I hesitated to find the
word I wanted.
John Silence nodded his head with approval.
"Exactly," he said. "The picturesqueness of stage scenery that is not
real, not alive. It's like a landscape by a clever painter, yet without
true imagination. Soulless--that's the word you wanted."
"Something like that," I answered, watching the gusts of wind on the
sails. "Not dead so much, as without soul. That's it."
"Of course," he went on, in a voice calculated, it seemed to me, not to
reach our companion in the bows, "to live long in a place like
this--long and alone--might bring about a strange result in some men."
I suddenly realised he was talking with a purpose and pricked up my
ears.
"There's no life here. These islands are mere dead rocks pushed up from
below the sea--not living land; and there's nothing really alive on
them. Even the sea, this tideless, brackish sea, neither salt water nor
fresh, is dead. It's all a pretty image of life without the real heart
and soul of life. To a man with too strong desires who came here and
lived close to nature, strange things might happen."
"Let her out a bit," I shouted to Sangree, who was coming aft. "The
wind's gusty and we've got hardly any ballast."
He went back to the bows, and Dr. Silence continued--
"Here, I mean, a long sojourn would lead to deterioration, to
degeneration. The place is utterly unsoftened by human influences, by
any humanising associations of history, good or bad. This landscape has
never awakened into life; it's still dreaming in its primitive sleep."
"In time," I put in, "you mean a man living here might become brutal?"
"The passions would run wild, selfishness become supreme, the instincts
coarsen and turn savage probably."
"But--"
"In other places just as wild, parts of Italy for instance, where there
are other moderating influences, it could not happen. The character
might grow wild, savage too in a sense, but with a human wildness one
could understand and deal with. But here, in a hard place like this, it
might be otherwise." He spoke slowly, weighing his words carefully.
I looked at him with many questions in my eyes, and a precautionary cry
to Sangree to stay in the fore part of the boat, out of earshot.
"First of all there would come callousness to pain, and indifference to
the rights of others. Then the soul would turn savage, not from
passionate human causes, or with enthusiasm, but by deadening down into
a kind of cold, primitive, emotionless savagery--by turning, like the
landscape, soulless."
"And a man with strong desires, you say, might change?"
"Without being aware of it, yes; he might turn savage, his instincts and
desires turn animal. And if"--he lowered his voice and turned for a
moment towards the bows, and then continued in his most weighty
manner--"owing to delicate health or other predisposing causes, his
Double--you know what I mean, of course--his etheric Body of Desire, or
astral body, as some term it--that part in which the emotions, passions
and desires reside--if this, I say, were for some constitutional reason
loosely joined to his physical organism, there might well take place an
occasional projection--"
Sangree came aft with a sudden rush, his face aflame, but whether with
wind or sun, or with what he had heard, I cannot say. In my surprise I
let the tiller slip and the cutter gave a great plunge as she came
sharply into the wind and flung us all together in a heap on the bottom.
Sangree said nothing, but while he scrambled up and made the jib sheet
fast my companion found a moment to add to his unfinished sentence the
words, too low for any ear but mine--
"Entirely unknown to himself, however."
We righted the boat and laughed, and then Sangree produced the map and
explained exactly where we were. Far away on the horizon, across an open
stretch of water, lay a blue cluster of islands with our crescent-shaped
home among them and the safe anchorage of the lagoon. An hour with this
wind would get us there comfortably, and while Dr. Silence and Sangree
fell into conversation, I sat and pondered over the strange suggestions
that had just been put into my mind concerning the "Double," and the
possible form it might assume when dissociated temporarily from the
physical body.
The whole way home these two chatted, and John Silence was as gentle and
sympathetic as a woman. I did not hear much of their talk, for the wind
grew occasionally to the force of a hurricane and the sails and tiller
absorbed my attention; but I could see that Sangree was pleased and
happy, and was pouring out intimate revelations to his companion in the
way that most people did--when John Silence wished them to do so.
But it was quite suddenly, while I sat all intent upon wind and sails,
that the true meaning of Sangree's remark about the animal flared up in
me with its full import. For his admission that he knew it was in pain
and starved was in reality nothing more or less than a revelation of his
deeper self. It was in the nature of a confession. He was speaking of
something that he knew positively, something that was beyond question or
argument, something that had to do directly with himself. "Poor starved
beast" he had called it in words that had "come out of their own
accord," and there had not been the slightest evidence of any desire to
conceal or explain away. He had spoken instinctively--from his heart,
and as though about his own self.
And half an hour before sunset we raced through the narrow opening of
the lagoon and saw the smoke of the dinner-fire blowing here and there
among the trees, and the figures of Joan and the Bo'sun's Mate running
down to meet us at the landing-stage.
V
Everything changed from the moment John Silence set foot on that island;
it was like the effect produced by calling in some big doctor, some
great arbiter of life and death, for consultation. The sense of gravity
increased a hundredfold. Even inanimate objects took upon themselves a
subtle alteration, for the setting of the adventure--this deserted bit
of sea with its hundreds of uninhabited islands--somehow turned sombre.
An element that was mysterious, and in a sense disheartening, crept
unbidden into the severity of grey rock and dark pine forest and took
the sparkle from the sunshine and the sea.
I, at least, was keenly aware of the change, for my whole being shifted,
as it were, a degree higher, becoming keyed up and alert. The figures
from the background of the stage moved forward a little into the
light--nearer to the inevitable action. In a word this man's arrival
intensified the whole affair.
And, looking back down the years to the time when all this happened, it
is clear to me that he had a pretty sharp idea of the meaning of it from
the very beginning. How much he knew beforehand by his strange divining
powers, it is impossible to say, but from the moment he came upon the
scene and caught within himself the note of what was going on amongst
us, he undoubtedly held the true solution of the puzzle and had no need
to ask questions. And this certitude it was that set him in such an
atmosphere of power and made us all look to him instinctively; for he
took no tentative steps, made no false moves, and while the rest of us
floundered he moved straight to the climax. He was indeed a true diviner
of souls.
I can now read into his behaviour a good deal that puzzled me at the
time, for though I had dimly guessed the solution, I had no idea how he
would deal with it. And the conversations I can reproduce almost
verbatim, for, according to my invariable habit, I kept full notes of
all he said.
To Mrs. Maloney, foolish and dazed; to Joan, alarmed, yet plucky; and to
the clergyman, moved by his daughter's distress below his usual shallow
emotions, he gave the best possible treatment in the best possible way,
yet all so easily and simply as to make it appear naturally spontaneous.
For he dominated the Bo'sun's Mate, taking the measure of her ignorance
with infinite patience; he keyed up Joan, stirring her courage and
interest to the highest point for her own safety; and the Reverend
Timothy he soothed and comforted, while obtaining his implicit
obedience, by taking him into his confidence, and leading him gradually
to a comprehension of the issue that was bound to follow.
And Sangree--here his wisdom was most wisely calculated--he neglected
outwardly because inwardly he was the object of his unceasing and most
concentrated attention. Under the guise of apparent indifference his
mind kept the Canadian under constant observation.
There was a restless feeling in the Camp that evening and none of us
lingered round the fire after supper as usual. Sangree and I busied
ourselves with patching up the torn tent for our guest and with finding
heavy stones to hold the ropes, for Dr. Silence insisted on having it
pitched on the highest point of the island ridge, just where it was most
rocky and there was no earth for pegs. The place, moreover, was midway
between the men's and women's tents, and, of course, commanded the most
comprehensive view of the Camp.
"So that if your dog comes," he said simply, "I may be able to catch him
as he passes across."
The wind had gone down with the sun and an unusual warmth lay over the
island that made sleep heavy, and in the morning we assembled at a late
breakfast, rubbing our eyes and yawning. The cool north wind had given
way to the warm southern air that sometimes came up with haze and
moisture across the Baltic, bringing with it the relaxing sensations
that produced enervation and listlessness.
And this may have been the reason why at first I failed to notice that
anything unusual was about, and why I was less alert than normally; for
it was not till after breakfast that the silence of our little party
struck me and I discovered that Joan had not yet put in an appearance.
And then, in a flash, the last heaviness of sleep vanished and I saw
that Maloney was white and troubled and his wife could not hold a plate
without trembling.
A desire to ask questions was stopped in me by a swift glance from Dr.
Silence, and I suddenly understood in some vague way that they were
waiting till Sangree should have gone. How this idea came to me I cannot
determine, but the soundness of the intuition was soon proved, for the
moment he moved off to his tent, Maloney looked up at me and began to
speak in a low voice.
"You slept through it all," he half whispered.
"Through what?" I asked, suddenly thrilled with the knowledge that
something dreadful had happened.
"We didn't wake you for fear of getting the whole Camp up," he went on,
meaning, by the Camp, I supposed, Sangree. "It was just before dawn when
the screams woke me."
"The dog again?" I asked, with a curious sinking of the heart.
"Got right into the tent," he went on, speaking passionately but very
low, "and woke my wife by scrambling all over her. Then she realised
that Joan was struggling beside her. And, by God! the beast had torn her
arm; scratched all down the arm she was, and bleeding."
"Joan injured?" I gasped.
"Merely scratched--this time," put in John Silence, speaking for the
first time; "suffering more from shock and fright than actual wounds."
"Isn't it a mercy the doctor was here?" said Mrs. Maloney, looking as if
she would never know calmness again. "I think we should both have been
killed."
"It has been a most merciful escape," Maloney said, his pulpit voice
struggling with his emotion. "But, of course, we cannot risk another--we
must strike Camp and get away at once--"
"Only poor Mr. Sangree must not know what has happened. He is so
attached to Joan and would be so terribly upset," added the Bo'sun's
Mate distractedly, looking all about in her terror.
"It is perhaps advisable that Mr. Sangree should not know what has
occurred," Dr. Silence said with quiet authority, "but I think, for the
safety of all concerned, it will be better not to leave the island just
now." He spoke with great decision and Maloney looked up and followed
his words closely.
"If you will agree to stay here a few days longer, I have no doubt we
can put an end to the attentions of your strange visitor, and
incidentally have the opportunity of observing a most singular and
interesting phenomenon--"
"What!" gasped Mrs. Maloney, "a phenomenon?--you mean that you know what
it is?"
"I am quite certain I know what it is," he replied very low, for we
heard the footsteps of Sangree approaching, "though I am not so certain
yet as to the best means of dealing with it. But in any case it is not
wise to leave precipitately--"
"Oh, Timothy, does he think it's a devil--?" cried the Bo'sun's Mate in
a voice that even the Canadian must have heard.
"In my opinion," continued John Silence, looking across at me and the
clergyman, "it is a case of modern lycanthropy with other complications
that may--" He left the sentence unfinished, for Mrs. Maloney got up
with a jump and fled to her tent fearful she might hear a worse thing,
and at that moment Sangree turned the corner of the stockade and came
into view.
"There are footmarks all round the mouth of my tent," he said with
excitement. "The animal has been here again in the night. Dr. Silence,
you really must come and see them for yourself. They're as plain on the
moss as tracks in snow."
But later in the day, while Sangree went off in the canoe to fish the
pools near the larger islands, and Joan still lay, bandaged and resting,
in her tent, Dr. Silence called me and the tutor and proposed a walk to
the granite slabs at the far end. Mrs. Maloney sat on a stump near her
daughter, and busied herself energetically with alternate nursing and
painting.
"We'll leave you in charge," the doctor said with a smile that was meant
to be encouraging, "and when you want us for lunch, or anything, the
megaphone will always bring us back in time."
For, though the very air was charged with strange emotions, every one
talked quietly and naturally as with a definite desire to counteract
unnecessary excitement.
"I'll keep watch," said the plucky Bo'sun's Mate, "and meanwhile I find
comfort in my work." She was busy with the sketch she had begun on the
day after our arrival. "For even a tree," she added proudly, pointing to
her little easel, "is a symbol of the divine, and the thought makes me
feel safer." We glanced for a moment at a daub which was more like the
symptom of a disease than a symbol of the divine--and then took the path
round the lagoon.
At the far end we made a little fire and lay round it in the shadow of a
big boulder. Maloney stopped his humming suddenly and turned to his
companion.
"And what do you make of it all?" he asked abruptly.
"In the first place," replied John Silence, making himself comfortable
against the rock, "it is of human origin, this animal; it is undoubted
lycanthropy."
His words had the effect precisely of a bombshell. Maloney listened as
though he had been struck.
"You puzzle me utterly," he said, sitting up closer and staring at him.
"Perhaps," replied the other, "but if you'll listen to me for a few
moments you may be less puzzled at the end--or more. It depends how much
you know. Let me go further and say that you have underestimated, or
miscalculated, the effect of this primitive wild life upon all of you."
"In what way?" asked the clergyman, bristling a trifle.
"It is strong medicine for any town-dweller, and for some of you it has
been too strong. One of you has gone wild." He uttered these last words
with great emphasis.
"Gone savage," he added, looking from one to the other.
Neither of us found anything to reply.
"To say that the brute has awakened in a man is not a mere metaphor
always," he went on presently.
"Of course not!"
"But, in the sense I mean, may have a very literal and terrible
significance," pursued Dr. Silence. "Ancient instincts that no one
dreamed of, least of all their possessor, may leap forth--"
"Atavism can hardly explain a roaming animal with teeth and claws and
sanguinary instincts," interrupted Maloney with impatience.
"The term is of your own choice," continued the doctor equably, "not
mine, and it is a good example of a word that indicates a result while
it conceals the process; but the explanation of this beast that haunts
your island and attacks your daughter is of far deeper significance than
mere atavistic tendencies, or throwing back to animal origin, which I
suppose is the thought in your mind."
"You spoke just now of lycanthropy," said Maloney, looking bewildered
and anxious to keep to plain facts evidently; "I think I have come
across the word, but really--really--it can have no actual significance
to-day, can it? These superstitions of mediaeval times can hardly--"
He looked round at me with his jolly red face, and the expression of
astonishment and dismay on it would have made me shout with laughter at
any other time. Laughter, however, was never farther from my mind than
at this moment when I listened to Dr. Silence as he carefully suggested
to the clergyman the very explanation that had gradually been forcing
itself upon my own mind.
"However mediaeval ideas may have exaggerated the idea is not of much
importance to us now," he said quietly, "when we are face to face with a
modern example of what, I take it, has always been a profound fact. For
the moment let us leave the name of any one in particular out of the
matter and consider certain possibilities."
We all agreed with that at any rate. There was no need to speak of
Sangree, or of any one else, until we knew a little more.
"The fundamental fact in this most curious case," he went on, "is that
the 'Double' of a man--"
"You mean the astral body? I've heard of that, of course," broke in
Maloney with a snort of triumph.
"No doubt," said the other, smiling, "no doubt you have;--that this
Double, or fluidic body of a man, as I was saying, has the power under
certain conditions of projecting itself and becoming visible to others.
Certain training will accomplish this, and certain drugs likewise;
illnesses, too, that ravage the body may produce temporarily the result
that death produces permanently, and let loose this counterpart of a
human being and render it visible to the sight of others.
"Every one, of course, knows this more or less to-day; but it is not so
generally known, and probably believed by none who have not witnessed
it, that this fluidic body can, under certain conditions, assume other
forms than human, and that such other forms may be determined by the
dominating thought and wish of the owner. For this Double, or astral
body as you call it, is really the seat of the passions, emotions and
desires in the psychical economy. It is the Passion Body; and, in
projecting itself, it can often assume a form that gives expression to
the overmastering desire that moulds it; for it is composed of such
tenuous matter that it lends itself readily to the moulding by thought
and wish."
"I follow you perfectly," said Maloney, looking as if he would much
rather be chopping firewood elsewhere and singing.
"And there are some persons so constituted," the doctor went on with
increasing seriousness, "that the fluid body in them is but loosely
associated with the physical, persons of poor health as a rule, yet
often of strong desires and passions; and in these persons it is easy
for the Double to dissociate itself during deep sleep from their system,
and, driven forth by some consuming desire, to assume an animal form and
seek the fulfilment of that desire."
There, in broad daylight, I saw Maloney deliberately creep closer to the
fire and heap the wood on. We gathered in to the heat, and to each
other, and listened to Dr. Silence's voice as it mingled with the swish
and whirr of the wind about us, and the falling of the little waves.
"For instance, to take a concrete example," he resumed; "suppose some
young man, with the delicate constitution I have spoken of, forms an
overpowering attachment to a young woman, yet perceives that it is not
welcomed, and is man enough to repress its outward manifestations. In
such a case, supposing his Double be easily projected, the very
repression of his love in the daytime would add to the intense force of
his desire when released in deep sleep from the control of his will,
and his fluidic body might issue forth in monstrous or animal shape and
become actually visible to others. And, if his devotion were dog-like in
its fidelity, yet concealing the fires of a fierce passion beneath, it
might well assume the form of a creature that seemed to be half dog,
half wolf--"
"A werewolf, you mean?" cried Maloney, pale to the lips as he listened.
John Silence held up a restraining hand. "A werewolf," he said, "is a
true psychical fact of profound significance, however absurdly it may
have been exaggerated by the imaginations of a superstitious peasantry
in the days of unenlightenment, for a werewolf is nothing but the
savage, and possibly sanguinary, instincts of a passionate man scouring
the world in his fluidic body, his passion body, his body of desire. As
in the case at hand, he may not know it--"
"It is not necessarily deliberate, then?" Maloney put in quickly, with
relief.
"--It is hardly ever deliberate. It is the desires released in sleep
from the control of the will finding a vent. In all savage races it has
been recognised and dreaded, this phenomenon styled 'Wehr Wolf,' but
to-day it is rare. And it is becoming rarer still, for the world grows
tame and civilised, emotions have become refined, desires lukewarm, and
few men have savagery enough left in them to generate impulses of such
intense force, and certainly not to project them in animal form."
"By Gad!" exclaimed the clergyman breathlessly, and with increasing
excitement, "then I feel I must tell you--what has been given to me in
confidence--that Sangree has in him an admixture of savage blood--of Red
Indian ancestry--"
"Let us stick to our supposition of a man as described," the doctor
stopped him calmly, "and let us imagine that he has in him this
admixture of savage blood; and further, that he is wholly unaware of his
dreadful physical and psychical infirmity; and that he suddenly finds
himself leading the primitive life together with the object of his
desires; with the result that the strain of the untamed wild-man in his
blood--"
"Red Indian, for instance," from Maloney.
"Red Indian, perfectly," agreed the doctor; "the result, I say, that
this savage strain in him is awakened and leaps into passionate life.
What then?"
He looked hard at Timothy Maloney, and the clergyman looked hard at him.
"The wild life such as you lead here on this island, for instance,
might quickly awaken his savage instincts--his buried instincts--and
with profoundly disquieting results."
"You mean his Subtle Body, as you call it, might issue forth
automatically in deep sleep and seek the object of its desire?" I said,
coming to Maloney's aid, who was finding it more and more difficult to
get words.
"Precisely;--yet the desire of the man remaining utterly unmalefic--pure
and wholesome in every sense--"
"Ah!" I heard the clergyman gasp.
"The lover's desire for union run wild, run savage, tearing its way out
in primitive, untamed fashion, I mean," continued the doctor, striving
to make himself clear to a mind bounded by conventional thought and
knowledge; "for the desire to possess, remember, may easily become
importunate, and, embodied in this animal form of the Subtle Body which
acts as its vehicle, may go forth to tear in pieces all that obstructs,
to reach to the very heart of the loved object and seize it. _Au fond_,
it is nothing more than the aspiration for union, as I said--the
splendid and perfectly clean desire to absorb utterly into itself--"
He paused a moment and looked into Maloney's eyes.
"To bathe in the very heart's blood of the one desired," he added with
grave emphasis.
The fire spurted and crackled and made me start, but Maloney found
relief in a genuine shudder, and I saw him turn his head and look about
him from the sea to the trees. The wind dropped just at that moment and
the doctor's words rang sharply through the stillness.
"Then it might even kill?" stammered the clergyman presently in a hushed
voice, and with a little forced laugh by way of protest that sounded
quite ghastly.
"In the last resort it might kill," repeated Dr. Silence. Then, after
another pause, during which he was clearly debating how much or how
little it was wise to give to his audience, he continued: "And if the
Double does not succeed in getting back to its physical body, that
physical body would wake an imbecile--an idiot--or perhaps never wake at
all."
Maloney sat up and found his tongue.
"You mean that if this fluid animal thing, or whatever it is, should be
prevented getting back, the man might never wake again?" he asked, with
shaking voice.
"He might be dead," replied the other calmly. The tremor of a positive
sensation shivered in the air about us.
"Then isn't that the best way to cure the fool--the brute--?" thundered
the clergyman, half rising to his feet.
"Certainly it would be an easy and undiscoverable form of murder," was
the stern reply, spoken as calmly as though it were a remark about the
weather.
Maloney collapsed visibly, and I gathered the wood over the fire and
coaxed up a blaze.
"The greater part of the man's life--of his vital forces--goes out with
this Double," Dr. Silence resumed, after a moment's consideration, "and
a considerable portion of the actual material of his physical body. So
the physical body that remains behind is depleted, not only of force,
but of matter. You would see it small, shrunken, dropped together, just
like the body of a materialising medium at a seance. Moreover, any mark
or injury inflicted upon this Double will be found exactly reproduced by
the phenomenon of repercussion upon the shrunken physical body lying in
its trance--"
"An injury inflicted upon the one you say would be reproduced also on
the other?" repeated Maloney, his excitement growing again.
"Undoubtedly," replied the other quietly; "for there exists all the time
a continuous connection between the physical body and the Double--a
connection of matter, though of exceedingly attenuated, possibly of
etheric, matter. The wound _travels_, so to speak, from one to the
other, and if this connection were broken the result would be death."
"Death," repeated Maloney to himself, "death!" He looked anxiously at
our faces, his thoughts evidently beginning to clear.
"And this solidity?" he asked presently, after a general pause; "this
tearing of tents and flesh; this howling, and the marks of paws? You
mean that the Double--?"
"Has sufficient material drawn from the depleted body to produce
physical results? Certainly!" the doctor took him up. "Although to
explain at this moment such problems as the passage of matter through
matter would be as difficult as to explain how the thought of a mother
can actually break the bones of the child unborn."
Dr. Silence pointed out to sea, and Maloney, looking wildly about him,
turned with a violent start. I saw a canoe, with Sangree in the
stern-seat, slowly coming into view round the farther point. His hat was
off, and his tanned face for the first time appeared to me--to us all, I
think--as though it were the face of some one else. He looked like a
wild man. Then he stood up in the canoe to make a cast with the rod, and
he looked for all the world like an Indian. I recalled the expression of
his face as I had seen it once or twice, notably on that occasion of the
evening prayer, and an involuntary shudder ran down my spine.
At that very instant he turned and saw us where we lay, and his face
broke into a smile, so that his teeth showed white in the sun. He
looked in his element, and exceedingly attractive. He called out
something about his fish, and soon after passed out of sight into the
lagoon.
For a time none of us said a word.
"And the cure?" ventured Maloney at length.
"Is not to quench this savage force," replied Dr. Silence, "but to steer
it better, and to provide other outlets. This is the solution of all
these problems of accumulated force, for this force is the raw material
of usefulness, and should be increased and cherished, not by separating
it from the body by death, but by raising it to higher channels. The
best and quickest cure of all," he went on, speaking very gently and
with a hand upon the clergyman's arm, "is to lead it towards its object,
provided that object is not unalterably hostile--to let it find rest
where--"
He stopped abruptly, and the eyes of the two men met in a single glance
of comprehension.
"Joan?" Maloney exclaimed, under his breath.
"Joan!" replied John Silence.
* * * * *
We all went to bed early. The day had been unusually warm, and after
sunset a curious hush descended on the island. Nothing was audible but
that faint, ghostly singing which is inseparable from a pinewood even on
the stillest day--a low, searching sound, as though the wind had hair
and trailed it o'er the world.
With the sudden cooling of the atmosphere a sea fog began to form. It
appeared in isolated patches over the water, and then these patches slid
together and a white wall advanced upon us. Not a breath of air stirred;
the firs stood like flat metal outlines; the sea became as oil. The
whole scene lay as though held motionless by some huge weight in the
air; and the flames from our fire--the largest we had ever made--rose
upwards, straight as a church steeple.
As I followed the rest of our party tent-wards, having kicked the embers
of the fire into safety, the advance guard of the fog was creeping
slowly among the trees, like white arms feeling their way. Mingled with
the smoke was the odour of moss and soil and bark, and the peculiar
flavour of the Baltic, half salt, half brackish, like the smell of an
estuary at low water.
It is difficult to say why it seemed to me that this deep stillness
masked an intense activity; perhaps in every mood lies the suggestion of
its opposite, so that I became aware of the contrast of furious energy,
for it was like moving through the deep pause before a thunderstorm, and
I trod gently lest by breaking a twig or moving a stone I might set the
whole scene into some sort of tumultuous movement. Actually, no doubt,
it was nothing more than a result of overstrung nerves.
There was no more question of undressing and going to bed than there was
of undressing and going to bathe. Some sense in me was alert and
expectant. I sat in my tent and waited. And at the end of half an hour
or so my waiting was justified, for the canvas suddenly shivered, and
some one tripped over the ropes that held it to the earth. John Silence
came in.
The effect of his quiet entry was singular and prophetic: it was just as
though the energy lying behind all this stillness had pressed forward to
the edge of action. This, no doubt, was merely the quickening of my own
mind, and had no other justification; for the presence of John Silence
always suggested the near possibility of vigorous action, and as a
matter of fact, he came in with nothing more than a nod and a
significant gesture.
He sat down on a corner of my ground-sheet, and I pushed the blanket
over so that he could cover his legs. He drew the flap of the tent after
him and settled down, but hardly had he done so when the canvas shook a
second time, and in blundered Maloney.
"Sitting in the dark?" he said self-consciously, pushing his head
inside, and hanging up his lantern on the ridge-pole nail. "I just
looked in for a smoke. I suppose--"
He glanced round, caught the eye of Dr. Silence, and stopped. He put his
pipe back into his pocket and began to hum softly--that underbreath
humming of a nondescript melody I knew so well and had come to hate.
Dr. Silence leaned forward, opened the lantern and blew the light out.
"Speak low," he said, "and don't strike matches. Listen for sounds and
movements about the Camp, and be ready to follow me at a moment's
notice." There was light enough to distinguish our faces easily, and I
saw Maloney glance again hurriedly at both of us.
"Is the Camp asleep?" the doctor asked presently, whispering.
"Sangree is," replied the clergyman, in a voice equally low. "I can't
answer for the women; I think they're sitting up."
"That's for the best." And then he added: "I wish the fog would thin a
bit and let the moon through; later--we may want it."
"It is lifting now, I think," Maloney whispered back. "It's over the
tops of the trees already."
I cannot say what it was in this commonplace exchange of remarks that
thrilled. Probably Maloney's swift acquiescence in the doctor's mood had
something to do with it; for his quick obedience certainly impressed me
a good deal. But, even without that slight evidence, it was clear that
each recognised the gravity of the occasion, and understood that sleep
was impossible and sentry duty was the order of the night.
"Report to me," repeated John Silence once again, "the least sound, and
do nothing precipitately."
He shifted across to the mouth of the tent and raised the flap,
fastening it against the pole so that he could see out. Maloney stopped
humming and began to force the breath through his teeth with a kind of
faint hissing, treating us to a medley of church hymns and popular songs
of the day.
Then the tent trembled as though some one had touched it.
"That's the wind rising," whispered the clergyman, and pulled the flap
open as far as it would go. A waft of cold damp air entered and made us
shiver, and with it came a sound of the sea as the first wave washed its
way softly along the shores.
"It's got round to the north," he added, and following his voice came a
long-drawn whisper that rose from the whole island as the trees sent
forth a sighing response. "The fog'll move a bit now. I can make out a
lane across the sea already."
"Hush!" said Dr. Silence, for Maloney's voice had risen above a whisper,
and we settled down again to another long period of watching and
waiting, broken only by the occasional rubbing of shoulders against the
canvas as we shifted our positions, and the increasing noise of waves on
the outer coast-line of the island. And over all whirred the murmur of
wind sweeping the tops of the trees like a great harp, and the faint
tapping on the tent as drops fell from the branches with a sharp pinging
sound.
We had sat for something over an hour in this way, and Maloney and I
were finding it increasingly hard to keep awake, when suddenly Dr.
Silence rose to his feet and peered out. The next minute he was gone.
Relieved of the dominating presence, the clergyman thrust his face close
into mine. "I don't much care for this waiting game," he whispered, "but
Silence wouldn't hear of my sitting up with the others; he said it would
prevent anything happening if I did."
"He knows," I answered shortly.
"No doubt in the world about that," he whispered back; "it's this
'Double' business, as he calls it, or else it's obsession as the Bible
describes it. But it's bad, whichever it is, and I've got my Winchester
outside ready cocked, and I brought this too." He shoved a pocket Bible
under my nose. At one time in his life it had been his inseparable
companion.
"One's useless and the other's dangerous," I replied under my breath,
conscious of a keen desire to laugh, and leaving him to choose. "Safety
lies in following our leader--"
"I'm not thinking of myself," he interrupted sharply; "only, if anything
happens to Joan to-night I'm going to shoot first--and pray afterwards!"
Maloney put the book back into his hip-pocket, and peered out of the
doorway. "What is he up to now, in the devil's name, I wonder!" he
added; "going round Sangree's tent and making gestures. How weird he
looks disappearing in and out of the fog."
"Just trust him and wait," I said quickly, for the doctor was already on
his way back. "Remember, he has the knowledge, and knows what he's
about. I've been with him through worse cases than this."
Maloney moved back as Dr. Silence darkened the doorway and stooped to
enter.
"His sleep is very deep," he whispered, seating himself by the door
again. "He's in a cataleptic condition, and the Double may be released
any minute now. But I've taken steps to imprison it in the tent, and it
can't get out till I permit it. Be on the watch for signs of movement."
Then he looked hard at Maloney. "But no violence, or shooting, remember,
Mr. Maloney, unless you want a murder on your hands. Anything done to
the Double acts by repercussion upon the physical body. You had better
take out the cartridges at once."
His voice was stern. The clergyman went out, and I heard him emptying
the magazine of his rifle. When he returned he sat nearer the door than
before, and from that moment until we left the tent he never once took
his eyes from the figure of Dr. Silence, silhouetted there against sky
and canvas.
And, meanwhile, the wind came steadily over the sea and opened the mist
into lanes and clearings, driving it about like a living thing.
It must have been well after midnight when a low booming sound drew my
attention; but at first the sense of hearing was so strained that it was
impossible exactly to locate it, and I imagined it was the thunder of
big guns far out at sea carried to us by the rising wind. Then Maloney,
catching hold of my arm and leaning forward, somehow brought the true
relation, and I realised the next second that it was only a few feet
away.
"Sangree's tent," he exclaimed in a loud and startled whisper.
I craned my head round the corner, but at first the effect of the fog
was so confusing that every patch of white driving about before the wind
looked like a moving tent and it was some seconds before I discovered
the one patch that held steady. Then I saw that it was shaking all over,
and the sides, flapping as much as the tightness of the ropes allowed,
were the cause of the booming sound we had heard. Something alive was
tearing frantically about inside, banging against the stretched canvas
in a way that made me think of a great moth dashing against the walls
and ceiling of a room. The tent bulged and rocked.
"It's trying to get out, by Jupiter!" muttered the clergyman, rising to
his feet and turning to the side where the unloaded rifle lay. I sprang
up too, hardly knowing what purpose was in my mind, but anxious to be
prepared for anything. John Silence, however, was before us both, and
his figure slipped past and blocked the doorway of the tent. And there
was some quality in his voice next minute when he began to speak that
brought our minds instantly to a state of calm obedience.
"First--the women's tent," he said low, looking sharply at Maloney, "and
if I need your help, I'll call."
The clergyman needed no second bidding. He dived past me and was out in
a moment. He was labouring evidently under intense excitement. I watched
him picking his way silently over the slippery ground, giving the moving
tent a wide berth, and presently disappearing among the floating shapes
of fog.
Dr. Silence turned to me. "You heard those footsteps about half an hour
ago?" he asked significantly.
"I heard nothing."
"They were extraordinarily soft--almost the soundless tread of a wild
creature. But now, follow me closely," he added, "for we must waste no
time if I am to save this poor man from his affliction and lead his
werewolf Double to its rest. And, unless I am much mistaken"--he
peered at me through the darkness, whispering with the utmost
distinctness--"Joan and Sangree are absolutely made for one another. And
I think she knows it too--just as well as he does."
My head swam a little as I listened, but at the same time something
cleared in my brain and I saw that he was right. Yet it was all so weird
and incredible, so remote from the commonplace facts of life as
commonplace people know them; and more than once it flashed upon me that
the whole scene--people, words, tents, and all the rest of it--were
delusions created by the intense excitement of my own mind somehow, and
that suddenly the sea-fog would clear off and the world become normal
again.
The cold air from the sea stung our cheeks sharply as we left the close
atmosphere of the little crowded tent. The sighing of the trees, the
waves breaking below on the rocks, and the lines and patches of mist
driving about us seemed to create the momentary illusion that the whole
island had broken loose and was floating out to sea like a mighty raft.
The doctor moved just ahead of me, quickly and silently; he was making
straight for the Canadian's tent where the sides still boomed and shook
as the creature of sinister life raced and tore about impatiently
within. A little distance from the door he paused and held up a hand to
stop me. We were, perhaps, a dozen feet away.
"Before I release it, you shall see for yourself," he said, "that the
reality of the werewolf is beyond all question. The matter of which it
is composed is, of course, exceedingly attenuated, but you are partially
clairvoyant--and even if it is not dense enough for normal sight you
will see something."
He added a little more I could not catch. The fact was that the
curiously strong vibrating atmosphere surrounding his person somewhat
confused my senses. It was the result, of course, of his intense
concentration of mind and forces, and pervaded the entire Camp and all
the persons in it. And as I watched the canvas shake and heard it boom
and flap I heartily welcomed it. For it was also protective.
At the back of Sangree's tent stood a thin group of pine trees, but in
front and at the sides the ground was comparatively clear. The flap was
wide open and any ordinary animal would have been out and away without
the least trouble. Dr. Silence led me up to within a few feet, evidently
careful not to advance beyond a certain limit, and then stooped down and
signalled to me to do the same. And looking over his shoulder I saw the
interior lit faintly by the spectral light reflected from the fog, and
the dim blot upon the balsam boughs and blankets signifying Sangree;
while over him, and round him, and up and down him, flew the dark mass
of "something" on four legs, with pointed muzzle and sharp ears plainly
visible against the tent sides, and the occasional gleam of fiery eyes
and white fangs.
I held my breath and kept utterly still, inwardly and outwardly, for
fear, I suppose, that the creature would become conscious of my
presence; but the distress I felt went far deeper than the mere sense of
personal safety, or the fact of watching something so incredibly active
and real. I became keenly aware of the dreadful psychic calamity it
involved. The realisation that Sangree lay confined in that narrow space
with this species of monstrous projection of himself--that he was
wrapped there in the cataleptic sleep, all unconscious that this thing
was masquerading with his own life and energies--added a distressing
touch of horror to the scene. In all the cases of John Silence--and they
were many and often terrible--no other psychic affliction has ever,
before or since, impressed me so convincingly with the pathetic
impermanence of the human personality, with its fluid nature, and with
the alarming possibilities of its transformations.
"Come," he whispered, after we had watched for some minutes the frantic
efforts to escape from the circle of thought and will that held it
prisoner, "come a little farther away while I release it."
We moved back a dozen yards or so. It was like a scene in some
impossible play, or in some ghastly and oppressive nightmare from which
I should presently awake to find the blankets all heaped up upon my
chest.
By some method undoubtedly mental, but which, in my confusion and
excitement, I failed to understand, the doctor accomplished his purpose,
and the next minute I heard him say sharply under his breath, "It's out!
Now watch!"
At this very moment a sudden gust from the sea blew aside the mist, so
that a lane opened to the sky, and the moon, ghastly and unnatural as
the effect of stage limelight, dropped down in a momentary gleam upon
the door of Sangree's tent, and I perceived that something had moved
forward from the interior darkness and stood clearly defined upon the
threshold. And, at the same moment, the tent ceased its shuddering and
held still.
There, in the doorway, stood an animal, with neck and muzzle thrust
forward, its head poking into the night, its whole body poised in that
attitude of intense rigidity that precedes the spring into freedom, the
running leap of attack. It seemed to be about the size of a calf, leaner
than a mastiff, yet more squat than a wolf, and I can swear that I saw
the fur ridged sharply upon its back. Then its upper lip slowly lifted,
and I saw the whiteness of its teeth.
Surely no human being ever stared as hard as I did in those next few
minutes. Yet, the harder I stared the clearer appeared the amazing and
monstrous apparition. For, after all, it was Sangree--and yet it was not
Sangree. It was the head and face of an animal, and yet it was the face
of Sangree: the face of a wild dog, a wolf, and yet his face. The eyes
were sharper, narrower, more fiery, yet they were his eyes--his eyes run
wild; the teeth were longer, whiter, more pointed--yet they were his
teeth, his teeth grown cruel; the expression was flaming, terrible,
exultant--yet it was his expression carried to the border of
savagery--his expression as I had already surprised it more than once,
only dominant now, fully released from human constraint, with the mad
yearning of a hungry and importunate soul. It was the soul of Sangree,
the long suppressed, deeply loving Sangree, expressed in its single and
intense desire--pure utterly and utterly wonderful.
Yet, at the same time, came the feeling that it was all an illusion. I
suddenly remembered the extraordinary changes the human face can undergo
in circular insanity, when it changes from melancholia to elation; and I
recalled the effect of hascheesh, which shows the human countenance in
the form of the bird or animal to which in character it most
approximates; and for a moment I attributed this mingling of Sangree's
face with a wolf to some kind of similar delusion of the senses. I was
mad, deluded, dreaming! The excitement of the day, and this dim light of
stars and bewildering mist combined to trick me. I had been amazingly
imposed upon by some false wizardry of the senses. It was all absurd and
fantastic; it would pass.
And then, sounding across this sea of mental confusion like a bell
through a fog, came the voice of John Silence bringing me back to a
consciousness of the reality of it all--
"Sangree--in his Double!"
And when I looked again more calmly, I plainly saw that it was indeed
the face of the Canadian, but his face turned animal, yet mingled with
the brute expression a curiously pathetic look like the soul seen
sometimes in the yearning eyes of a dog,--the face of an animal shot
with vivid streaks of the human.
The doctor called to him softly under his breath--
"Sangree! Sangree, you poor afflicted creature! Do you know me? Can you
understand what it is you're doing in your 'Body of Desire'?"
For the first time since its appearance the creature moved. Its ears
twitched and it shifted the weight of its body on to the hind legs.
Then, lifting its head and muzzle to the sky, it opened its long jaws
and gave vent to a dismal and prolonged howling.
But, when I heard that howling rise to heaven, the breath caught and
strangled in my throat and it seemed that my heart missed a beat; for,
though the sound was entirely animal, it was at the same time entirely
human. But, more than that, it was the cry I had so often heard in the
Western States of America where the Indians still fight and hunt and
struggle--it was the cry of the Redskin!
"The Indian blood!" whispered John Silence, when I caught his arm for
support; "the ancestral cry."
And that poignant, beseeching cry, that broken human voice, mingling
with the savage howl of the brute beast, pierced straight to my very
heart and touched there something that no music, no voice, passionate or
tender, of man, woman or child has ever stirred before or since for one
second into life. It echoed away among the fog and the trees and lost
itself somewhere out over the hidden sea. And some part of
myself--something that was far more than the mere act of intense
listening--went out with it, and for several minutes I lost
consciousness of my surroundings and felt utterly absorbed in the pain
of another stricken fellow-creature.
Again the voice of John Silence recalled me to myself.
"Hark!" he said aloud. "Hark!"
His tone galvanised me afresh. We stood listening side by side.
Far across the island, faintly sounding through the trees and brushwood,
came a similar, answering cry. Shrill, yet wonderfully musical, shaking
the heart with a singular wild sweetness that defies description, we
heard it rise and fall upon the night air.
"It's across the lagoon," Dr. Silence cried, but this time in full tones
that paid no tribute to caution. "It's Joan! She's answering him!"
Again the wonderful cry rose and fell, and that same instant the animal
lowered its head, and, muzzle to earth, set off on a swift easy canter
that took it off into the mist and out of our sight like a thing of wind
and vision.
The doctor made a quick dash to the door of Sangree's tent, and,
following close at his heels, I peered in and caught a momentary glimpse
of the small, shrunken body lying upon the branches but half covered by
the blankets--the cage from which most of the life, and not a little of
the actual corporeal substance, had escaped into that other form of life
and energy, the body of passion and desire.
By another of those swift, incalculable processes which at this stage of
my apprenticeship I failed often to grasp, Dr. Silence reclosed the
circle about the tent and body.
"Now it cannot return till I permit it," he said, and the next second
was off at full speed into the woods, with myself close behind him. I
had already had some experience of my companion's ability to run swiftly
through a dense wood, and I now had the further proof of his power
almost to see in the dark. For, once we left the open space about the
tents, the trees seemed to absorb all the remaining vestiges of light,
and I understood that special sensibility that is said to develop in the
blind--the sense of obstacles.
And twice as we ran we heard the sound of that dismal howling drawing
nearer and nearer to the answering faint cry from the point of the
island whither we were going.
Then, suddenly, the trees fell away, and we emerged, hot and breathless,
upon the rocky point where the granite slabs ran bare into the sea. It
was like passing into the clearness of open day. And there, sharply
defined against sea and sky, stood the figure of a human being. It was
Joan.
I at once saw that there was something about her appearance that was
singular and unusual, but it was only when we had moved quite close that
I recognised what caused it. For while the lips wore a smile that lit
the whole face with a happiness I had never seen there before, the eyes
themselves were fixed in a steady, sightless stare as though they were
lifeless and made of glass.
I made an impulsive forward movement, but Dr. Silence instantly dragged
me back.
"No," he cried, "don't wake her!"
"What do you mean?" I replied aloud, struggling in his grasp.
"She's asleep. It's somnambulistic. The shock might injure her
permanently."
I turned and peered closely into his face. He was absolutely calm. I
began to understand a little more, catching, I suppose, something of his
strong thinking.
"Walking in her sleep, you mean?"
He nodded. "She's on her way to meet him. From the very beginning he
must have drawn her--irresistibly."
"But the torn tent and the wounded flesh?"
"When she did not sleep deep enough to enter the somnambulistic trance
he missed her--he went instinctively and in all innocence to seek her
out--with the result, of course, that she woke and was terrified--"
"Then in their heart of hearts they love?" I asked finally.
John Silence smiled his inscrutable smile. "Profoundly," he answered,
"and as simply as only primitive souls can love. If only they both come
to realise it in their normal waking states his Double will cease these
nocturnal excursions. He will be cured, and at rest."
The words had hardly left his lips when there was a sound of rustling
branches on our left, and the very next instant the dense brushwood
parted where it was darkest and out rushed the swift form of an animal
at full gallop. The noise of feet was scarcely audible, but in that
utter stillness I heard the heavy panting breath and caught the swish of
the low bushes against its sides. It went straight towards Joan--and as
it went the girl lifted her head and turned to meet it. And the same
instant a canoe that had been creeping silently and unobserved round the
inner shore of the lagoon, emerged from the shadows and defined itself
upon the water with a figure at the middle thwart. It was Maloney.
It was only afterwards I realised that we were invisible to him where we
stood against the dark background of trees; the figures of Joan and the
animal he saw plainly, but not Dr. Silence and myself standing just
beyond them. He stood up in the canoe and pointed with his right arm. I
saw something gleam in his hand.
"Stand aside, Joan girl, or you'll get hit," he shouted, his voice
ringing horribly through the deep stillness, and the same instant a
pistol-shot cracked out with a burst of flame and smoke, and the figure
of the animal, with one tremendous leap into the air, fell back in the
shadows and disappeared like a shape of night and fog. Instantly, then,
Joan opened her eyes, looked in a dazed fashion about her, and pressing
both hands against her heart, fell with a sharp cry into my arms that
were just in time to catch her.
And an answering cry sounded across the lagoon--thin, wailing, piteous.
It came from Sangree's tent.
"Fool!" cried Dr. Silence, "you've wounded him!" and before we could
move or realise quite what it meant, he was in the canoe and half-way
across the lagoon.
Some kind of similar abuse came in a torrent from my lips, too--though I
cannot remember the actual words--as I cursed the man for his
disobedience and tried to make the girl comfortable on the ground. But
the clergyman was more practical. He was spreading his coat over her and
dashing water on her face.
"It's not Joan I've killed at any rate," I heard him mutter as she
turned and opened her eyes and smiled faintly up in his face. "I swear
the bullet went straight."
Joan stared at him; she was still dazed and bewildered, and still
imagined herself with the companion of her trance. The strange lucidity
of the somnambulist still hung over her brain and mind, though outwardly
she appeared troubled and confused.
"Where has he gone to? He disappeared so suddenly, crying that he was
hurt," she asked, looking at her father as though she did not recognise
him. "And if they've done anything to him--they have done it to me
too--for he is more to me than--"
Her words grew vaguer and vaguer as she returned slowly to her normal
waking state, and now she stopped altogether, as though suddenly aware
that she had been surprised into telling secrets. But all the way back,
as we carried her carefully through the trees, the girl smiled and
murmured Sangree's name and asked if he was injured, until it finally
became clear to me that the wild soul of the one had called to the wild
soul of the other and in the secret depths of their beings the call had
been heard and understood. John Silence was right. In the abyss of her
heart, too deep at first for recognition, the girl loved him, and had
loved him from the very beginning. Once her normal waking consciousness
recognised the fact they would leap together like twin flames, and his
affliction would be at an end; his intense desire would be satisfied; he
would be cured.
And in Sangree's tent Dr. Silence and I sat up for the remainder of the
night--this wonderful and haunted night that had shown us such strange
glimpses of a new heaven and a new hell--for the Canadian tossed upon
his balsam boughs with high fever in his blood, and upon each cheek a
dark and curious contusion showed, throbbing with severe pain although
the skin was not broken and there was no outward and visible sign of
blood.
"Maloney shot straight, you see," whispered Dr. Silence to me after the
clergyman had gone to his tent, and had put Joan to sleep beside her
mother, who, by the way, had never once awakened. "The bullet must have
passed clean through the face, for both cheeks are stained. He'll wear
these marks all his life--smaller, but always there. They're the most
curious scars in the world, these scars transferred by repercussion from
an injured Double. They'll remain visible until just before his death,
and then with the withdrawal of the subtle body they will disappear
finally."
His words mingled in my dazed mind with the sighs of the troubled
sleeper and the crying of the wind about the tent. Nothing seemed to
paralyse my powers of realisation so much as these twin stains of
mysterious significance upon the face before me.
It was odd, too, how speedily and easily the Camp resigned itself again
to sleep and quietness, as though a stage curtain had suddenly dropped
down upon the action and concealed it; and nothing contributed so
vividly to the feeling that I had been a spectator of some kind of
visionary drama as the dramatic nature of the change in the girl's
attitude.
Yet, as a matter of fact, the change had not been so sudden and
revolutionary as appeared. Underneath, in those remoter regions of
consciousness where the emotions, unknown to their owners, do secretly
mature, and owe thence their abrupt revelation to some abrupt
psychological climax, there can be no doubt that Joan's love for the
Canadian had been growing steadily and irresistibly all the time. It had
now rushed to the surface so that she recognised it; that was all.
And it has always seemed to me that the presence of John Silence, so
potent, so quietly efficacious, produced an effect, if one may say so,
of a psychic forcing-house, and hastened incalculably the bringing
together of these two "wild" lovers. In that sudden awakening had
occurred the very psychological climax required to reveal the passionate
emotion accumulated below. The deeper knowledge had leaped across and
transferred itself to her ordinary consciousness, and in that shock the
collision of the personalities had shaken them to the depths and shown
her the truth beyond all possibility of doubt.
"He's sleeping quietly now," the doctor said, interrupting my
reflections. "If you will watch alone for a bit I'll go to Maloney's
tent and help him to arrange his thoughts." He smiled in anticipation of
that "arrangement." "He'll never quite understand how a wound on the
Double can transfer itself to the physical body, but at least I can
persuade him that the less he talks and 'explains' to-morrow, the sooner
the forces will run their natural course now to peace and quietness."
He went away softly, and with the removal of his presence Sangree,
sleeping heavily, turned over and groaned with the pain of his broken
head.
And it was in the still hour just before the dawn, when all the islands
were hushed, the wind and sea still dreaming, and the stars visible
through clearing mists, that a figure crept silently over the ridge and
reached the door of the tent where I dozed beside the sufferer, before I
was aware of its presence. The flap was cautiously lifted a few inches
and in looked--Joan.
That same instant Sangree woke and sat up on his bed of branches. He
recognised her before I could say a word, and uttered a low cry. It was
pain and joy mingled, and this time all human. And the girl too was no
longer walking in her sleep, but fully aware of what she was doing. I
was only just able to prevent him springing from his blankets.
"Joan, Joan!" he cried, and in a flash she answered him, "I'm here--I'm
with you always now," and had pushed past me into the tent and flung
herself upon his breast.
"I knew you would come to me in the end," I heard him whisper.
"It was all too big for me to understand at first," she murmured, "and
for a long time I was frightened--"
"But not now!" he cried louder; "you don't feel afraid now of--of
anything that's in me--"
"I fear nothing," she cried, "nothing, nothing!"
I led her outside again. She looked steadily into my face with eyes
shining and her whole being transformed. In some intuitive way,
surviving probably from the somnambulism, she knew or guessed as much as
I knew.
"You must talk to-morrow with John Silence," I said gently, leading her
towards her own tent. "He understands everything."
I left her at the door, and as I went back softly to take up my place of
sentry again with the Canadian, I saw the first streaks of dawn lighting
up the far rim of the sea behind the distant islands.
And, as though to emphasise the eternal closeness of comedy to tragedy,
two small details rose out of the scene and impressed me so vividly that
I remember them to this very day. For in the tent where I had just left
Joan, all aquiver with her new happiness, there rose plainly to my ears
the grotesque sounds of the Bo'sun's Mate heavily snoring, oblivious of
all things in heaven or hell; and from Maloney's tent, so still was the
night, where I looked across and saw the lantern's glow, there came to
me, through the trees, the monotonous rising and falling of a human
voice that was beyond question the sound of a man praying to his God.
CASE III: A VICTIM OF HIGHER SPACE
"There's a hextraordinary gentleman to see you, sir," said the new man.
"Why 'extraordinary'?" asked Dr. Silence, drawing the tips of his thin
fingers through his brown beard. His eyes twinkled pleasantly. "Why
'extraordinary,' Barker?" he repeated encouragingly, noticing the
perplexed expression in the man's eyes.
"He's so--so thin, sir. I could hardly see 'im at all--at first. He was
inside the house before I could ask the name," he added, remembering
strict orders.
"And who brought him here?"
"He come alone, sir, in a closed cab. He pushed by me before I could say
a word--making no noise not what I could hear. He seemed to move so soft
like--"
The man stopped short with obvious embarrassment, as though he had
already said enough to jeopardise his new situation, but trying hard to
show that he remembered the instructions and warnings he had received
with regard to the admission of strangers not properly accredited.
"And where is the gentleman now?" asked Dr. Silence, turning away to
conceal his amusement.
"I really couldn't exactly say, sir. I left him standing in the 'all--"
The doctor looked up sharply. "But why in the hall, Barker? Why not in
the waiting-room?" He fixed his piercing though kindly eyes on the man's
face. "Did he frighten you?" he asked quickly.
"I think he did, sir, if I may say so. I seemed to lose sight of him, as
it were--" The man stammered, evidently convinced by now that he had
earned his dismissal. "He come in so funny, just like a cold wind," he
added boldly, setting his heels at attention and looking his master full
in the face.
The doctor made an internal note of the man's halting description; he
was pleased that the slight signs of psychic intuition which had induced
him to engage Barker had not entirely failed at the first trial. Dr.
Silence sought for this qualification in all his assistants, from
secretary to serving man, and if it surrounded him with a somewhat
singular crew, the drawbacks were more than compensated for on the whole
by their occasional flashes of insight.
"So the gentleman made you feel queer, did he?"
"That was it, I think, sir," repeated the man stolidly.
"And he brings no kind of introduction to me--no letter or anything?"
asked the doctor, with feigned surprise, as though he knew what was
coming.
The man fumbled, both in mind and pockets, and finally produced an
envelope.
"I beg pardon, sir," he said, greatly flustered; "the gentleman handed
me this for you."
It was a note from a discerning friend, who had never yet sent him a
case that was not vitally interesting from one point or another.
"Please see the bearer of this note," the brief message ran, "though I
doubt if even you can do much to help him."
John Silence paused a moment, so as to gather from the mind of the
writer all that lay behind the brief words of the letter. Then he looked
up at his servant with a graver expression than he had yet worn.
"Go back and find this gentleman," he said, "and show him into the green
study. Do not reply to his question, or speak more than actually
necessary; but think kind, helpful, sympathetic thoughts as strongly as
you can, Barker. You remember what I told you about the importance of
_thinking_, when I engaged you. Put curiosity out of your mind, and
think gently, sympathetically, affectionately, if you can."
He smiled, and Barker, who had recovered his composure in the doctor's
presence, bowed silently and went out.
There were two different reception-rooms in Dr. Silence's house. One
(intended for persons who imagined they needed spiritual assistance when
really they were only candidates for the asylum) had padded walls, and
was well supplied with various concealed contrivances by means of which
sudden violence could be instantly met and overcome. It was, however,
rarely used. The other, intended for the reception of genuine cases of
spiritual distress and out-of-the-way afflictions of a psychic nature,
was entirely draped and furnished in a soothing deep green, calculated
to induce calmness and repose of mind. And this room was the one in
which Dr. Silence interviewed the majority of his "queer" cases, and the
one into which he had directed Barker to show his present caller.
To begin with, the arm-chair in which the patient was always directed to
sit, was nailed to the floor, since its immovability tended to impart
this same excellent characteristic to the occupant. Patients invariably
grew excited when talking about themselves, and their excitement tended
to confuse their thoughts and to exaggerate their language. The
inflexibility of the chair helped to counteract this. After repeated
endeavours to drag it forward, or push it back, they ended by resigning
themselves to sitting quietly. And with the futility of fidgeting there
followed a calmer state of mind.
Upon the floor, and at intervals in the wall immediately behind, were
certain tiny green buttons, practically unnoticeable, which on being
pressed permitted a soothing and persuasive narcotic to rise invisibly
about the occupant of the chair. The effect upon the excitable patient
was rapid, admirable, and harmless. The green study was further provided
with a secret spy-hole; for John Silence liked when possible to observe
his patient's face before it had assumed that mask the features of the
human countenance invariably wear in the presence of another person. A
man sitting alone wears a psychic expression; and this expression is the
man himself. It disappears the moment another person joins him. And Dr.
Silence often learned more from a few moments' secret observation of a
face than from hours of conversation with its owner afterwards.
A very light, almost a dancing, step followed Barker's heavy tread
towards the green room, and a moment afterwards the man came in and
announced that the gentleman was waiting. He was still pale and his
manner nervous.
"Never mind, Barker" the doctor said kindly; "if you were not psychic
the man would have had no effect upon you at all. You only need training
and development. And when you have learned to interpret these feelings
and sensations better, you will feel no fear, but only a great
sympathy."
"Yes, sir; thank you, sir!" And Barker bowed and made his escape, while
Dr. Silence, an amused smile lurking about the corners of his mouth,
made his way noiselessly down the passage and put his eye to the
spy-hole in the door of the green study.
This spy-hole was so placed that it commanded a view of almost the
entire room, and, looking through it, the doctor saw a hat, gloves, and
umbrella lying on a chair by the table, but searched at first in vain
for their owner.
The windows were both closed and a brisk fire burned in the grate. There
were various signs--signs intelligible at least to a keenly intuitive
soul--that the room was occupied, yet so far as human beings were
concerned, it was empty, utterly empty. No one sat in the chairs; no one
stood on the mat before the fire; there was no sign even that a patient
was anywhere close against the wall, examining the Bocklin
reproductions--as patients so often did when they thought they were
alone--and therefore rather difficult to see from the spy-hole.
Ordinarily speaking, there was no one in the room. It was undeniable.
Yet Dr. Silence was quite well aware that a human being _was_ in the
room. His psychic apparatus never failed in letting him know the
proximity of an incarnate or discarnate being. Even in the dark he could
tell that. And he now knew positively that his patient--the patient who
had alarmed Barker, and had then tripped down the corridor with that
dancing footstep--was somewhere concealed within the four walls
commanded by his spy-hole. He also realised--and this was most
unusual--that this individual whom he desired to watch knew that he was
being watched. And, further, that the stranger himself was also
watching! In fact, that it was he, the doctor, who was being
observed--and by an observer as keen and trained as himself.
An inkling of the true state of the case began to dawn upon him, and he
was on the verge of entering--indeed, his hand already touched the
door-knob--when his eye, still glued to the spy-hole, detected a slight
movement. Directly opposite, between him and the fireplace, something
stirred. He watched very attentively and made certain that he was not
mistaken. An object on the mantelpiece--it was a blue vase--disappeared
from view. It passed out of sight together with the portion of the
marble mantelpiece on which it rested. Next, that part of the fire and
grate and brass fender immediately below it vanished entirely, as though
a slice had been taken clean out of them.
Dr. Silence then understood that something between him and these objects
was slowly coming into being, something that concealed them and
obstructed his vision by inserting itself in the line of sight between
them and himself.
He quietly awaited further results before going in.
First he saw a thin perpendicular line tracing itself from just above
the height of the clock and continuing downwards till it reached the
woolly fire-mat. This line grew wider, broadened, grew solid. It was no
shadow; it was something substantial. It defined itself more and more.
Then suddenly, at the top of the line, and about on a level with the
face of the clock, he saw a round luminous disc gazing steadily at him.
It was a human eye, looking straight into his own, pressed there against
the spy-hole. And it was bright with intelligence. Dr. Silence held his
breath for a moment--and stared back at it.
Then, like some one moving out of deep shadow into light, he saw the
figure of a man come sliding sideways into view, a whitish face
following the eye, and the perpendicular line he had first observed
broadening out and developing into the complete figure of a human being.
It was the patient. He had apparently been standing there in front of
the fire all the time. A second eye had followed the first, and both of
them stared steadily at the spy-hole, sharply concentrated, yet with a
sly twinkle of humour and amusement that made it impossible for the
doctor to maintain his position any longer.
He opened the door and went in quickly. As he did so he noticed for the
first time the sound of a German band coming in gaily through the open
ventilators. In some intuitive, unaccountable fashion the music
connected itself with the patient he was about to interview. This sort
of prevision was not unfamiliar to him. It always explained itself
later.
The man, he saw, was of middle age and of very ordinary appearance; so
ordinary, in fact, that he was difficult to describe--his only
peculiarity being his extreme thinness. Pleasant--that is,
good--vibrations issued from his atmosphere and met Dr. Silence as he
advanced to greet him, yet vibrations alive with currents and discharges
betraying the perturbed and disordered condition of his mind and brain.
There was evidently something wholly out of the usual in the state of
his thoughts. Yet, though strange, it was not altogether distressing; it
was not the impression that the broken and violent atmosphere of the
insane produces upon the mind. Dr. Silence realised in a flash that here
was a case of absorbing interest that might require all his powers to
handle properly.
"I was watching you through my little peep-hole--as you saw," he began,
with a pleasant smile, advancing to shake hands. "I find it of the
greatest assistance sometimes--"
But the patient interrupted him at once. His voice was hurried and had
odd, shrill changes in it, breaking from high to low in unexpected
fashion. One moment it thundered, the next it almost squeaked.
"I understand without explanation," he broke in rapidly. "You get the
true note of a man in this way--when he thinks himself unobserved. I
quite agree. Only, in my case, I fear, you saw very little. My case, as
you of course grasp, Dr. Silence, is extremely peculiar, uncomfortably
peculiar. Indeed, unless Sir William had positively assured me--"
"My friend has sent you to me," the doctor interrupted gravely, with a
gentle note of authority, "and that is quite sufficient. Pray, be
seated, Mr.--"
"Mudge--Racine Mudge," returned the other.
"Take this comfortable one, Mr. Mudge," leading him to the fixed chair,
"and tell me your condition in your own way and at your own pace. My
whole day is at your service if you require it."
Mr. Mudge moved towards the chair in question and then hesitated.
"You will promise me not to use the narcotic buttons," he said, before
sitting down. "I do not need them. Also I ought to mention that anything
you think of vividly will reach my mind. That is apparently part of my
peculiar case." He sat down with a sigh and arranged his thin legs and
body into a position of comfort. Evidently he was very sensitive to the
thoughts of others, for the picture of the green buttons had only
entered the doctor's mind for a second, yet the other had instantly
snapped it up. Dr. Silence noticed, too, that Mr. Mudge held on tightly
with both hands to the arms of the chair.
"I'm rather glad the chair is nailed to the floor," he remarked, as he
settled himself more comfortably. "It suits me admirably. The fact
is--and this is my case in a nutshell--which is all that a doctor of
your marvellous development requires--the fact is, Dr. Silence, I am a
victim of Higher Space. That's what's the matter with me--Higher Space!"
The two looked at each other for a space in silence, the little patient
holding tightly to the arms of the chair which "suited him admirably,"
and looking up with staring eyes, his atmosphere positively trembling
with the waves of some unknown activity; while the doctor smiled kindly
and sympathetically, and put his whole person as far as possible into
the mental condition of the other.
"Higher Space," repeated Mr. Mudge, "that's what it is. Now, do you
think you can help me with _that_?"
There was a pause during which the men's eyes steadily searched down
below the surface of their respective personalities. Then Dr. Silence
spoke.
"I am quite sure I can help," he answered quietly; "sympathy must always
help, and suffering always owns my sympathy. I see you have suffered
cruelly. You must tell me all about your case, and when I hear the
gradual steps by which you reached this strange condition, I have no
doubt I can be of assistance to you."
He drew a chair up beside his interlocutor and laid a hand on his
shoulder for a moment. His whole being radiated kindness, intelligence,
desire to help.
"For instance," he went on, "I feel sure it was the result of no mere
chance that you became familiar with the terrors of what you term Higher
Space; for Higher Space is no mere external measurement. It is, of
course, a spiritual state, a spiritual condition, an inner development,
and one that we must recognise as abnormal, since it is beyond the reach
of the world at the present stage of evolution. Higher Space is a
mythical state."
"Oh!" cried the other, rubbing his birdlike hands with pleasure, "the
relief it is to be able to talk to some one who can understand! Of
course what you say is the utter truth. And you are right that no mere
chance led me to my present condition, but, on the other hand, prolonged
and deliberate study. Yet chance in a sense now governs it. I mean, my
entering the condition of Higher Space seems to depend upon the chance
of this and that circumstance. For instance, the mere sound of that
German band sent me off. Not that all music will do so, but certain
sounds, certain vibrations, at once key me up to the requisite pitch,
and off I go. Wagner's music always does it, and that band must have
been playing a stray bit of Wagner. But I'll come to all that later.
Only first, I must ask you to send away your man from the spy-hole."
John Silence looked up with a start, for Mr. Mudge's back was to the
door, and there was no mirror. He saw the brown eye of Barker glued to
the little circle of glass, and he crossed the room without a word and
snapped down the black shutter provided for the purpose, and then heard
Barker snuffle away along the passage.
"Now," continued the little man in the chair, "I can begin. You have
managed to put me completely at my ease, and I feel I may tell you my
whole case without shame or reserve. You will understand. But you must
be patient with me if I go into details that are already familiar to
you--details of Higher Space, I mean--and if I seem stupid when I have
to describe things that transcend the power of language and are really
therefore indescribable."
"My dear friend," put in the other calmly, "that goes without saying. To
know Higher Space is an experience that defies description, and one is
obliged to make use of more or less intelligible symbols. But, pray,
proceed. Your vivid thoughts will tell me more than your halting words."
An immense sigh of relief proceeded from the little figure half lost in
the depths of the chair. Such intelligent sympathy meeting him half-way
was a new experience to him, and it touched his heart at once. He leaned
back, relaxing his tight hold of the arms, and began in his thin,
scale-like voice.
"My mother was a Frenchwoman, and my father an Essex bargeman," he said
abruptly. "Hence my name--Racine and Mudge. My father died before I ever
saw him. My mother inherited money from her Bordeaux relations, and when
she died soon after, I was left alone with wealth and a strange freedom.
I had no guardian, trustees, sisters, brothers, or any connection in the
world to look after me. I grew up, therefore, utterly without education.
This much was to my advantage; I learned none of that deceitful rubbish
taught in schools, and so had nothing to unlearn when I awakened to my
true love--mathematics, higher mathematics and higher geometry. These,
however, I seemed to know instinctively. It was like the memory of what
I had deeply studied before; the principles were in my blood, and I
simply raced through the ordinary stages, and beyond, and then did the
same with geometry. Afterwards, when I read the books on these subjects,
I understood how swift and undeviating the knowledge had come back to
me. It was simply memory. It was simply _re-collecting_ the memories of
what I had known before in a previous existence and required no books to
teach me."
In his growing excitement, Mr. Mudge attempted to drag the chair forward
a little nearer to his listener, and then smiled faintly as he resigned
himself instantly again to its immovability, and plunged anew into the
recital of his singular "disease."
"The audacious speculations of Bolyai, the amazing theories of
Gauss--that through a point more than one line could be drawn parallel
to a given line; the possibility that the angles of a triangle are
together _greater_ than two right angles, if drawn upon immense
curvatures--the breathless intuitions of Beltrami and Lobatchewsky--all
these I hurried through, and emerged, panting but unsatisfied, upon the
verge of my--my new world, my Higher Space possibilities--in a word, my
disease!
"How I got there," he resumed after a brief pause, during which he
appeared to be listening intently for an approaching sound, "is more
than I can put intelligibly into words. I can only hope to leave your
mind with an intuitive comprehension of the possibility of what I say.
"Here, however, came a change. At this point I was no longer absorbing
the fruits of studies I had made before; it was the beginning of new
efforts to learn for the first time, and I had to go slowly and
laboriously through terrible work. Here I sought for the theories and
speculations of others. But books were few and far between, and with the
exception of one man--a 'dreamer,' the world called him--whose audacity
and piercing intuition amazed and delighted me beyond description, I
found no one to guide or help.
"You, of course, Dr. Silence, understand something of what I am driving
at with these stammering words, though you cannot perhaps yet guess what
depths of pain my new knowledge brought me to, nor why an acquaintance
with a new development of space should prove a source of misery and
terror."
Mr. Racine Mudge, remembering that the chair would not move, did the
next best thing he could in his desire to draw nearer to the attentive
man facing him, and sat forward upon the very edge of the cushions,
crossing his legs and gesticulating with both hands as though he saw
into this region of new space he was attempting to describe, and might
any moment tumble into it bodily from the edge of the chair and
disappear form view. John Silence, separated from him by three paces,
sat with his eyes fixed upon the thin white face opposite, noting
every word and every gesture with deep attention.
"This room we now sit in, Dr. Silence, has one side open to space--to
Higher Space. A closed box only _seems_ closed. There is a way in and
out of a soap bubble without breaking the skin."
"You tell me no new thing," the doctor interposed gently.
"Hence, if Higher Space exists and our world borders upon it and lies
partially in it, it follows necessarily that we see only portions of all
objects. We never see their true and complete shape. We see their three
measurements, but not their fourth. The new direction is concealed from
us, and when I hold this book and move my hand all round it I have not
really made a complete circuit. We only perceive those portions of any
object which exist in our three dimensions; the rest escapes us. But,
once we learn to see in Higher Space, objects will appear as they
actually are. Only they will thus be hardly recognisable!
"Now, you may begin to grasp something of what I am coming to."
"I am beginning to understand something of what you must have suffered,"
observed the doctor soothingly, "for I have made similar experiments
myself, and only stopped just in time--"
"You are the one man in all the world who can hear and understand, _and_
sympathise," exclaimed Mr. Mudge, grasping his hand and holding it
tightly while he spoke. The nailed chair prevented further excitability.
"Well," he resumed, after a moment's pause, "I procured the implements
and the coloured blocks for practical experiment, and I followed the
instructions carefully till I had arrived at a working conception of
four-dimensional space. The tessaract, the figure whose boundaries are
cubes, I knew by heart. That is to say, I knew it and saw it mentally,
for my eye, of course, could never take in a new measurement, or my
hands and feet handle it.
"So, at least, I thought," he added, making a wry face. "I had reached
the stage, you see, when I could imagine in a new dimension. I was able
to conceive the shape of that new figure which is intrinsically
different to all we know--the shape of the tessaract. I could perceive
in four dimensions. When, therefore, I looked at a cube I could see all
its sides at once. Its top was not foreshortened, nor its farther side
and base invisible. I saw the whole thing out flat, so to speak. And
this tessaract was bounded by cubes! Moreover, I also saw its
content--its insides."
"You were not yourself able to enter this new world," interrupted Dr.
Silence.
"Not then. I was only able to conceive intuitively what it was like and
how exactly it must look. Later, when I slipped in there and saw objects
in their entirety, unlimited by the paucity of our poor three
measurements, I very nearly lost my life. For, you see, space does not
stop at a single new dimension, a fourth. It extends in all possible new
ones, and we must conceive it as containing any number of new
dimensions. In other words, there is no space at all, but only a
spiritual condition. But, meanwhile, I had come to grasp the strange
fact that the objects in our normal world appear to us only partially."
Mr. Mudge moved farther forward till he was balanced dangerously on the
very edge of the chair. "From this starting point," he resumed, "I began
my studies and experiments, and continued them for years. I had money,
and I was without friends. I lived in solitude and experimented. My
intellect, of course, had little part in the work, for intellectually it
was all unthinkable. Never was the limitation of mere reason more
plainly demonstrated. It was mystically, intuitively, spiritually that I
began to advance. And what I learnt, and knew, and did is all impossible
to put into language, since it all describes experiences transcending
the experiences of men. It is only some of the results--what you would
call the symptoms of my disease--that I can give you, and even these
must often appear absurd contradictions and impossible paradoxes.
"I can only tell you, Dr. Silence"--his manner became exceedingly
impressive--"that I reached sometimes a point of view whence all the
great puzzle of the world became plain to me, and I understood what they
call in the Yoga books 'The Great Heresy of Separateness'; why all great
teachers have urged the necessity of man loving his neighbour as
himself; how men are all really one; and why the utter loss of self is
necessary to salvation and the discovery of the true life of the soul."
He paused a moment and drew breath.
"Your speculations have been my own long ago," the doctor said quietly.
"I fully realise the force of your words. Men are doubtless not separate
at all--in the sense they imagine--"
"All this about the very much Higher Space I only dimly, very dimly,
conceived, of course," the other went on, raising his voice again by
jerks; "but what did happen to me was the humbler accident of--the
simpler disaster--oh, dear, how shall I put it--?"
He stammered and showed visible signs of distress.
"It was simply this," he resumed with a sudden rush of words, "that,
accidentally, as the result of my years of experiment, I one day slipped
bodily into the next world, the world of four dimensions, yet without
knowing precisely how I got there, or how I could get back again. I
discovered, that is, that my ordinary three-dimensional body was but an
expression--a projection--of my higher four-dimensional body!
"Now you understand what I meant much earlier in our talk when I spoke
of chance. I cannot control my entrance or exit. Certain people, certain
human atmospheres, certain wandering forces, thoughts, desires even--the
radiations of certain combinations of colour, and above all, the
vibrations of certain kinds of music, will suddenly throw me into a
state of what I can only describe as an intense and terrific inner
vibration--and behold I am off! Off in the direction at right angles to
all our known directions! Off in the direction the cube takes when it
begins to trace the outlines of the new figure! Off into my breathless
and semi-divine Higher Space! Off, _inside myself_, into the world of
four dimensions!"
He gasped and dropped back into the depths of the immovable chair.
"And there," he whispered, his voice issuing from among the cushions,
"there I have to stay until these vibrations subside, or until they do
something which I cannot find words to describe properly or intelligibly
to you--and then, behold, I am back again. First, that is, I disappear.
Then I reappear."
"Just so," exclaimed Dr. Silence, "and that is why a few--"
"Why a few moments ago," interrupted Mr. Mudge, taking the words out of
his mouth, "you found me gone, and then saw me return. The music of that
wretched German band sent me off. Your intense thinking about me brought
me back--when the band had stopped its Wagner. I saw you approach the
peep-hole and I saw Barker's intention of doing so later. For me no
interiors are hidden. I see inside. When in that state the content of
your mind, as of your body, is open to me as the day. Oh, dear, oh,
dear, oh, dear!"
Mr. Mudge stopped and again mopped his brow. A light trembling ran over
the surface of his small body like wind over grass. He still held
tightly to the arms of the chair.
"At first," he presently resumed, "my new experiences were so vividly
interesting that I felt no alarm. There was no room for it. The alarm
came a little later."
"Then you actually penetrated far enough into that state to experience
yourself as a normal portion of it?" asked the doctor, leaning forward,
deeply interested.
Mr. Mudge nodded a perspiring face in reply.
"I did," he whispered, "undoubtedly I did. I am coming to all that. It
began first at night, when I realised that sleep brought no loss of
consciousness--"
"The spirit, of course, can never sleep. Only the body becomes
unconscious," interposed John Silence.
"Yes, we know that--theoretically. At night, of course, the spirit is
active elsewhere, and we have no memory of where and how, simply
because the brain stays behind and receives no record. But I found
that, while remaining conscious, I also retained memory. I had attained
to the state of continuous consciousness, for at night I regularly, with
the first approaches of drowsiness, entered _nolens volens_ the
four-dimensional world.
"For a time this happened regularly, and I could not control it; though
later I found a way to regulate it better. Apparently sleep is
unnecessary in the higher--the four-dimensional--body. Yes, perhaps. But
I should infinitely have preferred dull sleep to the knowledge. For,
unable to control my movements, I wandered to and fro, attracted, owing
to my partial development and premature arrival, to parts of this new
world that alarmed me more and more. It was the awful waste and drift of
a monstrous world, so utterly different to all we know and see that I
cannot even hint at the nature of the sights and objects and beings in
it. More than that, I cannot even remember them. I cannot now picture
them to myself even, but can recall only the _memory of the impression_
they made upon me, the horror and devastating terror of it all. To be in
several places at once, for instance--"
"Perfectly," interrupted John Silence, noticing the increase of the
other's excitement, "I understand exactly. But now, please, tell me a
little more of this alarm you experienced, and how it affected you."
"It's not the disappearing and reappearing _per se_ that I mind,"
continued Mr. Mudge, "so much as certain other things. It's seeing
people and objects in their weird entirety, in their true and complete
shapes, that is so distressing. It introduces me to a world of monsters.
Horses, dogs, cats, all of which I loved; people, trees, children; all
that I have considered beautiful in life--everything, from a human face
to a cathedral--appear to me in a different shape and aspect to all I
have known before. I cannot perhaps convince you why this should be
terrible, but I assure you that it is so. To hear the human voice
proceeding from this novel appearance which I scarcely recognise as a
human body is ghastly, simply ghastly. To see inside everything and
everybody is a form of insight peculiarly distressing. To be so confused
in geography as to find myself one moment at the North Pole, and the
next at Clapham Junction--or possibly at both places simultaneously--is
absurdly terrifying. Your imagination will readily furnish other details
without my multiplying my experiences now. But you have no idea what it
all means, and how I suffer."
Mr. Mudge paused in his panting account and lay back in his chair. He
still held tightly to the arms as though they could keep him in the
world of sanity and three measurements, and only now and again released
his left hand in order to mop his face. He looked very thin and white
and oddly unsubstantial, and he stared about him as though he saw into
this other space he had been talking about.
John Silence, too, felt warm. He had listened to every word and had made
many notes. The presence of this man had an exhilarating effect upon
him. It seemed as if Mr. Racine Mudge still carried about with him
something of that breathless Higher-Space condition he had been
describing. At any rate, Dr. Silence had himself advanced sufficiently
far along the legitimate paths of spiritual and psychic transformations
to realise that the visions of this extraordinary little person had a
basis of truth for their origin.
After a pause that prolonged itself into minutes, he crossed the room
and unlocked a drawer in a bookcase, taking out a small book with a red
cover. It had a lock to it, and he produced a key out of his pocket and
proceeded to open the covers. The bright eyes of Mr. Mudge never left
him for a single second.
"It almost seems a pity," he said at length, "to cure you, Mr. Mudge.
You are on the way to discovery of great things. Though you may lose
your life in the process--that is, your life here in the world of three
dimensions--you would lose thereby nothing of great value--you will
pardon my apparent rudeness, I know--and you might gain what is
infinitely greater. Your suffering, of course, lies in the fact that you
alternate between the two worlds and are never wholly in one or the
other. Also, I rather imagine, though I cannot be certain of this from
any personal experiments, that you have here and there penetrated even
into space of more than four dimensions, and have hence experienced the
terror you speak of."
The perspiring son of the Essex bargeman and the woman of Normandy bent
his head several times in assent, but uttered no word in reply.
"Some strange psychic predisposition, dating no doubt from one of your
former lives, has favoured the development of your 'disease'; and the
fact that you had no normal training at school or college, no leading by
the poor intellect into the culs-de-sac falsely called knowledge, has
further caused your exceedingly rapid movement along the lines of direct
inner experience. None of the knowledge you have foreshadowed has come
to you through the senses, of course."
Mr. Mudge, sitting in his immovable chair, began to tremble slightly. A
wind again seemed to pass over his surface and again to set it curiously
in motion like a field of grass.
"You are merely talking to gain time," he said hurriedly, in a shaking
voice. "This thinking aloud delays us. I see ahead what you are coming
to, only please be quick, for something is going to happen. A band is
again coming down the street, and if it plays--if it plays Wagner--I
shall be off in a twinkling."
"Precisely. I will be quick. I was leading up to the point of how to
effect your cure. The way is this: You must simply learn to _block the
entrances_."
"True, true, utterly true!" exclaimed the little man, dodging about
nervously in the depths of the chair. "But how, in the name of space, is
that to be done?"
"By concentration. They are all within you, these entrances, although
outer cases such as colour, music and other things lead you towards
them. These external things you cannot hope to destroy, but once the
entrances are blocked, they will lead you only to bricked walls and
closed channels. You will no longer be able to find the way."
"Quick, quick!" cried the bobbing figure in the chair. "How is this
concentration to be effected?"
"This little book," continued Dr. Silence calmly, "will explain to you
the way." He tapped the cover. "Let me now read out to you certain
simple instructions, composed, as I see you divine, entirely from my own
personal experiences in the same direction. Follow these instructions
and you will no longer enter the state of Higher Space. The entrances
will be blocked effectively."
Mr. Mudge sat bolt upright in his chair to listen, and John Silence
cleared his throat and began to read slowly in a very distinct voice.
But before he had uttered a dozen words, something happened. A sound of
street music entered the room through the open ventilators, for a band
had begun to play in the stable mews at the back of the house--the March
from _Tannhäuser_. Odd as it may seem that a German band should twice
within the space of an hour enter the same mews and play Wagner, it was
nevertheless the fact.
Mr. Racine Mudge heard it. He uttered a sharp, squeaking cry and twisted
his arms with nervous energy round the chair. A piteous look that was
not far from tears spread over his white face. Grey shadows followed
it--the grey of fear. He began to struggle convulsively.
"Hold me fast! Catch me! For God's sake, keep me here! I'm on the rush
already. Oh, it's frightful!" he cried in tones of anguish, his voice as
thin as a reed.
Dr. Silence made a plunge forward to seize him, but in a flash, before
he could cover the space between them, Mr. Racine Mudge, screaming and
struggling, seemed to shoot past him into invisibility. He disappeared
like an arrow from a bow propelled at infinite speed, and his voice no
longer sounded in the external air, but seemed in some curious way to
make itself heard somewhere within the depths of the doctor's own being.
It was almost like a faint singing cry in his head, like a voice of
dream, a voice of vision and unreality.
"Alcohol, alcohol!" it cried, "give me alcohol! It's the quickest way.
Alcohol, before I'm out of reach!"
The doctor, accustomed to rapid decisions and even more rapid action,
remembered that a brandy flask stood upon the mantelpiece, and in less
than a second he had seized it and was holding it out towards the space
above the chair recently occupied by the visible Mudge. Then, before his
very eyes, and long ere he could unscrew the metal stopper, he saw the
contents of the closed glass phial sink and lessen as though some one
were drinking violently and greedily of the liquor within.
"Thanks! Enough! It deadens the vibrations!" cried the faint voice in
his interior, as he withdrew the flask and set it back upon the
mantelpiece. He understood that in Mudge's present condition one side of
the flask was open to space and he could drink without removing the
stopper. He could hardly have had a more interesting proof of what he
had been hearing described at such length.
But the next moment--the very same moment it almost seemed--the German
band stopped midway in its tune--and there was Mr. Mudge back in his
chair again, gasping and panting!
"Quick!" he shrieked, "stop that band! Send it away! Catch hold of me!
Block the entrances! Block the entrances! Give me the red book! Oh, oh,
oh-h-h-h!!!"
The music had begun again. It was merely a temporary interruption. The
_Tannhäuser_ March started again, this time at a tremendous pace that
made it sound like a rapid two-step as though the instruments played
against time.
But the brief interruption gave Dr. Silence a moment in which to collect
his scattering thoughts, and before the band had got through half a bar,
he had flung forward upon the chair and held Mr. Racine Mudge, the
struggling little victim of Higher Space, in a grip of iron. His arms
went all round his diminutive person, taking in a good part of the chair
at the same time. He was not a big man, yet he seemed to smother Mudge
completely.
Yet, even as he did so, and felt the wriggling form underneath him, it
began to melt and slip away like air or water. The wood of the arm-chair
somehow disentangled itself from between his own arms and those of
Mudge. The phenomenon known as the passage of matter through matter took
place. The little man seemed actually to get mixed up in his own being.
Dr. Silence could just see his face beneath him. It puckered and grew
dark as though from some great internal effort. He heard the thin, reedy
voice cry in his ear to "Block the entrances, block the entrances!" and
then--but how in the world describe what is indescribable?
John Silence half rose up to watch. Racine Mudge, his face distorted
beyond all recognition, was making a marvellous inward movement, as
though doubling back upon himself. He turned funnel-wise like water in a
whirling vortex, and then appeared to break up somewhat as a reflection
breaks up and divides in a distorting convex mirror. He went neither
forward nor backwards, neither to the right nor the left, neither up nor
down. But he went. He went utterly. He simply flashed away out of sight
like a vanishing projectile.
All but one leg! Dr. Silence just had the time and the presence of mind
to seize upon the left ankle and boot as it disappeared, and to this he
held on for several seconds like grim death. Yet all the time he knew it
was a foolish and useless thing to do.
The foot was in his grasp one moment, and the next it seemed--this was
the only way he could describe it--inside his own skin and bones, and at
the same time outside his hand and all round it. It seemed mixed up in
some amazing way with his own flesh and blood. Then it was gone, and he
was tightly grasping a draught of heated air.
"Gone! gone! gone!" cried a thick, whispering voice, somewhere deep
within his own consciousness. "Lost! lost! lost!" it repeated, growing
fainter and fainter till at length it vanished into nothing and the last
signs of Mr. Racine Mudge vanished with it.
John Silence locked his red book and replaced it in the cabinet, which
he fastened with a click, and when Barker answered the bell he inquired
if Mr. Mudge had left a card upon the table. It appeared that he had,
and when the servant returned with it, Dr. Silence read the address and
made a note of it. It was in North London.
"Mr. Mudge has gone," he said quietly to Barker, noticing his expression
of alarm.
"He's not taken his 'at with him, sir."
"Mr. Mudge requires no hat where he is now," continued the doctor,
stooping to poke the fire. "But he may return for it--"
"And the humbrella, sir."
"And the umbrella."
"He didn't go out _my_ way, sir, if you please," stuttered the amazed
servant, his curiosity overcoming his nervousness.
"Mr. Mudge has his own way of coming and going, and prefers it. If he
returns by the door at any time remember to bring him instantly to me,
and be kind and gentle with him and ask no questions. Also, remember,
Barker, to think pleasantly, sympathetically, affectionately of him
while he is away. Mr. Mudge is a very suffering gentleman."
Barker bowed and went out of the room backwards, gasping and feeling
round the inside of his collar with three very hot fingers of one hand.
It was two days later when he brought in a telegram to the study. Dr.
Silence opened it, and read as follows:
"Bombay. Just slipped out again. All safe. Have blocked
entrances. Thousand thanks. Address Cooks, London.--MUDGE."
Dr. Silence looked up and saw Barker staring at him bewilderingly. It
occurred to him that somehow he knew the contents of the telegram.
"Make a parcel of Mr. Mudge's things," he said briefly, "and address
them Thomas Cook & Sons, Ludgate Circus. And send them there exactly a
month from to-day and marked 'To be called for.'"
"Yes, sir," said Barker, leaving the room with a deep sigh and a hurried
glance at the waste-paper basket where his master had dropped the pink
paper.
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by Algernon Blackwood
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