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The Plattner Story, and Others

by H. G. Wells · English · Gutenberg #42989 · 462,810 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Plattner Story, and Others

Author: H. G. Wells


        
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                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PLATTNER STORY, AND OTHERS ***

  THE
  PLATTNER STORY

  AND OTHERS




  BY THE SAME AUTHOR


  THE STOLEN BACILLUS
  THE WONDERFUL VISIT
  THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
  THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU
  THE TIME MACHINE




  THE
  PLATTNER STORY

  AND OTHERS

  BY
  H. G. WELLS

  METHUEN & CO.
  36 ESSEX STREET, W.C.
  LONDON
  1897




  TO
  MY FATHER




CONTENTS


                                      PAGE
  THE PLATTNER STORY                     2
  THE ARGONAUTS OF THE AIR              29
  THE STORY OF THE LATE MR. ELVESHAM    47
  IN THE ABYSS                          71
  THE APPLE                             94
  UNDER THE KNIFE                      106
  THE SEA-RAIDERS                      126
  POLLOCK AND THE PORROH MAN           142
  THE RED ROOM                         165
  THE CONE                             179
  THE PURPLE PILEUS                    196
  THE JILTING OF JANE                  213
  IN THE MODERN VEIN                   224
  A CATASTROPHE                        239
  THE LOST INHERITANCE                 252
  THE SAD STORY OF A DRAMATIC CRITIC   262
  A SLIP UNDER THE MICROSCOPE          274




THE PLATTNER STORY


Whether the story of Gottfried Plattner is to be credited or not, is
a pretty question in the value of evidence. On the one hand, we have
seven witnesses--to be perfectly exact, we have six and a half pairs
of eyes, and one undeniable fact; and on the other we have--what is
it?--prejudice, common sense, the inertia of opinion. Never were there
seven more honest-seeming witnesses; never was there a more undeniable
fact than the inversion of Gottfried Plattner's anatomical structure,
and--never was there a more preposterous story than the one they
have to tell! The most preposterous part of the story is the worthy
Gottfried's contribution (for I count him as one of the seven). Heaven
forbid that I should be led into giving countenance to superstition by
a passion for impartiality, and so come to share the fate of Eusapia's
patrons! Frankly, I believe there is something crooked about this
business of Gottfried Plattner; but what that crooked factor is, I
will admit as frankly, I do not know. I have been surprised at the
credit accorded to the story in the most unexpected and authoritative
quarters. The fairest way to the reader, however, will be for me to
tell it without further comment.

Gottfried Plattner is, in spite of his name, a free-born Englishman.
His father was an Alsatian who came to England in the Sixties, married
a respectable English girl of unexceptionable antecedents, and died,
after a wholesome and uneventful life (devoted, I understand, chiefly
to the laying of parquet flooring), in 1887. Gottfried's age is
seven-and-twenty. He is, by virtue of his heritage of three languages,
Modern Languages Master in a small private school in the South of
England. To the casual observer he is singularly like any other Modern
Languages Master in any other small private school. His costume is
neither very costly nor very fashionable, but, on the other hand, it
is not markedly cheap or shabby; his complexion, like his height and
his bearing, is inconspicuous. You would notice, perhaps, that, like
the majority of people, his face was not absolutely symmetrical, his
right eye a little larger than the left, and his jaw a trifle heavier
on the right side. If you, as an ordinary careless person, were to bare
his chest and feel his heart beating, you would probably find it quite
like the heart of anyone else. But here you and the trained observer
would part company. If you found his heart quite ordinary, the trained
observer would find it quite otherwise. And once the thing was pointed
out to you, you too would perceive the peculiarity easily enough. It is
that Gottfried's heart beats on the right side of his body.

Now, that is not the only singularity of Gottfried's structure,
although it is the only one that would appeal to the untrained mind.
Careful sounding of Gottfried's internal arrangements, by a well-known
surgeon, seems to point to the fact that all the other unsymmetrical
parts of his body are similarly misplaced. The right lobe of his liver
is on the left side, the left on his right; while his lungs, too, are
similarly contraposed. What is still more singular, unless Gottfried is
a consummate actor, we must believe that his right hand has recently
become his left. Since the occurrences we are about to consider (as
impartially as possible), he has found the utmost difficulty in
writing, except from right to left across the paper with his left hand.
He cannot throw with his right hand, he is perplexed at meal times
between knife and fork, and his ideas of the rule of the road--he is
a cyclist--are still a dangerous confusion. And there is not a scrap
of evidence to show that before these occurrences Gottfried was at all
left-handed.

There is yet another wonderful fact in this preposterous business.
Gottfried produces three photographs of himself. You have him at the
age of five or six, thrusting fat legs at you from under a plaid frock,
and scowling. In that photograph his left eye is a little larger than
his right, and his jaw is a trifle heavier on the left side. This
is the reverse of his present living conditions. The photograph of
Gottfried at fourteen seems to contradict these facts, but that is
because it is one of those cheap "Gem" photographs that were then in
vogue, taken direct upon metal, and therefore reversing things just
as a looking-glass would. The third photograph represents him at
one-and-twenty, and confirms the record of the others. There seems here
evidence of the strongest confirmatory character that Gottfried has
exchanged his left side for his right. Yet how a human being can be so
changed, short of a fantastic and pointless miracle, it is exceedingly
hard to suggest.

In one way, of course, these facts might be explicable on the
supposition that Plattner has undertaken an elaborate mystification,
on the strength of his heart's displacement. Photographs may be
fudged, and left-handedness imitated. But the character of the man
does not lend itself to any such theory. He is quiet, practical,
unobtrusive, and thoroughly sane, from the Nordau standpoint. He
likes beer, and smokes moderately, takes walking exercise daily, and
has a healthily high estimate of the value of his teaching. He has a
good but untrained tenor voice, and takes a pleasure in singing airs
of a popular and cheerful character. He is fond, but not morbidly
fond, of reading,--chiefly fiction pervaded with a vaguely pious
optimism,--sleeps well, and rarely dreams. He is, in fact, the very
last person to evolve a fantastic fable. Indeed, so far from forcing
this story upon the world, he has been singularly reticent on the
matter. He meets inquirers with a certain engaging--bashfulness is
almost the word, that disarms the most suspicious. He seems genuinely
ashamed that anything so unusual has occurred to him.

It is to be regretted that Plattner's aversion to the idea of
post-mortem dissection may postpone, perhaps for ever, the positive
proof that his entire body has had its left and right sides
transposed. Upon that fact mainly the credibility of his story hangs.
There is no way of taking a man and moving him about _in space_, as
ordinary people understand space, that will result in our changing
his sides. Whatever you do, his right is still his right, his left
his left. You can do that with a perfectly thin and flat thing, of
course. If you were to cut a figure out of paper, any figure with a
right and left side, you could change its sides simply by lifting it
up and turning it over. But with a solid it is different. Mathematical
theorists tell us that the only way in which the right and left sides
of a solid body can be changed is by taking that body clean out of
space as we know it,--taking it out of ordinary existence, that is,
and turning it somewhere outside space. This is a little abstruse,
no doubt, but anyone with any knowledge of mathematical theory will
assure the reader of its truth. To put the thing in technical language,
the curious inversion of Plattner's right and left sides is proof
that he has moved out of our space into what is called the Fourth
Dimension, and that he has returned again to our world. Unless we
choose to consider ourselves the victims of an elaborate and motiveless
fabrication, we are almost bound to believe that this has occurred.

So much for the tangible facts. We come now to the account of the
phenomena that attended his temporary disappearance from the world.
It appears that in the Sussexville Proprietary School, Plattner not
only discharged the duties of Modern Languages Master, but also taught
chemistry, commercial geography, book-keeping, shorthand, drawing, and
any other additional subject to which the changing fancies of the
boys' parents might direct attention. He knew little or nothing of
these various subjects, but in secondary as distinguished from Board
or elementary schools, knowledge in the teacher is, very properly, by
no means so necessary as high moral character and gentlemanly tone.
In chemistry he was particularly deficient, knowing, he says, nothing
beyond the Three Gases (whatever the three gases may be). As, however,
his pupils began by knowing nothing, and derived all their information
from him, this caused him (or anyone) but little inconvenience for
several terms. Then a little boy named Whibble joined the school, who
had been educated (it seems) by some mischievous relative into an
inquiring habit of mind. This little boy followed Plattner's lessons
with marked and sustained interest, and in order to exhibit his zeal
on the subject, brought, at various times, substances for Plattner to
analyse. Plattner, flattered by this evidence of his power of awakening
interest, and trusting to the boy's ignorance, analysed these, and even
made general statements as to their composition. Indeed, he was so far
stimulated by his pupil as to obtain a work upon analytical chemistry,
and study it during his supervision of the evening's preparation. He
was surprised to find chemistry quite an interesting subject.

So far the story is absolutely commonplace. But now the greenish
powder comes upon the scene. The source of that greenish powder seems,
unfortunately, lost. Master Whibble tells a tortuous story of finding
it done up in a packet in a disused limekiln near the Downs. It would
have been an excellent thing for Plattner, and possibly for Master
Whibble's family, if a match could have been applied to that powder
there and then. The young gentleman certainly did not bring it to
school in a packet, but in a common eight-ounce graduated medicine
bottle, plugged with masticated newspaper. He gave it to Plattner at
the end of the afternoon school. Four boys had been detained after
school prayers in order to complete some neglected tasks, and Plattner
was supervising these in the small classroom in which the chemical
teaching was conducted. The appliances for the practical teaching of
chemistry in the Sussexville Proprietary School, as in most small
schools in this country, are characterised by a severe simplicity. They
are kept in a small cupboard standing in a recess, and having about the
same capacity as a common travelling trunk. Plattner, being bored with
his passive superintendence, seems to have welcomed the intervention of
Whibble with his green powder as an agreeable diversion, and, unlocking
this cupboard, proceeded at once with his analytical experiments.
Whibble sat, luckily for himself, at a safe distance, regarding him.
The four malefactors, feigning a profound absorption in their work,
watched him furtively with the keenest interest. For even within the
limits of the Three Gases, Plattner's practical chemistry was, I
understand, temerarious.

They are practically unanimous in their account of Plattner's
proceedings. He poured a little of the green powder into a test-tube,
and tried the substance with water, hydrochloric acid, nitric acid,
and sulphuric acid in succession. Getting no result, he emptied out a
little heap--nearly half the bottleful, in fact--upon a slate and tried
a match. He held the medicine bottle in his left hand. The stuff began
to smoke and melt, and then--exploded with deafening violence and a
blinding flash.

The five boys, seeing the flash and being prepared for catastrophes,
ducked below their desks, and were none of them seriously hurt. The
window was blown out into the playground, and the blackboard on its
easel was upset. The slate was smashed to atoms. Some plaster fell
from the ceiling. No other damage was done to the school edifice or
appliances, and the boys at first, seeing nothing of Plattner, fancied
he was knocked down and lying out of their sight below the desks. They
jumped out of their places to go to his assistance, and were amazed to
find the space empty. Being still confused by the sudden violence of
the report, they hurried to the open door, under the impression that
he must have been hurt, and have rushed out of the room. But Carson,
the foremost, nearly collided in the doorway with the principal, Mr.
Lidgett.

Mr. Lidgett is a corpulent, excitable man with one eye. The boys
describe him as stumbling into the room mouthing some of those tempered
expletives irritable schoolmasters accustom themselves to use--lest
worse befall. "Wretched mumchancer!" he said. "Where's Mr. Plattner?"
The boys are agreed on the very words. ("Wobbler," "snivelling puppy,"
and "mumchancer" are, it seems, among the ordinary small change of Mr.
Lidgett's scholastic commerce.)

Where's Mr. Plattner? That was a question that was to be repeated many
times in the next few days. It really seemed as though that frantic
hyperbole, "blown to atoms," had for once realised itself. There was
not a visible particle of Plattner to be seen; not a drop of blood nor
a stitch of clothing to be found. Apparently he had been blown clean
out of existence and left not a wrack behind. Not so much as would
cover a sixpenny piece, to quote a proverbial expression! The evidence
of his absolute disappearance, as a consequence of that explosion, is
indubitable.

It is not necessary to enlarge here upon the commotion excited in the
Sussexville Proprietary School, and in Sussexville and elsewhere, by
this event. It is quite possible, indeed, that some of the readers of
these pages may recall the hearing of some remote and dying version
of that excitement during the last summer holidays. Lidgett, it would
seem, did everything in his power to suppress and minimise the story.
He instituted a penalty of twenty-five lines for any mention of
Plattner's name among the boys, and stated in the schoolroom that he
was clearly aware of his assistant's whereabouts. He was afraid, he
explains, that the possibility of an explosion happening, in spite of
the elaborate precautions taken to minimise the practical teaching of
chemistry, might injure the reputation of the school; and so might any
mysterious quality in Plattner's departure. Indeed, he did everything
in his power to make the occurrence seem as ordinary as possible. In
particular, he cross-examined the five eye-witnesses of the occurrence
so searchingly that they began to doubt the plain evidence of their
senses. But, in spite of these efforts, the tale, in a magnified
and distorted state, made a nine days' wonder in the district, and
several parents withdrew their sons on colourable pretexts. Not the
least remarkable point in the matter is the fact that a large number
of people in the neighbourhood dreamed singularly vivid dreams of
Plattner during the period of excitement before his return, and that
these dreams had a curious uniformity. In almost all of them Plattner
was seen, sometimes singly, sometimes in company, wandering about
through a coruscating iridescence. In all cases his face was pale and
distressed, and in some he gesticulated towards the dreamer. One or
two of the boys, evidently under the influence of nightmare, fancied
that Plattner approached them with remarkable swiftness, and seemed to
look closely into their very eyes. Others fled with Plattner from the
pursuit of vague and extraordinary creatures of a globular shape. But
all these fancies were forgotten in inquiries and speculations when, on
the Wednesday next but one after the Monday of the explosion, Plattner
returned.

The circumstances of his return were as singular as those of his
departure. So far as Mr. Lidgett's somewhat choleric outline can be
filled in from Plattner's hesitating statements, it would appear that
on Wednesday evening, towards the hour of sunset, the former gentleman,
having dismissed evening preparation, was engaged in his garden,
picking and eating strawberries, a fruit of which he is inordinately
fond. It is a large old-fashioned garden, secured from observation,
fortunately, by a high and ivy-covered red-brick wall. Just as he was
stooping over a particularly prolific plant, there was a flash in the
air and a heavy thud, and before he could look round, some heavy body
struck him violently from behind. He was pitched forward, crushing the
strawberries he held in his hand, and that so roughly, that his silk
hat--Mr. Lidgett adheres to the older ideas of scholastic costume--was
driven violently down upon his forehead, and almost over one eye.
This heavy missile, which slid over him sideways and collapsed into a
sitting posture among the strawberry plants, proved to be our long-lost
Mr. Gottfried Plattner, in an extremely dishevelled condition. He
was collarless and hatless, his linen was dirty, and there was blood
upon his hands. Mr. Lidgett was so indignant and surprised that he
remained on all-fours, and with his hat jammed down on his eye, while
he expostulated vehemently with Plattner for his disrespectful and
unaccountable conduct.

This scarcely idyllic scene completes what I may call the exterior
version of the Plattner story--its exoteric aspect. It is quite
unnecessary to enter here into all the details of his dismissal by Mr.
Lidgett. Such details, with the full names and dates and references,
will be found in the larger report of these occurrences that was laid
before the Society for the Investigation of Abnormal Phenomena. The
singular transposition of Plattner's right and left sides was scarcely
observed for the first day or so, and then first in connection with
his disposition to write from right to left across the blackboard. He
concealed rather than ostended this curious confirmatory circumstance,
as he considered it would unfavourably affect his prospects in a new
situation. The displacement of his heart was discovered some months
after, when he was having a tooth extracted under anæsthetics. He then,
very unwillingly, allowed a cursory surgical examination to be made of
himself, with a view to a brief account in the _Journal of Anatomy_.
That exhausts the statement of the material facts; and we may now go on
to consider Plattner's account of the matter.

But first let us clearly differentiate between the preceding portion
of this story and what is to follow. All I have told thus far is
established by such evidence as even a criminal lawyer would approve.
Every one of the witnesses is still alive; the reader, if he have the
leisure, may hunt the lads out tomorrow, or even brave the terrors of
the redoubtable Lidgett, and cross-examine and trap and test to his
heart's content; Gottfried Plattner, himself, and his twisted heart and
his three photographs are producible. It may be taken as proved that he
did disappear for nine days as the consequence of an explosion; that
he returned almost as violently, under circumstances in their nature
annoying to Mr. Lidgett, whatever the details of those circumstances
may be; and that he returned inverted, just as a reflection returns
from a mirror. From the last fact, as I have already stated, it
follows almost inevitably that Plattner, during those nine days, must
have been in some state of existence altogether out of space. The
evidence to these statements is, indeed, far stronger than that upon
which most murderers are hanged. But for his own particular account
of where he had been, with its confused explanations and well-nigh
self-contradictory details, we have only Mr. Gottfried Plattner's word.
I do not wish to discredit that, but I must point out--what so many
writers upon obscure psychic phenomena fail to do--that we are passing
here from the practically undeniable to that kind of matter which any
reasonable man is entitled to believe or reject as he thinks proper.
The previous statements render it plausible; its discordance with
common experience tilts it towards the incredible. I would prefer not
to sway the beam of the reader's judgment either way, but simply to
tell the story as Plattner told it me.

He gave me his narrative, I may state, at my house at Chislehurst, and
so soon as he had left me that evening, I went into my study and wrote
down everything as I remembered it. Subsequently he was good enough to
read over a type-written copy, so that its substantial correctness is
undeniable.

He states that at the moment of the explosion he distinctly thought he
was killed. He felt lifted off his feet and driven forcibly backward.
It is a curious fact for psychologists that he thought clearly during
his backward flight, and wondered whether he should hit the chemistry
cupboard or the blackboard easel. His heels struck ground, and he
staggered and fell heavily into a sitting position on something soft
and firm. For a moment the concussion stunned him. He became aware at
once of a vivid scent of singed hair, and he seemed to hear the voice
of Lidgett asking for him. You will understand that for a time his
mind was greatly confused.

At first he was distinctly under the impression that he was still in
the classroom. He perceived quite distinctly the surprise of the boys
and the entry of Mr. Lidgett. He is quite positive upon that score.
He did not hear their remarks; but that he ascribed to the deafening
effect of the experiment. Things about him seemed curiously dark and
faint, but his mind explained that on the obvious but mistaken idea
that the explosion had engendered a huge volume of dark smoke. Through
the dimness the figures of Lidgett and the boys moved, as faint and
silent as ghosts. Plattner's face still tingled with the stinging
heat of the flash. He was, he says, "all muddled." His first definite
thoughts seem to have been of his personal safety. He thought he was
perhaps blinded and deafened. He felt his limbs and face in a gingerly
manner. Then his perceptions grew clearer, and he was astonished to
miss the old familiar desks and other schoolroom furniture about him.
Only dim, uncertain, grey shapes stood in the place of these. Then came
a thing that made him shout aloud, and awoke his stunned faculties
to instant activity. _Two of the boys, gesticulating, walked one
after the other clean through him!_ Neither manifested the slightest
consciousness of his presence. It is difficult to imagine the sensation
he felt. They came against him, he says, with no more force than a wisp
of mist.

Plattner's first thought after that was that he was dead. Having been
brought up with thoroughly sound views in these matters, however, he
was a little surprised to find his body still about him. His second
conclusion was that he was not dead, but that the others were: that the
explosion had destroyed the Sussexville Proprietary School and every
soul in it except himself. But that, too, was scarcely satisfactory. He
was thrown back upon astonished observation.

Everything about him was extraordinarily dark: at first it seemed to
have an altogether ebony blackness. Overhead was a black firmament.
The only touch of light in the scene was a faint greenish glow at the
edge of the sky in one direction, which threw into prominence a horizon
of undulating black hills. This, I say, was his impression at first.
As his eye grew accustomed to the darkness, he began to distinguish a
faint quality of differentiating greenish colour in the circumambient
night. Against this background the furniture and occupants of the
classroom, it seems, stood out like phosphorescent spectres, faint
and impalpable. He extended his hand, and thrust it without an effort
through the wall of the room by the fireplace.

He describes himself as making a strenuous effort to attract attention.
He shouted to Lidgett, and tried to seize the boys as they went to
and fro. He only desisted from these attempts when Mrs. Lidgett, whom
he (as an Assistant Master) naturally disliked, entered the room. He
says the sensation of being in the world, and yet not a part of it,
was an extraordinarily disagreeable one. He compared his feelings,
not inaptly, to those of a cat watching a mouse through a window.
Whenever he made a motion to communicate with the dim, familiar world
about him, he found an invisible, incomprehensible barrier preventing
intercourse.

He then turned his attention to his solid environment. He found the
medicine bottle still unbroken in his hand, with the remainder of the
green powder therein. He put this in his pocket, and began to feel
about him. Apparently, he was sitting on a boulder of rock covered with
a velvety moss. The dark country about him he was unable to see, the
faint, misty picture of the schoolroom blotting it out, but he had a
feeling (due perhaps to a cold wind) that he was near the crest of a
hill, and that a steep valley fell away beneath his feet. The green
glow along the edge of the sky seemed to be growing in extent and
intensity. He stood up, rubbing his eyes.

It would seem that he made a few steps, going steeply down hill, and
then stumbled, nearly fell, and sat down again upon a jagged mass of
rock to watch the dawn. He became aware that the world about him was
absolutely silent. It was as still as it was dark, and though there was
a cold wind blowing up the hill-face, the rustle of grass, the soughing
of the boughs that should have accompanied it, were absent. He could
hear, therefore, if he could not see, that the hillside upon which he
stood was rocky and desolate. The green grew brighter every moment, and
as it did so a faint, transparent blood-red mingled with, but did not
mitigate, the blackness of the sky overhead and the rocky desolations
about him. Having regard to what follows, I am inclined to think that
that redness may have been an optical effect due to contrast. Something
black fluttered momentarily against the livid yellow-green of the
lower sky, and then the thin and penetrating voice of a bell rose out
of the black gulf below him. An oppressive expectation grew with the
growing light.

It is probable that an hour or more elapsed while he sat there, the
strange green light growing brighter every moment, and spreading
slowly, in flamboyant fingers, upward towards the zenith. As it grew,
the spectral vision of _our_ world became relatively or absolutely
fainter. Probably both, for the time must have been about that of our
earthly sunset. So far as his vision of our world went, Plattner, by
his few steps downhill, had passed through the floor of the classroom,
and was now, it seemed, sitting in mid-air in the larger schoolroom
downstairs. He saw the boarders distinctly, but much more faintly
than he had seen Lidgett. They were preparing their evening tasks,
and he noticed with interest that several were cheating with their
Euclid riders by means of a crib, a compilation whose existence he had
hitherto never suspected. As the time passed, they faded steadily, as
steadily as the light of the green dawn increased.

Looking down into the valley, he saw that the light had crept far
down its rocky sides, and that the profound blackness of the abyss
was now broken by a minute green glow, like the light of a glow-worm.
And almost immediately the limb of a huge heavenly body of blazing
green rose over the basaltic undulations of the distant hills, and
the monstrous hill-masses about him came out gaunt and desolate, in
green light and deep, ruddy black shadows. He became aware of a vast
number of ball-shaped objects drifting as thistledown drifts over
the high ground. There were none of these nearer to him than the
opposite side of the gorge. The bell below twanged quicker and quicker,
with something like impatient insistence, and several lights moved
hither and thither. The boys at work at their desks were now almost
imperceptibly faint.

This extinction of our world, when the green sun of this other universe
rose, is a curious point upon which Plattner insists. During the
Other-World night it is difficult to move about, on account of the
vividness with which the things of this world are visible. It becomes a
riddle to explain why, if this is the case, we in this world catch no
glimpse of the Other-World. It is due, perhaps, to the comparatively
vivid illumination of this world of ours. Plattner describes the
midday of the Other-World, at its brightest, as not being nearly so
bright as this world at full moon, while its night is profoundly
black. Consequently, the amount of light, even in an ordinary dark
room, is sufficient to render the things of the Other-World invisible,
on the same principle that faint phosphorescence is only visible in
the profoundest darkness. I have tried, since he told me his story,
to see something of the Other-World by sitting for a long space in a
photographer's dark room at night. I have certainly seen indistinctly
the form of greenish slopes and rocks, but only, I must admit, very
indistinctly indeed. The reader may possibly be more successful.
Plattner tells me that since his return he has dreamt and seen and
recognised places in the Other-World, but this is probably due to his
memory of these scenes. It seems quite possible that people with
unusually keen eyesight may occasionally catch a glimpse of this
strange Other-World about us.

However, this is a digression. As the green sun rose, a long street
of black buildings became perceptible, though only darkly and
indistinctly, in the gorge, and, after some hesitation, Plattner began
to clamber down the precipitous descent towards them. The descent was
long and exceedingly tedious, being so not only by the extraordinary
steepness, but also by reason of the looseness of the boulders
with which the whole face of the hill was strewn. The noise of his
descent--now and then his heels struck fire from the rocks--seemed
now the only sound in the universe, for the beating of the bell had
ceased. As he drew nearer, he perceived that the various edifices had
a singular resemblance to tombs and mausoleums and monuments, saving
only that they were all uniformly black instead of being white, as
most sepulchres are. And then he saw, crowding out of the largest
building, very much as people disperse from church, a number of pallid,
rounded, pale-green figures. These dispersed in several directions
about the broad street of the place, some going through side alleys and
reappearing upon the steepness of the hill, others entering some of the
small black buildings which lined the way.

At the sight of these things drifting up towards him, Plattner stopped,
staring. They were not walking, they were indeed limbless, and they
had the appearance of human heads, beneath which a tadpole-like body
swung. He was too astonished at their strangeness, too full, indeed,
of strangeness, to be seriously alarmed by them. They drove towards
him, in front of the chill wind that was blowing uphill, much as
soap-bubbles drive before a draught. And as he looked at the nearest
of those approaching, he saw it was indeed a human head, albeit with
singularly large eyes, and wearing such an expression of distress and
anguish as he had never seen before upon mortal countenance. He was
surprised to find that it did not turn to regard him, but seemed to be
watching and following some unseen moving thing. For a moment he was
puzzled, and then it occurred to him that this creature was watching
with its enormous eyes something that was happening in the world he had
just left. Nearer it came, and nearer, and he was too astonished to
cry out. It made a very faint fretting sound as it came close to him.
Then it struck his face with a gentle pat--its touch was very cold--and
drove past him, and upward towards the crest of the hill.

An extraordinary conviction flashed across Plattner's mind that this
head had a strong likeness to Lidgett. Then he turned his attention
to the other heads that were now swarming thickly up the hillside.
None made the slightest sign of recognition. One or two, indeed, came
close to his head and almost followed the example of the first, but
he dodged convulsively out of the way. Upon most of them he saw the
same expression of unavailing regret he had seen upon the first, and
heard the same faint sounds of wretchedness from them. One or two wept,
and one rolling swiftly uphill wore an expression of diabolical rage.
But others were cold, and several had a look of gratified interest in
their eyes. One, at least, was almost in an ecstasy of happiness.
Plattner does not remember that he recognised any more likenesses in
those he saw at this time.

For several hours, perhaps, Plattner watched these strange things
dispersing themselves over the hills, and not till long after they
had ceased to issue from the clustering black buildings in the gorge,
did he resume his downward climb. The darkness about him increased so
much that he had a difficulty in stepping true. Overhead the sky was
now a bright, pale green. He felt neither hunger nor thirst. Later,
when he did, he found a chilly stream running down the centre of the
gorge, and the rare moss upon the boulders, when he tried it at last in
desperation, was good to eat.

He groped about among the tombs that ran down the gorge, seeking
vaguely for some clue to these inexplicable things. After a long
time he came to the entrance of the big mausoleum-like building from
which the heads had issued. In this he found a group of green lights
burning upon a kind of basaltic altar, and a bell-rope from a belfry
overhead hanging down into the centre of the place. Round the wall
ran a lettering of fire in a character unknown to him. While he was
still wondering at the purport of these things, he heard the receding
tramp of heavy feet echoing far down the street. He ran out into the
darkness again, but he could see nothing. He had a mind to pull the
bell-rope, and finally decided to follow the footsteps. But, although
he ran far, he never overtook them; and his shouting was of no avail.
The gorge seemed to extend an interminable distance. It was as dark
as earthly starlight throughout its length, while the ghastly green
day lay along the upper edge of its precipices. There were none of the
heads, now, below. They were all, it seemed, busily occupied along the
upper slopes. Looking up, he saw them drifting hither and thither, some
hovering stationary, some flying swiftly through the air. It reminded
him, he said, of "big snowflakes"; only these were black and pale green.

In pursuing the firm, undeviating footsteps that he never overtook, in
groping into new regions of this endless devil's dyke, in clambering up
and down the pitiless heights, in wandering about the summits, and in
watching the drifting faces, Plattner states that he spent the better
part of seven or eight days. He did not keep count, he says. Though
once or twice he found eyes watching him, he had word with no living
soul. He slept among the rocks on the hillside. In the gorge things
earthly were invisible, because, from the earthly standpoint, it was
far underground. On the altitudes, so soon as the earthly day began,
the world became visible to him. He found himself sometimes stumbling
over the dark green rocks, or arresting himself on a precipitous brink,
while all about him the green branches of the Sussexville lanes were
swaying; or, again, he seemed to be walking through the Sussexville
streets, or watching unseen the private business of some household.
And then it was he discovered, that to almost every human being in our
world there pertained some of these drifting heads: that everyone in
the world is watched intermittently by these helpless disembodiments.

What are they--these Watchers of the Living? Plattner never learned.
But two, that presently found and followed him, were like his
childhood's memory of his father and mother. Now and then other faces
turned their eyes upon him: eyes like those of dead people who had
swayed him, or injured him, or helped him in his youth and manhood.
Whenever they looked at him, Plattner was overcome with a strange
sense of responsibility. To his mother he ventured to speak; but she
made no answer. She looked sadly, steadfastly, and tenderly--a little
reproachfully, too, it seemed--into his eyes.

He simply tells this story: he does not endeavour to explain. We are
left to surmise who these Watchers of the Living may be, or if they are
indeed the Dead, why they should so closely and passionately watch a
world they have left for ever. It may be--indeed to my mind it seems
just--that, when our life has closed, when evil or good is no longer
a choice for us, we may still have to witness the working out of the
train of consequences we have laid. If human souls continue after
death, then surely human interests continue after death. But that is
merely my own guess at the meaning of the things seen. Plattner offers
no interpretation, for none was given him. It is well the reader should
understand this clearly. Day after day, with his head reeling, he
wandered about this strange-lit world outside the world, weary and,
towards the end, weak and hungry. By day--by our earthly day, that
is--the ghostly vision of the old familiar scenery of Sussexville, all
about him, irked and worried him. He could not see where to put his
feet, and ever and again with a chilly touch one of these Watching
Souls would come against his face. And after dark the multitude of
these Watchers about him, and their intent distress, confused his mind
beyond describing. A great longing to return to the earthly life that
was so near and yet so remote consumed him. The unearthliness of things
about him produced a positively painful mental distress. He was worried
beyond describing by his own particular followers. He would shout at
them to desist from staring at him, scold at them, hurry away from
them. They were always mute and intent. Run as he might over the uneven
ground, they followed his destinies.

On the ninth day, towards evening, Plattner heard the invisible
footsteps approaching, far away down the gorge. He was then wandering
over the broad crest of the same hill upon which he had fallen in his
entry into this strange Other-World of his. He turned to hurry down
into the gorge, feeling his way hastily, and was arrested by the sight
of the thing that was happening in a room in a back street near the
school. Both of the people in the room he knew by sight. The windows
were open, the blinds up, and the setting sun shone clearly into it, so
that it came out quite brightly at first, a vivid oblong of room, lying
like a magic-lantern picture upon the black landscape and the livid
green dawn. In addition to the sunlight, a candle had just been lit in
the room.

On the bed lay a lank man, his ghastly white face terrible upon the
tumbled pillow. His clenched hands were raised above his head. A little
table beside the bed carried a few medicine bottles, some toast and
water, and an empty glass. Every now and then the lank man's lips
fell apart, to indicate a word he could not articulate. But the woman
did not notice that he wanted anything, because she was busy turning
out papers from an old-fashioned bureau in the opposite corner of the
room. At first the picture was very vivid indeed, but as the green dawn
behind it grew brighter and brighter, so it became fainter and more and
more transparent.

As the echoing footsteps paced nearer and nearer, those footsteps
that sound so loud in that Other-World and come so silently in this,
Plattner perceived about him a great multitude of dim faces gathering
together out of the darkness and watching the two people in the room.
Never before had he seen so many of the Watchers of the Living.
A multitude had eyes only for the sufferer in the room, another
multitude, in infinite anguish, watched the woman as she hunted with
greedy eyes for something she could not find. They crowded about
Plattner, they came across his sight and buffeted his face, the noise
of their unavailing regrets was all about him. He saw clearly only
now and then. At other times the picture quivered dimly, through the
veil of green reflections upon their movements. In the room it must
have been very still, and Plattner says the candle flame streamed
up into a perfectly vertical line of smoke, but in his ears each
footfall and its echoes beat like a clap of thunder. And the faces!
Two, more particularly near the woman's: one a woman's also, white
and clear-featured, a face which might have once been cold and hard,
but which was now softened by the touch of a wisdom strange to earth.
The other might have been the woman's father. Both were evidently
absorbed in the contemplation of some act of hateful meanness, so it
seemed, which they could no longer guard against and prevent. Behind
were others, teachers, it may be, who had taught ill, friends whose
influence had failed. And over the man, too--a multitude, but none
that seemed to be parents or teachers! Faces that might once have
been coarse, now purged to strength by sorrow! And in the forefront
one face, a girlish one, neither angry nor remorseful, but merely
patient and weary, and, as it seemed to Plattner, waiting for relief.
His powers of description fail him at the memory of this multitude of
ghastly countenances. They gathered on the stroke of the bell. He saw
them all in the space of a second. It would seem that he was so worked
on by his excitement that, quite involuntarily, his restless fingers
took the bottle of green powder out of his pocket and held it before
him. But he does not remember that.

Abruptly the footsteps ceased. He waited for the next, and there was
silence, and then suddenly, cutting through the unexpected stillness
like a keen, thin blade, came the first stroke of the bell. At that the
multitudinous faces swayed to and fro, and a louder crying began all
about him. The woman did not hear; she was burning something now in the
candle flame. At the second stroke everything grew dim, and a breath of
wind, icy cold, blew through the host of watchers. They swirled about
him like an eddy of dead leaves in the spring, and at the third stroke
something was extended through them to the bed. You have heard of a
beam of light. This was like a beam of darkness, and looking again at
it, Plattner saw that it was a shadowy arm and hand.

The green sun was now topping the black desolations of the horizon,
and the vision of the room was very faint. Plattner could see that
the white of the bed struggled, and was convulsed; and that the woman
looked round over her shoulder at it, startled.

The cloud of watchers lifted high like a puff of green dust before the
wind, and swept swiftly downward towards the temple in the gorge. Then
suddenly Plattner understood the meaning of the shadowy black arm that
stretched across his shoulder and clutched its prey. He did not dare
turn his head to see the Shadow behind the arm. With a violent effort,
and covering his eyes, he set himself to run, made, perhaps, twenty
strides, then slipped on a boulder, and fell. He fell forward on his
hands; and the bottle smashed and exploded as he touched the ground.

In another moment he found himself, stunned and bleeding, sitting face
to face with Lidgett in the old walled garden behind the school.

       *       *       *       *       *

There the story of Plattner's experiences ends. I have resisted, I
believe successfully, the natural disposition of a writer of fiction
to dress up incidents of this sort. I have told the thing as far as
possible in the order in which Plattner told it to me. I have carefully
avoided any attempt at style, effect, or construction. It would have
been easy, for instance, to have worked the scene of the death-bed
into a kind of plot in which Plattner might have been involved.
But, quite apart from the objectionableness of falsifying a most
extraordinary true story, any such trite devices would spoil, to my
mind, the peculiar effect of this dark world, with its livid green
illumination and its drifting Watchers of the Living, which, unseen and
unapproachable to us, is yet lying all about us.

It remains to add, that a death did actually occur in Vincent Terrace,
just beyond the school garden, and, so far as can be proved, at
the moment of Plattner's return. Deceased was a rate-collector and
insurance agent. His widow, who was much younger than himself, married
last month a Mr. Whymper, a veterinary surgeon of Allbeeding. As the
portion of this story given here has in various forms circulated orally
in Sussexville, she has consented to my use of her name, on condition
that I make it distinctly known that she emphatically contradicts every
detail of Plattner's account of her husband's last moments. She burnt
no will, she says, although Plattner never accused her of doing so:
her husband made but one will, and that just after their marriage.
Certainly, from a man who had never seen it, Plattner's account of the
furniture of the room was curiously accurate.

One other thing, even at the risk of an irksome repetition, I must
insist upon, lest I seem to favour the credulous superstitious view.
Plattner's absence from the world for nine days is, I think, proved.
But that does not prove his story. It is quite conceivable that even
outside space hallucinations may be possible. That, at least, the
reader must bear distinctly in mind.




THE ARGONAUTS OF THE AIR


One saw Monson's Flying Machine from the windows of the trains passing
either along the South-Western main line or along the line between
Wimbledon and Worcester Park,--to be more exact, one saw the huge
scaffoldings which limited the flight of the apparatus. They rose over
the tree-tops, a massive alley of interlacing iron and timber, and an
enormous web of ropes and tackle, extending the best part of two miles.
From the Leatherhead branch this alley was foreshortened and in part
hidden by a hill with villas; but from the main line one had it in
profile, a complex tangle of girders and curving bars, very impressive
to the excursionists from Portsmouth and Southampton and the West.
Monson had taken up the work where Maxim had left it, had gone on at
first with an utter contempt for the journalistic wit and ignorance
that had irritated and hampered his predecessor, and had spent (it was
said) rather more than half his immense fortune upon his experiments.
The results, to an impatient generation, seemed inconsiderable. When
some five years had passed after the growth of the colossal iron groves
at Worcester Park, and Monson still failed to put in a fluttering
appearance over Trafalgar Square, even the Isle of Wight trippers felt
their liberty to smile. And such intelligent people as did not consider
Monson a fool stricken with the mania for invention, denounced him as
being (for no particular reason) a self-advertising quack.

Yet now and again a morning trainload of season-ticket holders would
see a white monster rush headlong through the airy tracery of guides
and bars, and hear the further stays, nettings, and buffers snap,
creak, and groan with the impact of the blow. Then there would be
an efflorescence of black-set white-rimmed faces along the sides of
the train, and the morning papers would be neglected for a vigorous
discussion of the possibility of flying (in which nothing new was ever
said by any chance), until the train reached Waterloo, and its cargo
of season-ticket holders dispersed themselves over London. Or the
fathers and mothers in some multitudinous train of weary excursionists
returning exhausted from a day of rest by the sea, would find the dark
fabric, standing out against the evening sky, useful in diverting some
bilious child from its introspection, and be suddenly startled by the
swift transit of a huge black flapping shape that strained upward
against the guides. It was a great and forcible thing beyond dispute,
and excellent for conversation; yet, all the same, it was but flying in
leading-strings, and most of those who witnessed it scarcely counted
its flight as flying. More of a switchback it seemed to the run of the
folk.

Monson, I say, did not trouble himself very keenly about the opinions
of the press at first. But possibly he, even, had formed but a poor
idea of the time it would take before the tactics of flying were
mastered, the swift assured adjustment of the big soaring shape to
every gust and chance movement of the air; nor had he clearly reckoned
the money this prolonged struggle against gravitation would cost
him. And he was not so pachydermatous as he seemed. Secretly he had
his periodical bundles of cuttings sent him by Romeike, he had his
periodical reminders from his banker; and if he did not mind the
initial ridicule and scepticism, he felt the growing neglect as the
months went by and the money dribbled away. Time was when Monson had
sent the enterprising journalist, keen after readable matter, empty
from his gates. But when the enterprising journalist ceased from
troubling, Monson was anything but satisfied in his heart of hearts.
Still day by day the work went on, and the multitudinous subtle
difficulties of the steering diminished in number. Day by day, too,
the money trickled away, until his balance was no longer a matter of
hundreds of thousands, but of tens. And at last came an anniversary.

Monson, sitting in the little drawing-shed, suddenly noticed the date
on Woodhouse's calendar.

"It was five years ago to-day that we began," he said to Woodhouse
suddenly.

"Is it?" said Woodhouse.

"It's the alterations play the devil with us," said Monson, biting a
paper-fastener.

The drawings for the new vans to the hinder screw lay on the table
before him as he spoke. He pitched the mutilated brass paper-fastener
into the waste-paper basket and drummed with his fingers. "These
alterations! Will the mathematicians ever be clever enough to save us
all this patching and experimenting? Five years--learning by rule of
thumb, when one might think that it was possible to calculate the whole
thing out beforehand. The cost of it! I might have hired three senior
wranglers for life. But they'd only have developed some beautifully
useless theorems in pneumatics. What a time it has been, Woodhouse!"

"These mouldings will take three weeks," said Woodhouse. "At special
prices."

"Three weeks!" said Monson, and sat drumming.

"Three weeks certain," said Woodhouse, an excellent engineer, but no
good as a comforter. He drew the sheets towards him and began shading a
bar.

Monson stopped drumming, and began to bite his finger-nails, staring
the while at Woodhouse's head.

"How long have they been calling this Monson's Folly?" he said suddenly.

"_Oh!_ Year or so," said Woodhouse carelessly, without looking up.

Monson sucked the air in between his teeth, and went to the window. The
stout iron columns carrying the elevated rails upon which the start of
the machine was made rose up close by, and the machine was hidden by
the upper edge of the window. Through the grove of iron pillars, red
painted and ornate with rows of bolts, one had a glimpse of the pretty
scenery towards Esher. A train went gliding noiselessly across the
middle distance, its rattle drowned by the hammering of the workmen
overhead. Monson could imagine the grinning faces at the windows of the
carriages. He swore savagely under his breath, and dabbed viciously at
a blowfly that suddenly became noisy on the window-pane.

"What's up?" said Woodhouse, staring in surprise at his employer.

"I'm about sick of this."

Woodhouse scratched his cheek. "Oh!" he said, after an assimilating
pause. He pushed the drawing away from him.

"Here these fools ... I'm trying to conquer a new element--trying to
do a thing that will revolutionise life. And instead of taking an
intelligent interest, they grin and make their stupid jokes, and call
me and my appliances names."

"Asses!" said Woodhouse, letting his eye fall again on the drawing.

The epithet, curiously enough, made Monson wince. "I'm about sick of
it, Woodhouse, anyhow," he said, after a pause.

Woodhouse shrugged his shoulders.

"There's nothing for it but patience, I suppose," said Monson, sticking
his hands in his pockets. "I've started. I've made my bed, and I've got
to lie on it. I can't go back. I'll see it through, and spend every
penny I have and every penny I can borrow. But I tell you, Woodhouse,
I'm infernally sick of it, all the same. If I'd paid a tenth part of
the money towards some political greaser's expenses--I'd have been a
baronet before this."

Monson paused. Woodhouse stared in front of him with a blank expression
he always employed to indicate sympathy, and tapped his pencil-case on
the table. Monson stared at him for a minute.

"Oh, _damn_!" said Monson suddenly, and abruptly rushed out of the room.

Woodhouse continued his sympathetic rigour for perhaps half a minute.
Then he sighed and resumed the shading of the drawings. Something had
evidently upset Monson. Nice chap, and generous, but difficult to get
on with. It was the way with every amateur who had anything to do with
engineering--wanted everything finished at once. But Monson had usually
the patience of the expert. Odd he was so irritable. Nice and round
that aluminium rod did look now! Woodhouse threw back his head, and put
it, first this side and then that, to appreciate his bit of shading
better.

"Mr. Woodhouse," said Hooper, the foreman of the labourers, putting his
head in at the door.

"Hullo!" said Woodhouse, without turning round.

"Nothing happened, sir?" said Hooper.

"Happened?" said Woodhouse.

"The governor just been up the rails swearing like a tornader."

"_Oh!_" said Woodhouse.

"It ain't like him, sir."

"No?"

"And I was thinking perhaps"--

"Don't think," said Woodhouse, still admiring the drawings.

Hooper knew Woodhouse, and he shut the door suddenly with a vicious
slam. Woodhouse stared stonily before him for some further minutes,
and then made an ineffectual effort to pick his teeth with his pencil.
Abruptly he desisted, pitched that old, tried, and stumpy servitor
across the room, got up, stretched himself, and followed Hooper.

He looked ruffled--it was visible to every workman he met. When a
millionaire who has been spending thousands on experiments that employ
quite a little army of people suddenly indicates that he is sick of
the undertaking, there is almost invariably a certain amount of mental
friction in the ranks of the little army he employs. And even before he
indicates his intentions there are speculations and murmurs, a watching
of faces and a study of straws. Hundreds of people knew before the day
was out that Monson was ruffled, Woodhouse ruffled, Hooper ruffled. A
workman's wife, for instance (whom Monson had never seen), decided to
keep her money in the savings-bank instead of buying a velveteen dress.
So far-reaching are even the casual curses of a millionaire.

Monson found a certain satisfaction in going on the works and behaving
disagreeably to as many people as possible. After a time even
that palled upon him, and he rode off the grounds, to every one's
relief there, and through the lanes south-eastward, to the infinite
tribulation of his house steward at Cheam.

And the immediate cause of it all, the little grain of annoyance that
had suddenly precipitated all this discontent with his life-work
was--these trivial things that direct all our great decisions!--half
a dozen ill-considered remarks made by a pretty girl, prettily
dressed, with a beautiful voice and something more than prettiness
in her soft grey eyes. And of these half-dozen remarks, two words
especially--"Monson's Folly." She had felt she was behaving charmingly
to Monson; she reflected the next day how exceptionally effective she
had been, and no one would have been more amazed than she, had she
learned the effect she had left on Monson's mind. I hope, considering
everything, that she never knew.

"How are you getting on with your flying-machine?" she asked. ("I
wonder if I shall ever meet any one with the sense not to ask that,"
thought Monson.) "It will be very dangerous at first, will it not?"
("Thinks I'm afraid.") "Jorgon is going to play presently; have you
heard him before?" ("My mania being attended to, we turn to rational
conversation.") Gush about Jorgon; gradual decline of conversation,
ending with--"You must let me know when your flying-machine is
finished, Mr. Monson, and then I will consider the advisability of
taking a ticket." ("One would think I was still playing inventions
in the nursery.") But the bitterest thing she said was not meant for
Monson's ears. To Phlox, the novelist, she was always conscientiously
brilliant. "I have been talking to Mr. Monson, and he can think of
nothing, positively nothing, but that flying-machine of his. Do you
know, all his workmen call that place of his 'Monson's Folly'? He is
quite impossible. It is really very, very sad. I always regard him
myself in the light of sunken treasure--the Lost Millionaire, you know."

She was pretty and well educated,--indeed, she had written an
epigrammatic novelette; but the bitterness was that she was typical.
She summarised what the world thought of the man who was working
sanely, steadily, and surely towards a more tremendous revolution in
the appliances of civilisation, a more far-reaching alteration in the
ways of humanity than has ever been effected since history began.
They did not even take him seriously. In a little while he would be
proverbial. "I _must_ fly now," he said on his way home, smarting with
a sense of absolute social failure. "I must fly soon. If it doesn't
come off soon, by God! I shall run amuck."

He said that before he had gone through his pass-book and his litter of
papers. Inadequate as the cause seems, it was that girl's voice and the
expression of her eyes that precipitated his discontent. But certainly
the discovery that he had no longer even one hundred thousand pounds'
worth of realisable property behind him was the poison that made the
wound deadly.

It was the next day after this that he exploded upon Woodhouse and
his workmen, and thereafter his bearing was consistently grim for
three weeks, and anxiety dwelt in Cheam and Ewell, Malden, Morden, and
Worcester Park, places that had thriven mightily on his experiments.

Four weeks after that first swearing of his, he stood with Woodhouse
by the reconstructed machine as it lay across the elevated railway,
by means of which it gained its initial impetus. The new propeller
glittered a brighter white than the rest of the machine, and a gilder,
obedient to a whim of Monson's, was picking out the aluminium bars
with gold. And looking down the long avenue between the ropes (gilded
now with the sunset), one saw red signals, and two miles away an
ant-hill of workmen busy altering the last falls of the run into a
rising slope.

"I'll _come_," said Woodhouse. "I'll come right enough. But I tell you
it's infernally foolhardy. If only you would give another year"--

"I tell you I won't. I tell you the thing works. I've given years
enough"--

"It's not that," said Woodhouse. "We're all right with the machine. But
it's the steering"--

"Haven't I been rushing, night and morning, backwards and forwards,
through this squirrel's cage? If the thing steers true here, it will
steer true all across England. It's just funk, I tell you, Woodhouse.
We could have gone a year ago. And besides"--

"Well?" said Woodhouse.

"The money!" snapped Monson over his shoulder.

"Hang it! I never thought of the money," said Woodhouse, and then,
speaking now in a very different tone to that with which he had said
the words before, he repeated, "I'll come. Trust me."

Monson turned suddenly, and saw all that Woodhouse had not the
dexterity to say, shining on his sunset-lit face. He looked for a
moment, then impulsively extended his hand. "Thanks," he said.

"All right," said Woodhouse, gripping the hand, and with a queer
softening of his features. "Trust me."

Then both men turned to the big apparatus that lay with its flat wings
extended upon the carrier, and stared at it meditatively. Monson,
guided perhaps by a photographic study of the flight of birds, and by
Lilienthal's methods, had gradually drifted from Maxim's shapes towards
the bird form again. The thing, however, was driven by a huge screw
behind in the place of the tail; and so hovering, which needs an almost
vertical adjustment of a flat tail, was rendered impossible. The body
of the machine was small, almost cylindrical, and pointed. Forward and
aft on the pointed ends were two small petroleum engines for the screw,
and the navigators sat deep in a canoe-like recess, the foremost one
steering, and being protected by a low screen, with two plate-glass
windows, from the blinding rush of air. On either side a monstrous flat
framework with a curved front border could be adjusted so as either to
lie horizontally, or to be tilted upward or down. These wings worked
rigidly together, or, by releasing a pin, one could be tilted through
a small angle independently of its fellow. The front edge of either
wing could also be shifted back so as to diminish the wing-area about
one-sixth. The machine was not only not designed to hover, but it was
also incapable of fluttering. Monson's idea was to get into the air
with the initial rush of the apparatus, and then to skim, much as a
playing-card may be skimmed, keeping up the rush by means of the screw
at the stern. Rooks and gulls fly enormous distances in that way with
scarcely a perceptible movement of the wings. The bird really drives
along on an aërial switchback. It glides slanting downward for a
space, until it has gained considerable momentum, and then altering
the inclination of its wings, glides up again almost to its original
altitude. Even a Londoner who has watched the birds in the aviary in
Regent's Park knows that.

But the bird is practising this art from the moment it leaves its nest.
It has not only the perfect apparatus, but the perfect instinct to
use it. A man off his feet has the poorest skill in balancing. Even
the simple trick of the bicycle costs him some hours of labour. The
instantaneous adjustments of the wings, the quick response to a passing
breeze, the swift recovery of equilibrium, the giddy, eddying movements
that require such absolute precision--all that he must learn, learn
with infinite labour and infinite danger, if ever he is to conquer
flying. The flying-machine that will start off some fine day, driven
by neat "little levers," with a nice open deck like a liner, and all
loaded up with bombshells and guns, is the easy dreaming of a literary
man. In lives and in treasure the cost of the conquest of the empire of
the air may even exceed all that has been spent in man's great conquest
of the sea. Certainly it will be costlier than the greatest war that
has ever devastated the world.

No one knew these things better than these two practical men. And they
knew they were in the front rank of the coming army. Yet there is
hope even in a forlorn hope. Men are killed outright in the reserves
sometimes, while others who have been left for dead in the thickest
corner crawl out and survive.

"If we miss these meadows"--said Woodhouse presently in his slow way.

"My dear chap," said Monson, whose spirits had been rising fitfully
during the last few days, "we mustn't miss these meadows. There's
a quarter of a square mile for us to hit, fences removed, ditches
levelled. We shall come down all right--rest assured. And if we don't"--

"Ah!" said Woodhouse. "If we don't!"

Before the day of the start, the newspaper people got wind of the
alterations at the northward end of the framework, and Monson was
cheered by a decided change in the comments Romeike forwarded him. "He
will be off some day," said the papers. "He will be off some day,"
said the South-Western season-ticket holders one to another; the
seaside excursionists, the Saturday-to-Monday trippers from Sussex
and Hampshire and Dorset and Devon, the eminent literary people from
Hazlemere, all remarked eagerly one to another, "He will be off
some day," as the familiar scaffolding came in sight. And actually,
one bright morning, in full view of the ten-past-ten train from
Basingstoke, Monson's flying-machine started on its journey.

They saw the carrier running swiftly along its rail, and the white and
gold screw spinning in the air. They heard the rapid rumble of wheels,
and a thud as the carrier reached the buffers at the end of its run.
Then a whirr as the Flying-Machine was shot forward into the networks.
All that the majority of them had seen and heard before. The thing went
with a drooping flight through the framework and rose again, and then
every beholder shouted, or screamed, or yelled, or shrieked after his
kind. For instead of the customary concussion and stoppage, the Flying
Machine flew out of its five years' cage like a bolt from a crossbow,
and drove slantingly upward into the air, curved round a little, so as
to cross the line, and soared in the direction of Wimbledon Common.

It seemed to hang momentarily in the air and grow smaller, then it
ducked and vanished over the clustering blue tree-tops to the east of
Coombe Hill, and no one stopped staring and gasping until long after it
had disappeared.

That was what the people in the train from Basingstoke saw. If you had
drawn a line down the middle of that train, from engine to guard's
van, you would not have found a living soul on the opposite side to
the flying-machine. It was a mad rush from window to window as the
thing crossed the line. And the engine-driver and stoker never took
their eyes off the low hills about Wimbledon, and never noticed that
they had run clean through Coombe and Maiden and Raynes Park, until,
with returning animation, they found themselves pelting, at the most
indecent pace, into Wimbledon station.

From the moment when Monson had started the carrier with a "_Now!_"
neither he nor Woodhouse said a word. Both men sat with clenched
teeth. Monson had crossed the line with a curve that was too sharp,
and Woodhouse had opened and shut his white lips; but neither spoke.
Woodhouse simply gripped his seat, and breathed sharply through his
teeth, watching the blue country to the west rushing past, and down,
and away from him. Monson knelt at his post forward, and his hands
trembled on the spoked wheel that moved the wings. He could see
nothing before him but a mass of white clouds in the sky.

The machine went slanting upward, travelling with an enormous speed
still, but losing momentum every moment. The land ran away underneath
with diminishing speed.

"_Now!_" said Woodhouse at last, and with a violent effort Monson
wrenched over the wheel and altered the angle of the wings. The machine
seemed to hang for half a minute motionless in mid-air, and then he
saw the hazy blue house-covered hills of Kilburn and Hampstead jump
up before his eyes and rise steadily, until the little sunlit dome of
the Albert Hall appeared through his windows. For a moment he scarcely
understood the meaning of this upward rush of the horizon, but as the
nearer and nearer houses came into view, he realised what he had done.
He had turned the wings over too far, and they were swooping steeply
downward towards the Thames.

The thought, the question, the realisation were all the business of a
second of time. "Too much!" gasped Woodhouse. Monson brought the wheel
half-way back with a jerk, and forthwith the Kilburn and Hampstead
ridge dropped again to the lower edge of his windows. They had been
a thousand feet above Coombe and Maiden station; fifty seconds after
they whizzed, at a frightful pace, not eighty feet above the East
Putney station, on the Metropolitan District line, to the screaming
astonishment of a platformful of people. Monson flung up the vans
against the air, and over Fulham they rushed up their atmospheric
switchback again, steeply--too steeply. The 'buses went floundering
across the Fulham Road, the people yelled.

Then down again, too steeply still, and the distant trees and houses
about Primrose Hill leapt up across Monson's window, and then suddenly
he saw straight before him the greenery of Kensington Gardens and the
towers of the Imperial Institute. They were driving straight down upon
South Kensington. The pinnacles of the Natural History Museum rushed up
into view. There came one fatal second of swift thought, a moment of
hesitation. Should he try and clear the towers, or swerve eastward?

He made a hesitating attempt to release the right wing, left the catch
half released, and gave a frantic clutch at the wheel.

The nose of the machine seemed to leap up before him. The wheel pressed
his hand with irresistible force, and jerked itself out of his control.

Woodhouse, sitting crouched together, gave a hoarse cry, and sprang up
towards Monson. "Too far!" he cried, and then he was clinging to the
gunwale for dear life, and Monson had been jerked clean overhead, and
was falling backwards upon him.

So swiftly had the thing happened that barely a quarter of the people
going to and fro in Hyde Park, and Brompton Road, and the Exhibition
Road saw anything of the aërial catastrophe. A distant winged shape
had appeared above the clustering houses to the south, had fallen
and risen, growing larger as it did so; had swooped swiftly down
towards the Imperial Institute, a broad spread of flying wings, had
swept round in a quarter circle, dashed eastward, and then suddenly
sprang vertically into the air. A black object shot out of it, and
came spinning downward. A man! Two men clutching each other! They came
whirling down, separated as they struck the roof of the Students' Club,
and bounded off into the green bushes on its southward side.

For perhaps half a minute, the pointed stem of the big machine still
pierced vertically upward, the screw spinning desperately. For one
brief instant, that yet seemed an age to all who watched, it had hung
motionless in mid-air. Then a spout of yellow flame licked up its
length from the stern engine, and swift, swifter, swifter, and flaring
like a rocket, it rushed down upon the solid mass of masonry which was
formerly the Royal College of Science. The big screw of white and gold
touched the parapet, and crumpled up like wet linen. Then the blazing
spindle-shaped body smashed and splintered, smashing and splintering in
its fall, upon the north-westward angle of the building.

But the crash, the flame of blazing paraffin that shot heavenward from
the shattered engines of the machine, the crushed horrors that were
found in the garden beyond the Students' Club, the masses of yellow
parapet and red brick that fell headlong into the roadway, the running
to and fro of people like ants in a broken ant-hill, the galloping of
fire-engines, the gathering of crowds--all these things do not belong
to this story, which was written only to tell how the first of all
successful flying-machines was launched and flew. Though he failed, and
failed disastrously, the record of Monson's work remains--a sufficient
monument--to guide the next of that band of gallant experimentalists
who will sooner or later master this great problem of flying. And
between Worcester Park and Malden there still stands that portentous
avenue of iron-work, rusting now, and dangerous here and there, to
witness to the first desperate struggle for man's right of way through
the air.




THE STORY OF THE LATE MR. ELVESHAM


I set this story down, not expecting it will be believed, but, if
possible, to prepare a way of escape for the next victim. He, perhaps,
may profit by my misfortune. My own case, I know, is hopeless, and I am
now in some measure prepared to meet my fate.

My name is Edward George Eden. I was born at Trentham, in Staffordshire,
my father being employed in the gardens there. I lost my mother when
I was three years old, and my father when I was five, my uncle,
George Eden, then adopting me as his own son. He was a single man,
self-educated, and well-known in Birmingham as an enterprising
journalist; he educated me generously, fired my ambition to succeed
in the world, and at his death, which happened four years ago, left
me his entire fortune, a matter of about five hundred pounds after
all outgoing charges were paid. I was then eighteen. He advised me
in his will to expend the money in completing my education. I had
already chosen the profession of medicine, and through his posthumous
generosity, and my good fortune in a scholarship competition, I became
a medical student at University College, London. At the time of the
beginning of my story I lodged at 11A University Street, in a little
upper room, very shabbily furnished, and draughty, overlooking the back
of Shoolbred's premises. I used this little room both to live in and
sleep in, because I was anxious to eke out my means to the very last
shillingsworth.

I was taking a pair of shoes to be mended at a shop in the Tottenham
Court Road when I first encountered the little old man with the yellow
face, with whom my life has now become so inextricably entangled. He
was standing on the kerb, and staring at the number on the door in
a doubtful way, as I opened it. His eyes--they were dull grey eyes,
and reddish under the rims--fell to my face, and his countenance
immediately assumed an expression of corrugated amiability.

"You come," he said, "apt to the moment. I had forgotten the number of
your house. How do you do, Mr. Eden?"

I was a little astonished at his familiar address, for I had never set
eyes on the man before. I was a little annoyed, too, at his catching me
with my boots under my arm. He noticed my lack of cordiality.

"Wonder who the deuce I am, eh? A friend, let me assure you. I have
seen you before, though you haven't seen me. Is there anywhere where I
can talk to you?"

I hesitated. The shabbiness of my room upstairs was not a matter for
every stranger. "Perhaps," said I, "we might walk down the street. I'm
unfortunately prevented"--My gesture explained the sentence before I
had spoken it.

"The very thing," he said, and faced this way and then that. "The
street? Which way shall we go?" I slipped my boots down in the passage.
"Look here!" he said abruptly; "this business of mine is a rigmarole.
Come and lunch with me, Mr. Eden. I'm an old man, a very old man, and
not good at explanations, and what with my piping voice and the clatter
of the traffic"--

He laid a persuasive skinny hand that trembled a little upon my arm.

I was not so old that an old man might not treat me to a lunch. Yet at
the same time I was not altogether pleased by this abrupt invitation.
"I had rather"--I began. "But _I_ had rather," he said, catching me
up, "and a certain civility is surely due to my grey hairs." And so I
consented, and went with him.

He took me to Blavitski's; I had to walk slowly to accommodate myself
to his paces; and over such a lunch as I had never tasted before,
he fended off my leading questions, and I took a better note of his
appearance. His clean-shaven face was lean and wrinkled, his shrivelled
lips fell over a set of false teeth, and his white hair was thin and
rather long; he seemed small to me,--though, indeed, most people seemed
small to me,--and his shoulders were rounded and bent. And watching
him, I could not help but observe that he too was taking note of me,
running his eyes, with a curious touch of greed in them, over me, from
my broad shoulders to my sun-tanned hands, and up to my freckled face
again. "And now," said he, as we lit our cigarettes, "I must tell you
of the business in hand.

"I must tell you, then, that I am an old man, a very old man." He
paused momentarily. "And it happens that I have money that I must
presently be leaving, and never a child have I to leave it to." I
thought of the confidence trick, and resolved I would be on the alert
for the vestiges of my five hundred pounds. He proceeded to enlarge on
his loneliness, and the trouble he had to find a proper disposition
of his money. "I have weighed this plan and that plan, charities,
institutions, and scholarships, and libraries, and I have come to this
conclusion at last,"--he fixed his eyes on my face,--"that I will find
some young fellow, ambitious, pure-minded, and poor, healthy in body
and healthy in mind, and, in short, make him my heir, give him all
that I have." He repeated, "Give him all that I have. So that he will
suddenly be lifted out of all the trouble and struggle in which his
sympathies have been educated, to freedom and influence."

I tried to seem disinterested. With a transparent hypocrisy, I said,
"And you want my help, my professional services, maybe, to find that
person."

He smiled, and looked at me over his cigarette, and I laughed at his
quiet exposure of my modest pretence.

"What a career such a man might have!" he said. "It fills me with envy
to think how I have accumulated that another man may spend--

"But there are conditions, of course, burdens to be imposed. He must,
for instance, take my name. You cannot expect everything without some
return. And I must go into all the circumstances of his life before I
can accept him. He _must_ be sound. I must know his heredity, how his
parents and grandparents died, have the strictest inquiries made into
his private morals"--

This modified my secret congratulations a little. "And do I understand,"
said I, "that I--?"

"Yes," he said, almost fiercely. "You. _You._"

I answered never a word. My imagination was dancing wildly, my innate
scepticism was useless to modify its transports. There was not a
particle of gratitude in my mind--I did not know what to say nor how to
say it. "But why me in particular?" I said at last.

He had chanced to hear of me from Professor Haslar, he said, as a
typically sound and sane young man, and he wished, as far as possible,
to leave his money where health and integrity were assured.

That was my first meeting with the little old man. He was mysterious
about himself; he would not give his name yet, he said, and after I had
answered some questions of his, he left me at the Blavitski portal.
I noticed that he drew a handful of gold coins from his pocket when
it came to paying for the lunch. His insistence upon bodily health
was curious. In accordance with an arrangement we had made I applied
that day for a life policy in the Loyal Insurance Company for a large
sum, and I was exhaustively overhauled by the medical advisers of that
company in the subsequent week. Even that did not satisfy him, and he
insisted I must be re-examined by the great Doctor Henderson. It was
Friday in Whitsun week before he came to a decision. He called me
down, quite late in the evening,--nearly nine it was,--from cramming
chemical equations for my Preliminary Scientific examination. He was
standing in the passage under the feeble gas-lamp, and his face was a
grotesque interplay of shadows. He seemed more bowed than when I had
first seen him, and his cheeks had sunk in a little.

His voice shook with emotion. "Everything is satisfactory, Mr. Eden,"
he said. "Everything is quite, quite satisfactory. And this night of
all nights, you must dine with me and celebrate your--accession." He
was interrupted by a cough. "You won't have long to wait, either," he
said, wiping his handkerchief across his lips, and gripping my hand
with his long bony claw that was disengaged. "Certainly not very long
to wait."

We went into the street and called a cab. I remember every incident of
that drive vividly, the swift, easy motion, the vivid contrast of gas
and oil and electric light, the crowds of people in the streets, the
place in Regent Street to which we went, and the sumptuous dinner we
were served with there. I was disconcerted at first by the well-dressed
waiter's glances at my rough clothes, bothered by the stones of the
olives, but as the champagne warmed my blood, my confidence revived. At
first the old man talked of himself. He had already told me his name in
the cab; he was Egbert Elvesham, the great philosopher, whose name I
had known since I was a lad at school. It seemed incredible to me that
this man, whose intelligence had so early dominated mine, this great
abstraction, should suddenly realise itself as this decrepit, familiar
figure. I daresay every young fellow who has suddenly fallen among
celebrities has felt something of my disappointment. He told me now of
the future that the feeble streams of his life would presently leave
dry for me, houses, copyrights, investments; I had never suspected that
philosophers were so rich. He watched me drink and eat with a touch of
envy. "What a capacity for living you have!" he said; and then, with a
sigh, a sigh of relief I could have thought it, "It will not be long."

"Ay," said I, my head swimming now with champagne; "I have a future
perhaps--of a passing agreeable sort, thanks to you. I shall now have
the honour of your name. But you have a past. Such a past as is worth
all my future."

He shook his head and smiled, as I thought, with half-sad appreciation
of my flattering admiration. "That future," he said, "would you
in truth change it?" The waiter came with liqueurs. "You will not
perhaps mind taking my name, taking my position, but would you
indeed--willingly--take my years?"

"With your achievements," said I gallantly.

He smiled again. "Kummel--both," he said to the waiter, and turned
his attention to a little paper packet he had taken from his pocket.
"This hour," said he, "this after-dinner hour is the hour of small
things. Here is a scrap of my unpublished wisdom." He opened the packet
with his shaking yellow fingers, and showed a little pinkish powder
on the paper. "This," said he--"well, you must guess what it is. But
Kummel--put but a dash of this powder in it--is Himmel." His large
greyish eyes watched mine with an inscrutable expression.

It was a bit of a shock to me to find this great teacher gave his mind
to the flavour of liqueurs. However, I feigned a great interest in his
weakness, for I was drunk enough for such small sycophancy.

He parted the powder between the little glasses, and, rising suddenly,
with a strange unexpected dignity, held out his hand towards me. I
imitated his action, and the glasses rang. "To a quick succession,"
said he, and raised his glass towards his lips.

"Not that," I said hastily. "Not that."

He paused, with the liqueur at the level of his chin, and his eyes
blazing into mine.

"To a long life," said I.

He hesitated. "To a long life," said he, with a sudden bark of
laughter, and with eyes fixed on one another we tilted the little
glasses. His eyes looked straight into mine, and as I drained the stuff
off, I felt a curiously intense sensation. The first touch of it set my
brain in a furious tumult; I seemed to feel an actual physical stirring
in my skull, and a seething humming filled my ears. I did not notice
the flavour in my mouth, the aroma that filled my throat; I saw only
the grey intensity of his gaze that burnt into mine. The draught, the
mental confusion, the noise and stirring in my head, seemed to last an
interminable time. Curious vague impressions of half-forgotten things
danced and vanished on the edge of my consciousness. At last he broke
the spell. With a sudden explosive sigh he put down his glass.

"Well?" he said.

"It's glorious," said I, though I had not tasted the stuff.

My head was spinning. I sat down. My brain was chaos. Then my
perception grew clear and minute as though I saw things in a concave
mirror. His manner seemed to have changed into something nervous and
hasty. He pulled out his watch and grimaced at it. "Eleven-seven! And
to-night I must--Seven--twenty-five. Waterloo! I must go at once." He
called for the bill, and struggled with his coat. Officious waiters
came to our assistance. In another moment I was wishing him good-bye,
over the apron of a cab, and still with an absurd feeling of minute
distinctness, as though--how can I express it?--I not only saw but
_felt_ through an inverted opera-glass.

"That stuff," he said. He put his hand to his forehead. "I ought not
to have given it to you. It will make your head split to-morrow.
Wait a minute. Here." He handed me out a little flat thing like a
seidlitz-powder. "Take that in water as you are going to bed. The other
thing was a drug. Not till you're ready to go to bed, mind. It will
clear your head. That's all. One more shake--Futurus!"

I gripped his shrivelled claw. "Good-bye," he said, and by the droop of
his eyelids I judged he too was a little under the influence of that
brain-twisting cordial.

He recollected something else with a start, felt in his breast-pocket,
and produced another packet, this time a cylinder the size and shape of
a shaving-stick. "Here," said he. "I'd almost forgotten. Don't open
this until I come to-morrow--but take it now."

It was so heavy that I well-nigh dropped it. "All ri'!" said I, and he
grinned at me through the cab window as the cabman flicked his horse
into wakefulness. It was a white packet he had given me, with red seals
at either end and along its edge. "If this isn't money," said I, "it's
platinum or lead."

I stuck it with elaborate care into my pocket, and with a whirling
brain walked home through the Regent Street loiterers and the dark
back streets beyond Portland Road. I remember the sensations of that
walk very vividly, strange as they were. I was still so far myself
that I could notice my strange mental state, and wonder whether this
stuff I had had was opium--a drug beyond my experience. It is hard now
to describe the peculiarity of my mental strangeness--mental doubling
vaguely expresses it. As I was walking up Regent Street I found in my
mind a queer persuasion that it was Waterloo station, and had an odd
impulse to get into the Polytechnic as a man might get into a train. I
put a knuckle in my eye, and it was Regent Street. How can I express
it? You see a skilful actor looking quietly at you, he pulls a grimace,
and lo!--another person. Is it too extravagant if I tell you that it
seemed to me as if Regent Street had, for the moment, done that? Then,
being persuaded it was Regent Street again, I was oddly muddled about
some fantastic reminiscences that cropped up. "Thirty years ago,"
thought I, "it was here that I quarrelled with my brother." Then I
burst out laughing, to the astonishment and encouragement of a group of
night prowlers. Thirty years ago I did not exist, and never in my life
had I boasted a brother. The stuff was surely liquid folly, for the
poignant regret for that lost brother still clung to me. Along Portland
Road the madness took another turn. I began to recall vanished shops,
and to compare the street with what it used to be. Confused, troubled
thinking is comprehensible enough after the drink I had taken, but what
puzzled me were these curiously vivid phantasm memories that had crept
into my mind, and not only the memories that had crept in, but also
the memories that had slipped out. I stopped opposite Stevens', the
natural history dealer's, and cudgelled my brains to think what he had
to do with me. A 'bus went by, and sounded exactly like the rumbling
of a train. I seemed to be dipped into some dark, remote pit for the
recollection. "Of course," said I, at last, "he has promised me three
frogs to-morrow. Odd I should have forgotten."

Do they still show children dissolving views? In those I remember one
view would begin like a faint ghost, and grow and oust another. In
just that way it seemed to me that a ghostly set of new sensations was
struggling with those of my ordinary self.

I went on through Euston Road to Tottenham Court Road, puzzled, and a
little frightened, and scarcely noticed the unusual way I was taking,
for commonly I used to cut through the intervening network of back
streets. I turned into University Street, to discover that I had
forgotten my number. Only by a strong effort did I recall 11A, and
even then it seemed to me that it was a thing some forgotten person
had told me. I tried to steady my mind by recalling the incidents of
the dinner, and for the life of me I could conjure up no picture of
my host's face; I saw him only as a shadowy outline, as one might see
oneself reflected in a window through which one was looking. In his
place, however, I had a curious exterior vision of myself sitting at a
table, flushed, bright-eyed, and talkative.

"I must take this other powder," said I. "This is getting impossible."

I tried the wrong side of the hall for my candle and the matches, and
had a doubt of which landing my room might be on. "I'm drunk," I said,
"that's certain," and blundered needlessly on the staircase to sustain
the proposition.

At the first glance my room seemed unfamiliar. "What rot!" I said, and
stared about me. I seemed to bring myself back by the effort, and the
odd phantasmal quality passed into the concrete familiar. There was the
old glass still, with my notes on the albumens stuck in the corner of
the frame, my old everyday suit of clothes pitched about the floor. And
yet it was not so real after all. I felt an idiotic persuasion trying
to creep into my mind, as it were, that I was in a railway carriage in
a train just stopping, that I was peering out of the window at some
unknown station. I gripped the bed-rail firmly to reassure myself.
"It's clairvoyance, perhaps," I said. "I must write to the Psychical
Research Society."

I put the rouleau on my dressing-table, sat on my bed and began to
take off my boots. It was as if the picture of my present sensations
was painted over some other picture that was trying to show through.
"Curse it!" said I; "my wits are going, or am I in two places at once?"
Half-undressed, I tossed the powder into a glass and drank it off. It
effervesced, and became a fluorescent amber colour. Before I was in bed
my mind was already tranquillised. I felt the pillow at my cheek, and
thereupon I must have fallen asleep.

       *       *       *       *       *

I awoke abruptly out of a dream of strange beasts, and found myself
lying on my back. Probably everyone knows that dismal, emotional dream
from which one escapes, awake indeed, but strangely cowed. There was
a curious taste in my mouth, a tired feeling in my limbs, a sense of
cutaneous discomfort. I lay with my head motionless on my pillow,
expecting that my feeling of strangeness and terror would probably
pass away, and that I should then doze off again to sleep. But instead
of that, my uncanny sensations increased. At first I could perceive
nothing wrong about me. There was a faint light in the room, so faint
that it was the very next thing to darkness, and the furniture stood
out in it as vague blots of absolute darkness. I stared with my eyes
just over the bedclothes.

It came into my mind that someone had entered the room to rob me of my
rouleau of money, but after lying for some moments, breathing regularly
to simulate sleep, I realised this was mere fancy. Nevertheless, the
uneasy assurance of something wrong kept fast hold of me. With an
effort I raised my head from the pillow, and peered about me at the
dark. What it was I could not conceive. I looked at the dim shapes
around me, the greater and lesser darknesses that indicated curtains,
table, fireplace, bookshelves, and so forth. Then I began to perceive
something unfamiliar in the forms of the darkness. Had the bed turned
round? Yonder should be the bookshelves, and something shrouded and
pallid rose there, something that would not answer to the bookshelves,
however I looked at it. It was far too big to be my shirt thrown on a
chair.

Overcoming a childish terror, I threw back the bedclothes and thrust my
leg out of bed. Instead of coming out of my truckle-bed upon the floor,
I found my foot scarcely reached the edge of the mattress. I made
another step, as it were, and sat up on the edge of the bed. By the
side of my bed should be the candle, and the matches upon the broken
chair. I put out my hand and touched--nothing. I waved my hand in the
darkness, and it came against some heavy hanging, soft and thick in
texture, which gave a rustling noise at my touch. I grasped this and
pulled it; it appeared to be a curtain suspended over the head of my
bed.

I was now thoroughly awake, and beginning to realise that I was
in a strange room. I was puzzled. I tried to recall the overnight
circumstances, and I found them now, curiously enough, vivid in my
memory: the supper, my reception of the little packages, my wonder
whether I was intoxicated, my slow undressing, the coolness to my
flushed face of my pillow. I felt a sudden distrust. Was that last
night, or the night before? At anyrate, this room was strange to
me, and I could not imagine how I had got into it. The dim, pallid
outline was growing paler, and I perceived it was a window, with the
dark shape of an oval toilet-glass against the weak intimation of the
dawn that filtered through the blind. I stood up, and was surprised
by a curious feeling of weakness and unsteadiness. With trembling
hands outstretched, I walked slowly towards the window, getting,
nevertheless, a bruise on the knee from a chair by the way. I fumbled
round the glass, which was large, with handsome brass sconces, to find
the blind-cord. I could not find any. By chance I took hold of the
tassel, and with the click of a spring the blind ran up.

I found myself looking out upon a scene that was altogether strange
to me. The night was overcast, and through the flocculent grey of
the heaped clouds there filtered a faint half-light of dawn. Just at
the edge of the sky, the cloud-canopy had a blood-red rim. Below,
everything was dark and indistinct, dim hills in the distance, a vague
mass of buildings running up into pinnacles, trees like spilt ink, and
below the window a tracery of black bushes and pale grey paths. It was
so unfamiliar that for the moment I thought myself still dreaming. I
felt the toilet-table; it appeared to be made of some polished wood,
and was rather elaborately furnished--there were little cut-glass
bottles and a brush upon it. There was also a queer little object,
horse-shoe-shaped it felt, with smooth, hard projections, lying in a
saucer. I could find no matches nor candlestick.

I turned my eyes to the room again. Now the blind was up, faint
spectres of its furnishing came out of the darkness. There was a huge
curtained bed, and the fireplace at its foot had a large white mantel
with something of the shimmer of marble.

I leant against the toilet-table, shut my eyes and opened them again,
and tried to think. The whole thing was far too real for dreaming. I
was inclined to imagine there was still some hiatus in my memory, as a
consequence of my draught of that strange liqueur; that I had come into
my inheritance perhaps, and suddenly lost my recollection of everything
since my good fortune had been announced. Perhaps if I waited a little,
things would be clearer to me again. Yet my dinner with old Elvesham
was now singularly vivid and recent. The champagne, the observant
waiters, the powder, and the liqueurs--I could have staked my soul it
all happened a few hours ago.

And then occurred a thing so trivial and yet so terrible to me that I
shiver now to think of that moment. I spoke aloud. I said, "How the
devil did I get here?" ... _And the voice was not my own._

It was not my own, it was thin, the articulation was slurred, the
resonance of my facial bones was different. Then, to reassure myself
I ran one hand over the other, and felt loose folds of skin, the
bony laxity of age. "Surely," I said, in that horrible voice that
had somehow established itself in my throat, "surely this thing is a
dream!" Almost as quickly as if I did it involuntarily, I thrust my
fingers into my mouth. My teeth had gone. My finger-tips ran on the
flaccid surface of an even row of shrivelled gums. I was sick with
dismay and disgust.

I felt then a passionate desire to see myself, to realise at once in
its full horror the ghastly change that had come upon me. I tottered to
the mantel, and felt along it for matches. As I did so, a barking cough
sprang up in my throat, and I clutched the thick flannel nightdress I
found about me. There were no matches there, and I suddenly realised
that my extremities were cold. Sniffing and coughing, whimpering a
little, perhaps, I fumbled back to bed. "It is surely a dream," I
whimpered to myself as I clambered back, "surely a dream." It was a
senile repetition. I pulled the bedclothes over my shoulders, over my
ears, I thrust my withered hand under the pillow, and determined to
compose myself to sleep. Of course it was a dream. In the morning the
dream would be over, and I should wake up strong and vigorous again to
my youth and studies. I shut my eyes, breathed regularly, and, finding
myself wakeful, began to count slowly through the powers of three.

But the thing I desired would not come. I could not get to sleep.
And the persuasion of the inexorable reality of the change that had
happened to me grew steadily. Presently I found myself with my eyes
wide open, the powers of three forgotten, and my skinny fingers upon
my shrivelled gums. I was, indeed, suddenly and abruptly, an old man.
I had in some unaccountable manner fallen through my life and come to
old age, in some way I had been cheated of all the best of my life, of
love, of struggle, of strength, and hope. I grovelled into the pillow
and tried to persuade myself that such hallucination was possible.
Imperceptibly, steadily, the dawn grew clearer.

At last, despairing of further sleep, I sat up in bed and looked
about me. A chill twilight rendered the whole chamber visible. It
was spacious and well-furnished, better furnished than any room I
had ever slept in before. A candle and matches became dimly visible
upon a little pedestal in a recess. I threw back the bedclothes,
and, shivering with the rawness of the early morning, albeit it was
summer-time, I got out and lit the candle. Then, trembling horribly,
so that the extinguisher rattled on its spike, I tottered to the glass
and saw--_Elvesham's face!_ It was none the less horrible because I
had already dimly feared as much. He had already seemed physically
weak and pitiful to me, but seen now, dressed only in a coarse flannel
nightdress that fell apart and showed the stringy neck, seen now as
my own body, I cannot describe its desolate decrepitude. The hollow
cheeks, the straggling tail of dirty grey hair, the rheumy bleared
eyes, the quivering, shrivelled lips, the lower displaying a gleam of
the pink interior lining, and those horrible dark gums showing. You
who are mind and body together, at your natural years, cannot imagine
what this fiendish imprisonment meant to me. To be young and full of
the desire and energy of youth, and to be caught, and presently to be
crushed in this tottering ruin of a body....

But I wander from the course of my story. For some time I must have
been stunned at this change that had come upon me. It was daylight when
I did so far gather myself together as to think. In some inexplicable
way I had been changed, though how, short of magic, the thing had been
done, I could not say. And as I thought, the diabolical ingenuity of
Elvesham came home to me. It seemed plain to me that as I found myself
in his, so he must be in possession of _my_ body, of my strength, that
is, and my future. But how to prove it? Then, as I thought, the thing
became so incredible, even to me, that my mind reeled, and I had to
pinch myself, to feel my toothless gums, to see myself in the glass,
and touch the things about me, before I could steady myself to face the
facts again. Was all life hallucination? Was I indeed Elvesham, and he
me? Had I been dreaming of Eden overnight? Was there any Eden? But if
I was Elvesham, I should remember where I was on the previous morning,
the name of the town in which I lived, what happened before the dream
began. I struggled with my thoughts. I recalled the queer doubleness of
my memories overnight. But now my mind was clear. Not the ghost of any
memories but those proper to Eden could I raise.

"This way lies insanity!" I cried in my piping voice. I staggered to my
feet, dragged my feeble, heavy limbs to the washhand-stand, and plunged
my grey head into a basin of cold water. Then, towelling myself, I
tried again. It was no good. I felt beyond all question that I was
indeed Eden, not Elvesham. But Eden in Elvesham's body!

Had I been a man of any other age, I might have given myself up to my
fate as one enchanted. But in these sceptical days miracles do not pass
current. Here was some trick of psychology. What a drug and a steady
stare could do, a drug and a steady stare, or some similar treatment,
could surely undo. Men have lost their memories before. But to exchange
memories as one does umbrellas! I laughed. Alas! not a healthy laugh,
but a wheezing, senile titter. I could have fancied old Elvesham
laughing at my plight, and a gust of petulant anger, unusual to me,
swept across my feelings. I began dressing eagerly in the clothes I
found lying about on the floor, and only realised when I was dressed
that it was an evening suit I had assumed. I opened the wardrobe
and found some more ordinary clothes, a pair of plaid trousers, and
an old-fashioned dressing-gown. I put a venerable smoking-cap on my
venerable head, and, coughing a little from my exertions, tottered out
upon the landing.

It was then, perhaps, a quarter to six, and the blinds were closely
drawn and the house quite silent. The landing was a spacious one, a
broad, richly-carpeted staircase went down into the darkness of the
hall below, and before me a door ajar showed me a writing-desk, a
revolving bookcase, the back of a study chair, and a fine array of
bound books, shelf upon shelf.

"My study," I mumbled, and walked across the landing. Then at the sound
of my voice a thought struck me, and I went back to the bedroom and put
in the set of false teeth. They slipped in with the ease of old habit.
"That's better," said I, gnashing them, and so returned to the study.

The drawers of the writing-desk were locked. Its revolving top was also
locked. I could see no indications of the keys, and there were none in
the pockets of my trousers. I shuffled back at once to the bedroom,
and went through the dress suit, and afterwards the pockets of all the
garments I could find. I was very eager, and one might have imagined
that burglars had been at work, to see my room when I had done. Not
only were there no keys to be found, but not a coin, nor a scrap of
paper--save only the receipted bill of the overnight dinner.

A curious weariness asserted itself. I sat down and stared at the
garments flung here and there, their pockets turned inside out. My
first frenzy had already flickered out. Every moment I was beginning
to realise the immense intelligence of the plans of my enemy, to see
more and more clearly the hopelessness of my position. With an effort I
rose and hurried hobbling into the study again. On the staircase was a
housemaid pulling up the blinds. She stared, I think, at the expression
of my face. I shut the door of the study behind me, and, seizing a
poker, began an attack upon the desk. That is how they found me. The
cover of the desk was split, the lock smashed, the letters torn out of
the pigeon-holes and tossed about the room. In my senile rage I had
flung about the pens and other such light stationery, and overturned
the ink. Moreover, a large vase upon the mantel had got broken--I do
not know how. I could find no cheque-book, no money, no indications of
the slightest use for the recovery of my body. I was battering madly at
the drawers, when the butler, backed by two women-servants, intruded
upon me.

       *       *       *       *       *

That simply is the story of my change. No one will believe my frantic
assertions. I am treated as one demented, and even at this moment I
am under restraint. But I am sane, absolutely sane, and to prove it I
have sat down to write this story minutely as the things happened to
me. I appeal to the reader, whether there is any trace of insanity in
the style or method of the story he has been reading. I am a young man
locked away in an old man's body. But the clear fact is incredible to
everyone. Naturally I appear demented to those who will not believe
this, naturally I do not know the names of my secretaries, of the
doctors who come to see me, of my servants and neighbours, of this
town (wherever it is) where I find myself. Naturally I lose myself in
my own house, and suffer inconveniences of every sort. Naturally I ask
the oddest questions. Naturally I weep and cry out, and have paroxysms
of despair. I have no money and no cheque-book. The bank will not
recognise my signature, for I suppose that, allowing for the feeble
muscles I now have, my handwriting is still Eden's. These people about
me will not let me go to the bank personally. It seems, indeed, that
there is no bank in this town, and that I have an account in some part
of London. It seems that Elvesham kept the name of his solicitor secret
from all his household--I can ascertain nothing. Elvesham was, of
course, a profound student of mental science, and all my declarations
of the facts of the case merely confirm the theory that my insanity
is the outcome of overmuch brooding upon psychology. Dreams of the
personal identity indeed! Two days ago I was a healthy youngster,
with all life before me; now I am a furious old man, unkempt, and
desperate, and miserable, prowling about a great luxurious strange
house, watched, feared, and avoided as a lunatic by everyone about me.
And in London is Elvesham beginning life again in a vigorous body, and
with all the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of threescore and ten. He
has stolen my life.

What has happened I do not clearly know. In the study are volumes
of manuscript notes referring chiefly to the psychology of memory,
and parts of what may be either calculations or ciphers in symbols
absolutely strange to me. In some passages there are indications that
he was also occupied with the philosophy of mathematics. I take it he
has transferred the whole of his memories, the accumulation that makes
up his personality, from this old withered brain of his to mine, and,
similarly, that he has transferred mine to his discarded tenement.
Practically, that is, he has changed bodies. But how such a change
may be possible is without the range of my philosophy. I have been a
materialist for all my thinking life, but here, suddenly, is a clear
case of man's detachability from matter.

One desperate experiment I am about to try. I sit writing here
before putting the matter to issue. This morning, with the help of a
table-knife that I had secreted at breakfast, I succeeded in breaking
open a fairly obvious secret drawer in this wrecked writing-desk. I
discovered nothing save a little green glass phial containing a white
powder. Round the neck of the phial was a label, and thereon was
written this one word, "_Release_." This may be--is most probably,
poison. I can understand Elvesham placing poison in my way, and I
should be sure that it was his intention so to get rid of the only
living witness against him, were it not for this careful concealment.
The man has practically solved the problem of immortality. Save for the
spite of chance, he will live in my body until it has aged, and then,
again, throwing that aside, he will assume some other victim's youth
and strength. When one remembers his heartlessness, it is terrible to
think of the ever-growing experience, that.... How long has he been
leaping from body to body?... But I tire of writing. The powder appears
to be soluble in water. The taste is not unpleasant.

       *       *       *       *       *

There the narrative found upon Mr. Elvesham's desk ends. His dead body
lay between the desk and the chair. The latter had been pushed back,
probably by his last convulsions. The story was written in pencil,
and in a crazy hand, quite unlike his usual minute characters. There
remain only two curious facts to record. Indisputably there was some
connection between Eden and Elvesham, since the whole of Elvesham's
property was bequeathed to the young man. But he never inherited. When
Elvesham committed suicide, Eden was, strangely enough, already dead.
Twenty-four hours before, he had been knocked down by a cab and killed
instantly, at the crowded crossing at the intersection of Gower Street
and Euston Road. So that the only human being who could have thrown
light upon this fantastic narrative is beyond the reach of questions.
Without further comment I leave this extraordinary matter to the
reader's individual judgment.




IN THE ABYSS


The lieutenant stood in front of the steel sphere and gnawed a piece of
pine splinter. "What do you think of it, Steevens?" he asked.

"It's an idea," said Steevens, in the tone of one who keeps an open
mind.

"I believe it will smash--flat," said the lieutenant.

"He seems to have calculated it all out pretty well," said Steevens,
still impartial.

"But think of the pressure," said the lieutenant. "At the surface
of the water it's fourteen pounds to the inch, thirty feet down
it's double that; sixty, treble; ninety, four times; nine hundred,
forty times; five thousand, three hundred--that's a mile--it's two
hundred and forty times fourteen pounds; that's--let's see--thirty
hundredweight--a ton and a half, Steevens; _a ton and a half_ to the
square inch. And the ocean where he's going is five miles deep. That's
seven and a half"--

"Sounds a lot," said Steevens, "but it's jolly thick steel."

The lieutenant made no answer, but resumed his pine splinter. The
object of their conversation was a huge ball of steel, having an
exterior diameter of perhaps nine feet. It looked like the shot
for some Titanic piece of artillery. It was elaborately nested in a
monstrous scaffolding built into the framework of the vessel, and
the gigantic spars that were presently to sling it overboard gave
the stern of the ship an appearance that had raised the curiosity
of every decent sailor who had sighted it, from the Pool of London
to the Tropic of Capricorn. In two places, one above the other, the
steel gave place to a couple of circular windows of enormously thick
glass, and one of these, set in a steel frame of great solidity, was
now partially unscrewed. Both the men had seen the interior of this
globe for the first time that morning. It was elaborately padded with
air cushions, with little studs sunk between bulging pillows to work
the simple mechanism of the affair. Everything was elaborately padded,
even the Myers apparatus which was to absorb carbonic acid and replace
the oxygen inspired by its tenant, when he had crept in by the glass
manhole, and had been screwed in. It was so elaborately padded that a
man might have been fired from a gun in it with perfect safety. And it
had need to be, for presently a man was to crawl in through that glass
manhole, to be screwed up tightly, and to be flung overboard, and to
sink down--down--down, for five miles, even as the lieutenant said. It
had taken the strongest hold of his imagination; it made him a bore at
mess; and he found Steevens, the new arrival aboard, a godsend to talk
to about it, over and over again.

"It's my opinion," said the lieutenant, "that that glass will simply
bend in and bulge and smash, under a pressure of that sort. Daubrée
has made rocks run like water under big pressures--and, you mark my
words"--

"If the glass did break in," said Steevens, "what then?"

"The water would shoot in like a jet of iron. Have you ever felt a
straight jet of high pressure water? It would hit as hard as a bullet.
It would simply smash him and flatten him. It would tear down his
throat, and into his lungs; it would blow in his ears"--

"What a detailed imagination you have!" protested Steevens, who saw
things vividly.

"It's a simple statement of the inevitable," said the lieutenant.

"And the globe?"

"Would just give out a few little bubbles, and it would settle down
comfortably against the day of judgment, among the oozes and the bottom
clay--with poor Elstead spread over his own smashed cushions like
butter over bread."

He repeated this sentence as though he liked it very much. "Like butter
over bread," he said.

"Having a look at the jigger?" said a voice, and Elstead stood behind
them, spick and span in white, with a cigarette between his teeth,
and his eyes smiling out of the shadow of his ample hat-brim. "What's
that about bread and butter, Weybridge? Grumbling as usual about the
insufficient pay of naval officers? It won't be more than a day now
before I start. We are to get the slings ready to-day. This clean sky
and gentle swell is just the kind of thing for swinging off a dozen
tons of lead and iron; isn't it?"

"It won't affect you much," said Weybridge.

"No. Seventy or eighty feet down, and I shall be there in a dozen
seconds, there's not a particle moving, though the wind shriek itself
hoarse up above, and the water lifts halfway to the clouds. No. Down
there"-- He moved to the side of the ship and the other two followed
him. All three leant forward on their elbows and stared down into the
yellow-green water.

"_Peace_," said Elstead, finishing his thought aloud.

"Are you dead certain that clockwork will act?" asked Weybridge
presently.

"It has worked thirty-five times," said Elstead. "It's bound to work."

"But if it doesn't?"

"Why shouldn't it?"

"I wouldn't go down in that confounded thing," said Weybridge, "for
twenty thousand pounds."

"Cheerful chap you are," said Elstead, and spat sociably at a bubble
below.

"I don't understand yet how you mean to work the thing," said Steevens.

"In the first place, I'm screwed into the sphere," said Elstead, "and
when I've turned the electric light off and on three times to show I'm
cheerful, I'm swung out over the stern by that crane, with all those
big lead sinkers slung below me. The top lead weight has a roller
carrying a hundred fathoms of strong cord rolled up, and that's all
that joins the sinkers to the sphere, except the slings that will be
cut when the affair is dropped. We use cord rather than wire rope
because it's easier to cut and more buoyant--necessary points, as you
will see.

"Through each of these lead weights you notice there is a hole, and
an iron rod will be run through that and will project six feet on the
lower side. If that rod is rammed up from below, it knocks up a lever
and sets the clockwork in motion at the side of the cylinder on which
the cord winds.

"Very well. The whole affair is lowered gently into the water, and the
slings are cut. The sphere floats,--with the air in it, it's lighter
than water,--but the lead weights go down straight and the cord runs
out. When the cord is all paid out, the sphere will go down too, pulled
down by the cord."

"But why the cord?" asked Steevens. "Why not fasten the weights
directly to the sphere?"

"Because of the smash down below. The whole affair will go rushing
down, mile after mile, at a headlong pace at last. It would be knocked
to pieces on the bottom if it wasn't for that cord. But the weights
will hit the bottom, and directly they do, the buoyancy of the sphere
will come into play. It will go on sinking slower and slower; come to a
stop at last, and then begin to float upward again.

"That's where the clockwork comes in. Directly the weights smash
against the sea bottom, the rod will be knocked through and will kick
up the clockwork, and the cord will be rewound on the reel. I shall be
lugged down to the sea bottom. There I shall stay for half an hour,
with the electric light on, looking about me. Then the clockwork
will release a spring knife, the cord will be cut, and up I shall
rush again, like a soda-water bubble. The cord itself will help the
flotation."

"And if you should chance to hit a ship?" said Weybridge.

"I should come up at such a pace, I should go clean through it," said
Elstead, "like a cannon ball. You needn't worry about that."

"And suppose some nimble crustacean should wriggle into your
clockwork"--

"It would be a pressing sort of invitation for me to stop," said
Elstead, turning his back on the water and staring at the sphere.

       *       *       *       *       *

They had swung Elstead overboard by eleven o'clock. The day was
serenely bright and calm, with the horizon lost in haze. The electric
glare in the little upper compartment beamed cheerfully three times.
Then they let him down slowly to the surface of the water, and a sailor
in the stern chains hung ready to cut the tackle that held the lead
weights and the sphere together. The globe, which had looked so large
on deck, looked the smallest thing conceivable under the stern of the
ship. It rolled a little, and its two dark windows, which floated
uppermost, seemed like eyes turned up in round wonderment at the people
who crowded the rail. A voice wondered how Elstead liked the rolling.
"Are you ready?" sang out the commander. "Ay, ay, sir!" "Then let her
go!"

The rope of the tackle tightened against the blade and was cut, and an
eddy rolled over the globe in a grotesquely helpless fashion. Someone
waved a handkerchief, someone else tried an ineffectual cheer, a middy
was counting slowly, "Eight, nine, ten!" Another roll, then with a jerk
and a splash the thing righted itself.

It seemed to be stationary for a moment, to grow rapidly smaller, and
then the water closed over it, and it became visible, enlarged by
refraction and dimmer, below the surface. Before one could count three
it had disappeared. There was a flicker of white light far down in the
water, that diminished to a speck and vanished. Then there was nothing
but a depth of water going down into blackness, through which a shark
was swimming.

Then suddenly the screw of the cruiser began to rotate, the water was
crickled, the shark disappeared in a wrinkled confusion, and a torrent
of foam rushed across the crystalline clearness that had swallowed up
Elstead. "What's the idee?" said one A.B. to another.

"We're going to lay off about a couple of miles, 'fear he should hit us
when he comes up," said his mate.

The ship steamed slowly to her new position. Aboard her almost everyone
who was unoccupied remained watching the breathing swell into which
the sphere had sunk. For the next half-hour it is doubtful if a word
was spoken that did not bear directly or indirectly on Elstead. The
December sun was now high in the sky, and the heat very considerable.

"He'll be cold enough down there," said Weybridge. "They say that below
a certain depth sea water's always just about freezing."

"Where'll he come up?" asked Steevens. "I've lost my bearings."

"That's the spot," said the commander, who prided himself on his
omniscience. He extended a precise finger south-eastward. "And this, I
reckon, is pretty nearly the moment," he said. "He's been thirty-five
minutes."

"How long does it take to reach the bottom of the ocean?" asked
Steevens.

"For a depth of five miles, and reckoning--as we did--an acceleration
of two feet per second, both ways, is just about three-quarters of a
minute."

"Then he's overdue," said Weybridge.

"Pretty nearly," said the commander. "I suppose it takes a few minutes
for that cord of his to wind in."

"I forgot that," said Weybridge, evidently relieved.

And then began the suspense. A minute slowly dragged itself out, and no
sphere shot out of the water. Another followed, and nothing broke the
low oily swell. The sailors explained to one another that little point
about the winding-in of the cord. The rigging was dotted with expectant
faces. "Come up, Elstead!" called one hairy-chested salt impatiently,
and the others caught it up, and shouted as though they were waiting
for the curtain of a theatre to rise.

The commander glanced irritably at them.

"Of course, if the acceleration's less than two," he said, "he'll
be all the longer. We aren't absolutely certain that was the proper
figure. I'm no slavish believer in calculations."

Steevens agreed concisely. No one on the quarter-deck spoke for a
couple of minutes. Then Steevens' watchcase clicked.

When, twenty-one minutes after, the sun reached the zenith, they were
still waiting for the globe to reappear, and not a man aboard had
dared to whisper that hope was dead. It was Weybridge who first gave
expression to that realisation. He spoke while the sound of eight bells
still hung in the air. "I always distrusted that window," he said quite
suddenly to Steevens.

"Good God!" said Steevens; "you don't think--?"

"Well!" said Weybridge, and left the rest to his imagination.

"I'm no great believer in calculations myself," said the commander
dubiously, "so that I'm not altogether hopeless yet." And at midnight
the gunboat was steaming slowly in a spiral round the spot where
the globe had sunk, and the white beam of the electric light fled
and halted and swept discontentedly onward again over the waste of
phosphorescent waters under the little stars.

"If his window hasn't burst and smashed him," said Weybridge, "then
it's a cursed sight worse, for his clockwork has gone wrong, and he's
alive now, five miles under our feet, down there in the cold and dark,
anchored in that little bubble of his, where never a ray of light has
shone or a human being lived, since the waters were gathered together.
He's there without food, feeling hungry and thirsty and scared,
wondering whether he'll starve or stifle. Which will it be? The Myers
apparatus is running out, I suppose. How long do they last?"

"Good heavens!" he exclaimed; "what little things we are! What daring
little devils! Down there, miles and miles of water--all water, and
all this empty water about us and this sky. Gulfs!" He threw his hands
out, and as he did so, a little white streak swept noiselessly up the
sky, travelled more slowly, stopped, became a motionless dot, as though
a new star had fallen up into the sky. Then it went sliding back again
and lost itself amidst the reflections of the stars and the white haze
of the sea's phosphorescence.

At the sight he stopped, arm extended and mouth open. He shut his
mouth, opened it again, and waved his arms with an impatient gesture.
Then he turned, shouted "El-stead ahoy!" to the first watch, and
went at a run to Lindley and the search-light. "I saw him," he said.
"Starboard there! His light's on, and he's just shot out of the water.
Bring the light round. We ought to see him drifting, when he lifts on
the swell."

But they never picked up the explorer until dawn. Then they almost ran
him down. The crane was swung out and a boat's crew hooked the chain
to the sphere. When they had shipped the sphere, they unscrewed the
manhole and peered into the darkness of the interior (for the electric
light chamber was intended to illuminate the water about the sphere,
and was shut off entirely from its general cavity).

The air was very hot within the cavity, and the indiarubber at the lip
of the manhole was soft. There was no answer to their eager questions
and no sound of movement within. Elstead seemed to be lying motionless,
crumpled up in the bottom of the globe. The ship's doctor crawled in
and lifted him out to the men outside. For a moment or so they did not
know whether Elstead was alive or dead. His face, in the yellow light
of the ship's lamps, glistened with perspiration. They carried him down
to his own cabin.

He was not dead, they found, but in a state of absolute nervous
collapse, and besides cruelly bruised. For some days he had to lie
perfectly still. It was a week before he could tell his experiences.

Almost his first words were that he was going down again. The sphere
would have to be altered, he said, in order to allow him to throw off
the cord if need be, and that was all. He had had the most marvellous
experience. "You thought I should find nothing but ooze," he said. "You
laughed at my explorations, and I've discovered a new world!" He told
his story in disconnected fragments, and chiefly from the wrong end, so
that it is impossible to re-tell it in his words. But what follows is
the narrative of his experience.

It began atrociously, he said. Before the cord ran out, the thing kept
rolling over. He felt like a frog in a football. He could see nothing
but the crane and the sky overhead, with an occasional glimpse of the
people on the ship's rail. He couldn't tell a bit which way the thing
would roll next. Suddenly he would find his feet going up, and try to
step, and over he went rolling, head over heels, and just anyhow, on
the padding. Any other shape would have been more comfortable, but
no other shape was to be relied upon under the huge pressure of the
nethermost abyss.

Suddenly the swaying ceased; the globe righted, and when he had
picked himself up, he saw the water all about him greeny-blue, with
an attenuated light filtering down from above, and a shoal of little
floating things went rushing up past him, as it seemed to him, towards
the light. And even as he looked, it grew darker and darker, until
the water above was as dark as the midnight sky, albeit of a greener
shade, and the water below black. And little transparent things in the
water developed a faint glint of luminosity, and shot past him in faint
greenish streaks.

And the feeling of falling! It was just like the start of a lift, he
said, only it kept on. One has to imagine what that means, that keeping
on. It was then of all times that Elstead repented of his adventure. He
saw the chances against him in an altogether new light. He thought of
the big cuttlefish people knew to exist in the middle waters, the kind
of things they find half digested in whales at times, or floating dead
and rotten and half eaten by fish. Suppose one caught hold and wouldn't
let go. And had the clockwork really been sufficiently tested? But
whether he wanted to go on or to go back mattered not the slightest now.

In fifty seconds everything was as black as night outside, except where
the beam from his light struck through the waters, and picked out every
now and then some fish or scrap of sinking matter. They flashed by too
fast for him to see what they were. Once he thinks he passed a shark.
And then the sphere began to get hot by friction against the water.
They had underestimated this, it seems.

The first thing he noticed was that he was perspiring, and then he
heard a hissing growing louder under his feet, and saw a lot of little
bubbles--very little bubbles they were--rushing upward like a fan
through the water outside. Steam! He felt the window, and it was hot.
He turned on the minute glow-lamp that lit his own cavity, looked at
the padded watch by the studs, and saw he had been travelling now for
two minutes. It came into his head that the window would crack through
the conflict of temperatures, for he knew the bottom water is very near
freezing.

Then suddenly the floor of the sphere seemed to press against his feet,
the rush of bubbles outside grew slower and slower, and the hissing
diminished. The sphere rolled a little. The window had not cracked,
nothing had given, and he knew that the dangers of sinking, at anyrate,
were over.

In another minute or so he would be on the floor of the abyss. He
thought, he said, of Steevens and Weybridge and the rest of them five
miles overhead, higher to him than the very highest clouds that ever
floated over land are to us, steaming slowly and staring down and
wondering what had happened to him.

He peered out of the window. There were no more bubbles now, and the
hissing had stopped. Outside there was a heavy blackness--as black as
black velvet--except where the electric light pierced the empty water
and showed the colour of it--a yellow-green. Then three things like
shapes of fire swam into sight, following each other through the water.
Whether they were little and near or big and far off he could not tell.

Each was outlined in a bluish light almost as bright as the lights of
a fishing smack, a light which seemed to be smoking greatly, and all
along the sides of them were specks of this, like the lighter portholes
of a ship. Their phosphorescence seemed to go out as they came into
the radiance of his lamp, and he saw then that they were little fish
of some strange sort, with huge heads, vast eyes, and dwindling bodies
and tails. Their eyes were turned towards him, and he judged they were
following him down. He supposed they were attracted by his glare.

Presently others of the same sort joined them. As he went on down,
he noticed that the water became of a pallid colour, and that little
specks twinkled in his ray like motes in a sunbeam. This was probably
due to the clouds of ooze and mud that the impact of his leaden sinkers
had disturbed.

By the time he was drawn down to the lead weights he was in a dense fog
of white that his electric light failed altogether to pierce for more
than a few yards, and many minutes elapsed before the hanging sheets
of sediment subsided to any extent. Then, lit by his light and by the
transient phosphorescence of a distant shoal of fishes, he was able to
see under the huge blackness of the super-incumbent water an undulating
expanse of greyish-white ooze, broken here and there by tangled
thickets of a growth of sea lilies, waving hungry tentacles in the air.

Farther away were the graceful, translucent outlines of a group of
gigantic sponges. About this floor there were scattered a number of
bristling flattish tufts of rich purple and black, which he decided
must be some sort of sea-urchin, and small, large-eyed or blind things
having a curious resemblance, some to woodlice, and others to lobsters,
crawled sluggishly across the track of the light and vanished into the
obscurity again, leaving furrowed trails behind them.

Then suddenly the hovering swarm of little fishes veered about and came
towards him as a flight of starlings might do. They passed over him
like a phosphorescent snow, and then he saw behind them some larger
creature advancing towards the sphere.

At first he could see it only dimly, a faintly moving figure remotely
suggestive of a walking man, and then it came into the spray of light
that the lamp shot out. As the glare struck it, it shut its eyes,
dazzled. He stared in rigid astonishment.

It was a strange vertebrated animal. Its dark purple head was dimly
suggestive of a chameleon, but it had such a high forehead and such a
braincase as no reptile ever displayed before; the vertical pitch of
its face gave it a most extraordinary resemblance to a human being.

Two large and protruding eyes projected from sockets in chameleon
fashion, and it had a broad reptilian mouth with horny lips beneath its
little nostrils. In the position of the ears were two huge gill-covers,
and out of these floated a branching tree of coralline filaments,
almost like the tree-like gills that very young rays and sharks possess.

But the humanity of the face was not the most extraordinary thing about
the creature. It was a biped; its almost globular body was poised on a
tripod of two frog-like legs and a long thick tail, and its fore limbs,
which grotesquely caricatured the human hand, much as a frog's do,
carried a long shaft of bone, tipped with copper. The colour of the
creature was variegated; its head, hands, and legs were purple; but
its skin, which hung loosely upon it, even as clothes might do, was a
phosphorescent grey. And it stood there blinded by the light.

At last this unknown creature of the abyss blinked its eyes open,
and, shading them with its disengaged hand, opened its mouth and gave
vent to a shouting noise, articulate almost as speech might be, that
penetrated even the steel case and padded jacket of the sphere. How a
shouting may be accomplished without lungs Elstead does not profess to
explain. It then moved sideways out of the glare into the mystery of
shadow that bordered it on either side, and Elstead felt rather than
saw that it was coming towards him. Fancying the light had attracted
it, he turned the switch that cut off the current. In another moment
something soft dabbed upon the steel, and the globe swayed.

Then the shouting was repeated, and it seemed to him that a distant
echo answered it. The dabbing recurred, and the globe swayed and ground
against the spindle over which the wire was rolled. He stood in the
blackness and peered out into the everlasting night of the abyss.
And presently he saw, very faint and remote, other phosphorescent
quasi-human forms hurrying towards him.

Hardly knowing what he did, he felt about in his swaying prison for
the stud of the exterior electric light, and came by accident against
his own small glow-lamp in its padded recess. The sphere twisted, and
then threw him down; he heard shouts like shouts of surprise, and when
he rose to his feet, he saw two pairs of stalked eyes peering into the
lower window and reflecting his light.

In another moment hands were dabbing vigorously at his steel casing,
and there was a sound, horrible enough in his position, of the metal
protection of the clockwork being vigorously hammered. That, indeed,
sent his heart into his mouth, for if these strange creatures succeeded
in stopping that, his release would never occur. Scarcely had he
thought as much when he felt the sphere sway violently, and the floor
of it press hard against his feet. He turned off the small glow-lamp
that lit the interior, and sent the ray of the large light in the
separate compartment out into the water. The sea-floor and the man-like
creatures had disappeared, and a couple of fish chasing each other
dropped suddenly by the window.

He thought at once that these strange denizens of the deep sea had
broken the rope, and that he had escaped. He drove up faster and
faster, and then stopped with a jerk that sent him flying against the
padded roof of his prison. For half a minute, perhaps, he was too
astonished to think.

Then he felt that the sphere was spinning slowly, and rocking, and
it seemed to him that it was also being drawn through the water. By
crouching close to the window, he managed to make his weight effective
and roll that part of the sphere downward, but he could see nothing
save the pale ray of his light striking down ineffectively into the
darkness. It occurred to him that he would see more if he turned the
lamp off, and allowed his eyes to grow accustomed to the profound
obscurity.

In this he was wise. After some minutes the velvety blackness became a
translucent blackness, and then, far away, and as faint as the zodiacal
light of an English summer evening, he saw shapes moving below. He
judged these creatures had detached his cable, and were towing him
along the sea bottom.

And then he saw something faint and remote across the undulations of
the submarine plain, a broad horizon of pale luminosity that extended
this way and that way as far as the range of his little window
permitted him to see. To this he was being towed, as a balloon might be
towed by men out of the open country into a town. He approached it very
slowly, and very slowly the dim irradiation was gathered together into
more definite shapes.

It was nearly five o'clock before he came over this luminous area, and
by that time he could make out an arrangement suggestive of streets
and houses grouped about a vast roofless erection that was grotesquely
suggestive of a ruined abbey. It was spread out like a map below him.
The houses were all roofless enclosures of walls, and their substance
being, as he afterwards saw, of phosphorescent bones, gave the place an
appearance as if it were built of drowned moonshine.

Among the inner caves of the place waving trees of crinoid stretched
their tentacles, and tall, slender, glassy sponges shot like shining
minarets and lilies of filmy light out of the general glow of the
city. In the open spaces of the place he could see a stirring movement
as of crowds of people, but he was too many fathoms above them to
distinguish the individuals in those crowds.

Then slowly they pulled him down, and as they did so, the details of
the place crept slowly upon his apprehension. He saw that the courses
of the cloudy buildings were marked out with beaded lines of round
objects, and then he perceived that at several points below him, in
broad open spaces, were forms like the encrusted shapes of ships.

Slowly and surely he was drawn down, and the forms below him became
brighter, clearer, more distinct. He was being pulled down, he
perceived, towards the large building in the centre of the town, and he
could catch a glimpse ever and again of the multitudinous forms that
were lugging at his cord. He was astonished to see that the rigging of
one of the ships, which formed such a prominent feature of the place,
was crowded with a host of gesticulating figures regarding him, and
then the walls of the great building rose about him silently, and hid
the city from his eyes.

And such walls they were, of water-logged wood, and twisted wire-rope,
and iron spars, and copper, and the bones and skulls of dead men. The
skulls ran in zigzag lines and spirals and fantastic curves over the
building; and in and out of their eye-sockets, and over the whole
surface of the place, lurked and played a multitude of silvery little
fishes.

Suddenly his ears were filled with a low shouting and a noise like the
violent blowing of horns, and this gave place to a fantastic chant.
Down the sphere sank, past the huge pointed windows, through which he
saw vaguely a great number of these strange, ghostlike people regarding
him, and at last he came to rest, as it seemed, on a kind of altar that
stood in the centre of the place.

And now he was at such a level that he could see these strange people
of the abyss plainly once more. To his astonishment, he perceived that
they were prostrating themselves before him, all save one, dressed as
it seemed in a robe of placoid scales, and crowned with a luminous
diadem, who stood with his reptilian mouth opening and shutting, as
though he led the chanting of the worshippers.

A curious impulse made Elstead turn on his small glow-lamp again, so
that he became visible to these creatures of the abyss, albeit the
glare made them disappear forthwith into night. At this sudden sight
of him, the chanting gave place to a tumult of exultant shouts; and
Elstead, being anxious to watch them, turned his light off again, and
vanished from before their eyes. But for a time he was too blind to
make out what they were doing, and when at last he could distinguish
them, they were kneeling again. And thus they continued worshipping
him, without rest or intermission, for the space of three hours.

Most circumstantial was Elstead's account of this astounding city and
its people, these people of perpetual night, who have never seen sun
or moon or stars, green vegetation, nor any living, air-breathing
creatures, who know nothing of fire, nor any light but the
phosphorescent light of living things.

Startling as is his story, it is yet more startling to find that
scientific men, of such eminence as Adams and Jenkins, find nothing
incredible in it. They tell me they see no reason why intelligent,
water-breathing, vertebrated creatures, inured to a low temperature and
enormous pressure, and of such a heavy structure, that neither alive
nor dead would they float, might not live upon the bottom of the deep
sea, and quite unsuspected by us, descendants like ourselves of the
great Theriomorpha of the New Red Sandstone age.

We should be known to them, however, as strange, meteoric creatures,
wont to fall catastrophically dead out of the mysterious blackness of
their watery sky. And not only we ourselves, but our ships, our metals,
our appliances, would come raining down out of the night. Sometimes
sinking things would smite down and crush them, as if it were the
judgment of some unseen power above, and sometimes would come things of
the utmost rarity or utility, or shapes of inspiring suggestion. One
can understand, perhaps, something of their behaviour at the descent of
a living man, if one thinks what a barbaric people might do, to whom an
enhaloed, shining creature came suddenly out of the sky.

At one time or another Elstead probably told the officers of the
_Ptarmigan_ every detail of his strange twelve hours in the abyss. That
he also intended to write them down is certain, but he never did, and
so unhappily we have to piece together the discrepant fragments of his
story from the reminiscences of Commander Simmons, Weybridge, Steevens,
Lindley, and the others.

We see the thing darkly in fragmentary glimpses--the huge ghostly
building, the bowing, chanting people, with their dark chameleon-like
heads and faintly luminous clothing, and Elstead, with his light turned
on again, vainly trying to convey to their minds that the cord by which
the sphere was held was to be severed. Minute after minute slipped
away, and Elstead, looking at his watch, was horrified to find that he
had oxygen only for four hours more. But the chant in his honour kept
on as remorselessly as if it was the marching song of his approaching
death.

The manner of his release he does not understand, but to judge by the
end of cord that hung from the sphere, it had been cut through by
rubbing against the edge of the altar. Abruptly the sphere rolled over,
and he swept up, out of their world, as an ethereal creature clothed
in a vacuum would sweep through our own atmosphere back to its native
ether again. He must have torn out of their sight as a hydrogen bubble
hastens upward from our air. A strange ascension it must have seemed to
them.

The sphere rushed up with even greater velocity than, when weighted
with the lead sinkers, it had rushed down. It became exceedingly hot.
It drove up with the windows uppermost, and he remembers the torrent of
bubbles frothing against the glass. Every moment he expected this to
fly. Then suddenly something like a huge wheel seemed to be released
in his head, the padded compartment began spinning about him, and he
fainted. His next recollection was of his cabin, and of the doctor's
voice.

But that is the substance of the extraordinary story that Elstead
related in fragments to the officers of the _Ptarmigan_. He promised to
write it all down at a later date. His mind was chiefly occupied with
the improvement of his apparatus, which was effected at Rio.

It remains only to tell that on February 2, 1896, he made his second
descent into the ocean abyss, with the improvements his first
experience suggested. What happened we shall probably never know.
He never returned. The _Ptarmigan_ beat about over the point of his
submersion, seeking him in vain for thirteen days. Then she returned to
Rio, and the news was telegraphed to his friends. So the matter remains
for the present. But it is hardly probable that no further attempt
will be made to verify his strange story of these hitherto unsuspected
cities of the deep sea.




THE APPLE


"I must get rid of it," said the man in the corner of the carriage,
abruptly breaking the silence.

Mr. Hinchcliff looked up, hearing imperfectly. He had been lost in
the rapt contemplation of the college cap tied by a string to his
portmanteau handles--the outward and visible sign of his newly-gained
pedagogic position--in the rapt appreciation of the college cap and
the pleasant anticipations it excited. For Mr. Hinchcliff had just
matriculated at London University, and was going to be junior assistant
at the Holmwood Grammar School--a very enviable position. He stared
across the carriage at his fellow-traveller.

"Why not give it away?" said this person. "Give it away! Why not?"

He was a tall, dark, sunburnt man with a pale face. His arms were
folded tightly, and his feet were on the seat in front of him. He was
pulling at a lank black moustache. He stared hard at his toes.

"Why not?" he said.

Mr. Hinchcliff coughed.

The stranger lifted his eyes--they were curious, dark-grey eyes--and
stared blankly at Mr. Hinchcliff for the best part of a minute,
perhaps. His expression grew to interest.

"Yes," he said slowly. "Why not? And end it."

"I don't quite follow you, I'm afraid," said Mr. Hinchcliff, with
another cough.

"You don't quite follow me?" said the stranger quite mechanically,
his singular eyes wandering from Mr. Hinchcliff to the bag with its
ostentatiously displayed cap, and back to Mr. Hinchcliff's downy face.

"You're so abrupt, you know," apologised Mr Hinchcliff.

"Why shouldn't I?" said the stranger, following his thoughts. "You are
a student?" he said, addressing Mr. Hinchcliff.

"I am--by Correspondence--of the London University," said Mr.
Hinchcliff, with irrepressible pride, and feeling nervously at his tie.

"In pursuit of knowledge," said the stranger, and suddenly took his
feet off the seat, put his fist on his knees, and stared at Mr.
Hinchcliff as though he had never seen a student before. "Yes," he
said, and flung out an index finger. Then he rose, took a bag from
the hat-rack, and unlocked it. Quite silently he drew out something
round and wrapped in a quantity of silver-paper, and unfolded this
carefully. He held it out towards Mr. Hinchcliff--a small, very smooth,
golden-yellow fruit.

Mr. Hinchcliff's eyes and mouth were open. He did not offer to take
this object--if he was intended to take it.

"That," said this fantastic stranger, speaking very slowly, "is the
Apple of the Tree of Knowledge. Look at it--small, and bright, and
wonderful--Knowledge--and I am going to give it to you."

Mr. Hinchcliff's mind worked painfully for a minute, and then
the sufficient explanation, "Mad!" flashed across his brain, and
illuminated the whole situation. One humoured madmen. He put his head a
little on one side.

"The Apple of the Tree of Knowledge, eigh!" said Mr. Hinchcliff,
regarding it with a finely assumed air of interest, and then looking
at the interlocutor. "But don't you want to eat it yourself? And
besides--how did you come by it?"

"It never fades. I have had it now three months. And it is ever bright
and smooth and ripe and desirable, as you see it." He laid his hand
on his knee and regarded the fruit musingly. Then he began to wrap it
again in the papers, as though he had abandoned his intention of giving
it away.

"But how did you come by it?" said Mr. Hinchcliff, who had his
argumentative side. "And how do you know that it _is_ the Fruit of the
Tree?"

"I bought this fruit," said the stranger, "three months ago--for a
drink of water and a crust of bread. The man who gave it to me--because
I kept the life in him--was an Armenian. Armenia! that wonderful
country, the first of all countries, where the ark of the Flood
remains to this day, buried in the glaciers of Mount Ararat. This man,
I say, fleeing with others from the Kurds who had come upon them,
went up into desolate places among the mountains--places beyond the
common knowledge of men. And fleeing from imminent pursuit, they
came to a slope high among the mountain-peaks, green with a grass
like knife-blades, that cut and slashed most pitilessly at anyone
who went into it. The Kurds were close behind, and there was nothing
for it but to plunge in, and the worst of it was that the paths they
made through it at the price of their blood served for the Kurds to
follow. Every one of the fugitives was killed save this Armenian and
another. He heard the screams and cries of his friends, and the swish
of the grass about those who were pursuing them--it was tall grass
rising overhead. And then a shouting and answers, and when presently he
paused, everything was still. He pushed out again, not understanding,
cut and bleeding, until he came out on a steep slope of rocks below a
precipice, and then he saw the grass was all on fire, and the smoke of
it rose like a veil between him and his enemies."

The stranger paused. "Yes?" said Mr. Hinchcliff. "Yes?"

"There he was, all torn and bloody from the knife-blades of the grass,
the rocks blazing under the afternoon sun--the sky molten brass--and
the smoke of the fire driving towards him. He dared not stay there.
Death he did not mind, but torture! Far away beyond the smoke he heard
shouts and cries. Women screaming. So he went clambering up a gorge in
the rocks--everywhere were bushes with dry branches that stuck out like
thorns among the leaves--until he clambered over the brow of a ridge
that hid him. And then he met his companion, a shepherd, who had also
escaped. And, counting cold and famine and thirst as nothing against
the Kurds, they went on into the heights, and among the snow and ice.
They wandered three whole days.

"The third day came the vision. I suppose hungry men often do see
visions, but then there is this fruit." He lifted the wrapped globe in
his hand. "And I have heard it, too, from other mountaineers who have
known something of the legend. It was in the evening time, when the
stars were increasing, that they came down a slope of polished rock
into a huge dark valley all set about with strange, contorted trees,
and in these trees hung little globes like glow-worm spheres, strange
round yellow lights.

"Suddenly this valley was lit far away, many miles away, far down it,
with a golden flame marching slowly athwart it, that made the stunted
trees against it black as night, and turned the slopes all about them
and their figures to the likeness of fiery gold. And at the vision
they, knowing the legends of the mountains, instantly knew that it was
Eden they saw, or the sentinel of Eden, and they fell upon their faces
like men struck dead.

"When they dared to look again the valley was dark for a space, and
then the light came again--returning, a burning amber.

"At that the shepherd sprang to his feet, and with a shout began to run
down towards the light, but the other man was too fearful to follow
him. He stood stunned, amazed, and terrified, watching his companion
recede towards the marching glare. And hardly had the shepherd set out
when there came a noise like thunder, the beating of invisible wings
hurrying up the valley, and a great and terrible fear; and at that
the man who gave me the fruit turned--if he might still escape. And
hurrying headlong up the slope again, with that tumult sweeping after
him, he stumbled against one of these stunted bushes, and a ripe fruit
came off it into his hand. This fruit. Forthwith, the wings and the
thunder rolled all about him. He fell and fainted, and when he came to
his senses, he was back among the blackened ruins of his own village,
and I and the others were attending to the wounded. A vision? But the
golden fruit of the tree was still clutched in his hand. There were
others there who knew the legend, knew what that strange fruit might
be." He paused. "And this is it," he said.

It was a most extraordinary story to be told in a third-class carriage
on a Sussex railway. It was as if the real was a mere veil to the
fantastic, and here was the fantastic poking through. "Is it?" was all
Mr. Hinchcliff could say.

"The legend," said the stranger, "tells that those thickets of dwarfed
trees growing about the garden sprang from the apple that Adam carried
in his hand when he and Eve were driven forth. He felt something in
his hand, saw the half-eaten apple, and flung it petulantly aside.
And there they grow, in that desolate valley, girdled round with the
everlasting snows, and there the fiery swords keep ward against the
Judgment Day."

"But I thought these things were"--Mr. Hinchcliff
paused--"fables--parables rather. Do you mean to tell me that there in
Armenia"--

The stranger answered the unfinished question with the fruit in his
open hand.

"But you don't know," said Mr. Hinchcliff, "that that _is_ the fruit
of the Tree of Knowledge. The man may have had--a sort of mirage, say.
Suppose"--

"Look at it," said the stranger.

It was certainly a strange-looking globe, not really an apple, Mr.
Hinchcliff saw, and a curious glowing golden colour, almost as though
light itself was wrought into its substance. As he looked at it, he
began to see more vividly the desolate valley among the mountains, the
guarding swords of fire, the strange antiquities of the story he had
just heard. He rubbed a knuckle into his eye. "But"--said he.

"It has kept like that, smooth and full, three months. Longer than that
it is now by some days. No drying, no withering, no decay."

"And you yourself," said Mr. Hinchcliff, "really believe that"--

"Is the Forbidden Fruit."

There was no mistaking the earnestness of the man's manner and his
perfect sanity. "The Fruit of Knowledge," he said.

"Suppose it was?" said Mr. Hinchcliff, after a pause, still staring
at it. "But after all," said Mr. Hinchcliff, "it's not my kind of
knowledge--not the sort of knowledge. I mean, Adam and Eve have eaten
it already."

"We inherit their sins--not their knowledge," said the stranger.
"That would make it all clear and bright again. We should see
into everything, through everything, into the deepest meaning of
everything"--

"Why don't you eat it, then?" said Mr. Hinchcliff, with an inspiration.

"I took it intending to eat it," said the stranger. "Man has fallen.
Merely to eat again could scarcely"--

"Knowledge is power," said Mr. Hinchcliff.

"But is it happiness? I am older than you--more than twice as old.
Time after time I have held this in my hand, and my heart has
failed me at the thought of all that one might know, that terrible
lucidity-- Suppose suddenly all the world became pitilessly clear?"

"That, I think, would be a great advantage," said Mr. Hinchcliff, "on
the whole."

"Suppose you saw into the hearts and minds of everyone about you, into
their most secret recesses--people you loved, whose love you valued?"

"You'd soon find out the humbugs," said Mr. Hinchcliff, greatly struck
by the idea.

"And worse--to know yourself, bare of your most intimate illusions.
To see yourself in your place. All that your lusts and weaknesses
prevented your doing. No merciful perspective."

"That might be an excellent thing too. 'Know thyself,' you know."

"You are young," said the stranger.

"If you don't care to eat it, and it bothers you, why don't you throw
it away?"

"There again, perhaps, you will not understand me. To me, how could one
throw away a thing like that, glowing, wonderful? Once one has it, one
is bound. But, on the other hand, to _give_ it away! To give it away
to someone who thirsted after knowledge, who found no terror in the
thought of that clear perception"--

"Of course," said Mr. Hinchcliff thoughtfully, "it might be some sort
of poisonous fruit."

And then his eye caught something motionless, the end of a white board
black-lettered outside the carriage window. "--MWOOD," he saw. He
started convulsively. "Gracious!" said Mr. Hinchcliff. "Holmwood!"--and
the practical present blotted out the mystic realisations that had been
stealing upon him.

In another moment he was opening the carriage-door, portmanteau in
hand. The guard was already fluttering his green flag. Mr. Hinchcliff
jumped out. "Here!" said a voice behind him, and he saw the dark eyes
of the stranger shining and the golden fruit, bright and bare, held
out of the open carriage-door. He took it instinctively, the train was
already moving.

"_No!_" shouted the stranger, and made a snatch at it as if to take it
back.

"Stand away," cried a country porter, thrusting forward to close the
door. The stranger shouted something Mr. Hinchcliff did not catch, head
and arm thrust excitedly out of the window, and then the shadow of the
bridge fell on him, and in a trice he was hidden. Mr. Hinchcliff stood
astonished, staring at the end of the last waggon receding round the
bend, and with the wonderful fruit in his hand. For the fraction of
a minute his mind was confused, and then he became aware that two or
three people on the platform were regarding him with interest. Was he
not the new Grammar School master making his début? It occurred to him
that, so far as they could tell, the fruit might very well be the naïve
refreshment of an orange. He flushed at the thought, and thrust the
fruit into his side pocket, where it bulged undesirably. But there was
no help for it, so he went towards them, awkwardly concealing his sense
of awkwardness, to ask the way to the Grammar School, and the means of
getting his portmanteau and the two tin boxes which lay up the platform
thither. Of all the odd and fantastic yarns to tell a fellow!

His luggage could be taken on a truck for sixpence, he found, and he
could precede it on foot. He fancied an ironical note in the voices. He
was painfully aware of his contour.

The curious earnestness of the man in the train, and the glamour
of the story he told, had, for a time, diverted the current of Mr.
Hinchcliff's thoughts. It drove like a mist before his immediate
concerns. Fires that went to and fro! But the preoccupation of his
new position, and the impression he was to produce upon Holmwood
generally, and the school people in particular, returned upon him with
reinvigorating power before he left the station and cleared his mental
atmosphere. But it is extraordinary what an inconvenient thing the
addition of a soft and rather brightly-golden fruit, not three inches
in diameter, may prove to a sensitive youth on his best appearance.
In the pocket of his black jacket it bulged dreadfully, spoilt the
lines altogether. He passed a little old lady in black, and he felt
her eye drop upon the excrescence at once. He was wearing one glove
and carrying the other, together with his stick, so that to bear the
fruit openly was impossible. In one place, where the road into the
town seemed suitably secluded, he took his encumbrance out of his
pocket and tried it in his hat. It was just too large, the hat wobbled
ludicrously, and just as he was taking it out again, a butcher's boy
came driving round the corner.

"Confound it!" said Mr. Hinchcliff.

He would have eaten the thing, and attained omniscience there and
then, but it would seem so silly to go into the town sucking a juicy
fruit--and it certainly felt juicy. If one of the boys should come by,
it might do him a serious injury with his discipline so to be seen.
And the juice might make his face sticky and get upon his cuffs--or it
might be an acid juice as potent as lemon, and take all the colour out
of his clothes.

Then round a bend in the lane came two pleasant sunlit girlish figures.
They were walking slowly towards the town and chattering--at any
moment they might look round and see a hot-faced young man behind them
carrying a kind of phosphorescent yellow tomato! They would be sure to
laugh.

"_Hang!_" said Mr. Hinchcliff, and with a swift jerk sent the
encumbrance flying over the stone wall of an orchard that there abutted
on the road. As it vanished, he felt a faint twinge of loss that lasted
scarcely a moment. He adjusted the stick and glove in his hand, and
walked on, erect and self-conscious, to pass the girls.

       *       *       *       *       *

But in the darkness of the night Mr. Hinchcliff had a dream, and saw
the valley, and the flaming swords, and the contorted trees, and knew
that it really was the Apple of the Tree of Knowledge that he had
thrown regardlessly away. And he awoke very unhappy.

In the morning his regret had passed, but afterwards it returned and
troubled him; never, however, when he was happy or busily occupied. At
last, one moonlight night about eleven, when all Holmwood was quiet,
his regrets returned with redoubled force, and therewith an impulse to
adventure. He slipped out of the house and over the playground wall,
went through the silent town to Station Lane, and climbed into the
orchard where he had thrown the fruit. But nothing was to be found
of it there among the dewy grass and the faint intangible globes of
dandelion down.




UNDER THE KNIFE


"What if I die under it?" The thought recurred again and again, as I
walked home from Haddon's. It was a purely personal question. I was
spared the deep anxieties of a married man, and I knew there were few
of my intimate friends but would find my death troublesome chiefly on
account of their duty of regret. I was surprised indeed, and perhaps
a little humiliated, as I turned the matter over, to think how few
could possibly exceed the conventional requirement. Things came
before me stripped of glamour, in a clear dry light, during that walk
from Haddon's house over Primrose Hill. There were the friends of my
youth: I perceived now that our affection was a tradition, which we
foregathered rather laboriously to maintain. There were the rivals
and helpers of my later career: I suppose I had been cold-blooded or
undemonstrative--one perhaps implies the other. It may be that even the
capacity for friendship is a question of physique. There had been a
time in my own life when I had grieved bitterly enough at the loss of
a friend; but as I walked home that afternoon the emotional side of my
imagination was dormant. I could not pity myself, nor feel sorry for
my friends, nor conceive of them as grieving for me.

I was interested in this deadness of my emotional nature--no doubt
a concomitant of my stagnating physiology; and my thoughts wandered
off along the line it suggested. Once before, in my hot youth, I
had suffered a sudden loss of blood, and had been within an ace of
death. I remembered now that my affections as well as my passions had
drained out of me, leaving scarce anything but a tranquil resignation,
a dreg of self-pity. It had been weeks before the old ambitions,
and tendernesses, and all the complex moral interplay of a man, had
reasserted themselves. It occurred to me that the real meaning of
this numbness might be a gradual slipping away from the pleasure-pain
guidance of the animal man. It has been proven, I take it, as
thoroughly as anything can be proven in this world, that the higher
emotions, the moral feelings, even the subtle tendernesses of love, are
evolved from the elemental desires and fears of the simple animal: they
are the harness in which man's mental freedom goes. And it may be that,
as death overshadows us, as our possibility of acting diminishes, this
complex growth of balanced impulse, propensity, and aversion, whose
interplay inspires our acts, goes with it. Leaving what?

I was suddenly brought back to reality by an imminent collision with
a butcher-boy's tray. I found that I was crossing the bridge over the
Regent's Park Canal, which runs parallel with that in the Zoological
Gardens. The boy in blue had been looking over his shoulder at a black
barge advancing slowly, towed by a gaunt white horse. In the Gardens
a nurse was leading three happy little children over the bridge. The
trees were bright green; the spring hopefulness was still unstained by
the dusts of summer; the sky in the water was bright and clear, but
broken by long waves, by quivering bands of black, as the barge drove
through. The breeze was stirring; but it did not stir me as the spring
breeze used to do.

Was this dulness of feeling in itself an anticipation? It was curious
that I could reason and follow out a network of suggestion as clearly
as ever: so, at least, it seemed to me. It was calmness rather than
dulness that was coming upon me. Was there any ground for the belief in
the presentiment of death? Did a man near to death begin instinctively
to withdraw himself from the meshes of matter and sense, even before
the cold hand was laid upon his? I felt strangely isolated--isolated
without regret--from the life and existence about me. The children
playing in the sun and gathering strength and experience for the
business of life, the park-keeper gossiping with a nursemaid, the
nursing mother, the young couple intent upon each other as they passed
me, the trees by the wayside spreading new pleading leaves to the
sunlight, the stir in their branches--I had been part of it all, but I
had nearly done with it now.

Some way down the Broad Walk I perceived that I was tired, and that my
feet were heavy. It was hot that afternoon, and I turned aside and sat
down on one of the green chairs that line the way. In a minute I had
dozed into a dream, and the tide of my thoughts washed up a vision
of the resurrection. I was still sitting in the chair, but I thought
myself actually dead, withered, tattered, dried, one eye (I saw) pecked
out by birds. "Awake!" cried a voice; and incontinently the dust of the
path and the mould under the grass became insurgent. I had never before
thought of Regent's Park as a cemetery, but now, through the trees,
stretching as far as eye could see, I beheld a flat plain of writhing
graves and heeling tombstones. There seemed to be some trouble: the
rising dead appeared to stifle as they struggled upward, they bled in
their struggles, the red flesh was tattered away from the white bones.
"Awake!" cried a voice; but I determined I would not rise to such
horrors. "Awake!" They would not let me alone. "Wike up!" said an angry
voice. A cockney angel! The man who sells the tickets was shaking me,
demanding my penny.

I paid my penny, pocketed my ticket, yawned, stretched my legs, and,
feeling now rather less torpid, got up and walked on towards Langham
Place. I speedily lost myself again in a shifting maze of thoughts
about death. Going across Marylebone Road into that crescent at the end
of Langham Place, I had the narrowest escape from the shaft of a cab,
and went on my way with a palpitating heart and a bruised shoulder. It
struck me that it would have been curious if my meditations on my death
on the morrow had led to my death that day.

But I will not weary you with more of my experiences that day and
the next. I knew more and more certainly that I should die under the
operation; at times I think I was inclined to pose to myself. The
doctors were coming at eleven, and I did not get up. It seemed scarce
worth while to trouble about washing and dressing, and though I read
my newspapers and the letters that came by the first post, I did not
find them very interesting. There was a friendly note from Addison,
my old school friend, calling my attention to two discrepancies and
a printer's error in my new book, with one from Langridge venting
some vexation over Minton. The rest were business communications. I
breakfasted in bed. The glow of pain at my side seemed more massive.
I knew it was pain, and yet, if you can understand, I did not find it
very painful. I had been awake and hot and thirsty in the night, but in
the morning bed felt comfortable. In the night-time I had lain thinking
of things that were past; in the morning I dozed over the question of
immortality. Haddon came, punctual to the minute, with a neat black
bag; and Mowbray soon followed. Their arrival stirred me up a little. I
began to take a more personal interest in the proceedings. Haddon moved
the little octagonal table close to the bedside, and, with his broad
black back to me, began taking things out of his bag. I heard the light
click of steel upon steel. My imagination, I found, was not altogether
stagnant. "Will you hurt me much?" I said in an off-hand tone.

"Not a bit," Haddon answered over his shoulder. "We shall chloroform
you. Your heart's as sound as a bell." And as he spoke, I had a whiff
of the pungent sweetness of the anæsthetic.

They stretched me out, with a convenient exposure of my side, and,
almost before I realised what was happening, the chloroform was being
administered. It stings the nostrils, and there is a suffocating
sensation, at first. I knew I should die--that this was the end of
consciousness for me. And suddenly I felt that I was not prepared for
death: I had a vague sense of a duty overlooked--I knew not what. What
was it I had not done? I could think of nothing more to do, nothing
desirable left in life; and yet I had the strangest disinclination
to death. And the physical sensation was painfully oppressive. Of
course the doctors did not know they were going to kill me. Possibly
I struggled. Then I fell motionless, and a great silence, a monstrous
silence, and an impenetrable blackness came upon me.

There must have been an interval of absolute unconsciousness,
seconds or minutes. Then, with a chilly, unemotional clearness, I
perceived that I was not yet dead. I was still in my body; but all the
multitudinous sensations that come sweeping from it to make up the
background of consciousness had gone, leaving me free of it all. No,
not free of it all; for as yet something still held me to the poor
stark flesh upon the bed--held me, yet not so closely that I did not
feel myself external to it, independent of it, straining away from it.
I do not think I saw, I do not think I heard; but I perceived all that
was going on, and it was as if I both heard and saw. Haddon was bending
over me, Mowbray behind me; the scalpel--it was a large scalpel--was
cutting my flesh at the side under the flying ribs. It was interesting
to see myself cut like cheese, without a pang, without even a qualm.
The interest was much of a quality with that one might feel in a game
of chess between strangers. Haddon's face was firm and his hand steady;
but I was surprised to perceive (_how_ I know not) that he was feeling
the gravest doubt as to his own wisdom in the conduct of the operation.

Mowbray's thoughts, too, I could see. He was thinking that Haddon's
manner showed too much of the specialist. New suggestions came up like
bubbles through a stream of frothing meditation, and burst one after
another in the little bright spot of his consciousness. He could not
help noticing and admiring Haddon's swift dexterity, in spite of his
envious quality and his disposition to detract. I saw my liver exposed.
I was puzzled at my own condition. I did not feel that I was dead, but
I was different in some way from my living self. The grey depression,
that had weighed on me for a year or more and coloured all my thoughts,
was gone. I perceived and thought without any emotional tint at all.
I wondered if everyone perceived things in this way under chloroform,
and forgot it again when he came out of it. It would be inconvenient to
look into some heads, and not forget.

Although I did not think that I was dead, I still perceived quite
clearly that I was soon to die. This brought me back to the
consideration of Haddon's proceedings. I looked into his mind, and
saw that he was afraid of cutting a branch of the portal vein. My
attention was distracted from details by the curious changes going on
in his mind. His consciousness was like the quivering little spot of
light which is thrown by the mirror of a galvanometer. His thoughts
ran under it like a stream, some through the focus bright and distinct,
some shadowy in the half-light of the edge. Just now the little glow
was steady; but the least movement on Mowbray's part, the slightest
sound from outside, even a faint difference in the slow movement of
the living flesh he was cutting, set the light-spot shivering and
spinning. A new sense-impression came rushing up through the flow of
thoughts; and lo! the light-spot jerked away towards it, swifter than
a frightened fish. It was wonderful to think that upon that unstable,
fitful thing depended all the complex motions of the man; that for
the next five minutes, therefore, my life hung upon its movements.
And he was growing more and more nervous in his work. It was as if a
little picture of a cut vein grew brighter, and struggled to oust from
his brain another picture of a cut falling short of the mark. He was
afraid: his dread of cutting too little was battling with his dread of
cutting too far.

Then, suddenly, like an escape of water from under a lock-gate, a
great uprush of horrible realisation set all his thoughts swirling,
and simultaneously I perceived that the vein was cut. He started back
with a hoarse exclamation, and I saw the brown-purple blood gather
in a swift bead, and run trickling. He was horrified. He pitched the
red-stained scalpel on to the octagonal table; and instantly both
doctors flung themselves upon me, making hasty and ill-conceived
efforts to remedy the disaster. "Ice!" said Mowbray, gasping. But I
knew that I was killed, though my body still clung to me.

I will not describe their belated endeavours to save me, though I
perceived every detail. My perceptions were sharper and swifter
than they had ever been in life; my thoughts rushed through my mind
with incredible swiftness, but with perfect definition. I can only
compare their crowded clarity to the effects of a reasonable dose
of opium. In a moment it would all be over, and I should be free. I
knew I was immortal, but what would happen I did not know. Should I
drift off presently, like a puff of smoke from a gun, in some kind of
half-material body, an attenuated version of my material self? Should
I find myself suddenly among the innumerable hosts of the dead, and
know the world about me for the phantasmagoria it had always seemed?
Should I drift to some spiritualistic _séance_, and there make foolish,
incomprehensible attempts to affect a purblind medium? It was a
state of unemotional curiosity, of colourless expectation. And then
I realised a growing stress upon me, a feeling as though some huge
human magnet was drawing me upward out of my body. The stress grew and
grew. I seemed an atom for which monstrous forces were fighting. For
one brief, terrible moment sensation came back to me. That feeling of
falling headlong which comes in nightmares, that feeling a thousand
times intensified, that and a black horror swept across my thoughts in
a torrent. Then the two doctors, the naked body with its cut side, the
little room, swept away from under me and vanished, as a speck of foam
vanishes down an eddy.

I was in mid-air. Far below was the West End of London, receding
rapidly,--for I seemed to be flying swiftly upward,--and, as it
receded, passing westward, like a panorama. I could see, through the
faint haze of smoke, the innumerable roofs chimney-set, the narrow
roadways, stippled with people and conveyances, the little specks
of squares, and the church steeples like thorns sticking out of the
fabric. But it spun away as the earth rotated on its axis, and in a
few seconds (as it seemed) I was over the scattered clumps of town
about Ealing, the little Thames a thread of blue to the south, and the
Chiltern Hills and the North Downs coming up like the rim of a basin,
far away and faint with haze. Up I rushed. And at first I had not the
faintest conception what this headlong rush upward could mean.

Every moment the circle of scenery beneath me grew wider and wider,
and the details of town and field, of hill and valley, got more and
more hazy and pale and indistinct, a luminous grey was mingled more
and more with the blue of the hills and the green of the open meadows;
and a little patch of cloud, low and far to the west, shone ever more
dazzlingly white. Above, as the veil of atmosphere between myself and
outer space grew thinner, the sky, which had been a fair springtime
blue at first, grew deeper and richer in colour, passing steadily
through the intervening shades, until presently it was as dark as
the blue sky of midnight, and presently as black as the blackness of
a frosty starlight, and at last as black as no blackness I had ever
beheld. And first one star, and then many, and at last an innumerable
host broke out upon the sky: more stars than anyone has ever seen from
the face of the earth. For the blueness of the sky is the light of the
sun and stars sifted and spread abroad blindingly: there is diffused
light even in the darkest skies of winter, and we do not see the stars
by day only because of the dazzling irradiation of the sun. But now I
saw things--I know not how; assuredly with no mortal eyes--and that
defect of bedazzlement blinded me no longer. The sun was incredibly
strange and wonderful. The body of it was a disc of blinding white
light: not yellowish, as it seems to those who live upon the earth, but
livid white, all streaked with scarlet streaks and rimmed about with a
fringe of writhing tongues of red fire. And, shooting half-way across
the heavens from either side of it, and brighter than the Milky Way,
were two pinions of silver-white, making it look more like those winged
globes I have seen in Egyptian sculpture, than anything else I can
remember upon earth. These I knew for the solar corona, though I had
never seen anything of it but a picture during the days of my earthly
life.

When my attention came back to the earth again, I saw that it
had fallen very far away from me. Field and town were long since
indistinguishable, and all the varied hues of the country were merging
into a uniform bright grey, broken only by the brilliant white of the
clouds that lay scattered in flocculent masses over Ireland and the
west of England. For now I could see the outlines of the north of
France and Ireland, and all this island of Britain, save where Scotland
passed over the horizon to the north, or where the coast was blurred
or obliterated by cloud. The sea was a dull grey, and darker than the
land; and the whole panorama was rotating slowly towards the east.

All this had happened so swiftly that, until I was some thousand miles
or so from the earth, I had no thought for myself. But now I perceived
I had neither hands nor feet, neither parts nor organs, and that I felt
neither alarm nor pain. All about me I perceived that the vacancy (for
I had already left the air behind) was cold beyond the imagination of
man; but it troubled me not. The sun's rays shot through the void,
powerless to light or heat until they should strike on matter in their
course. I saw things with a serene self-forgetfulness, even as if I
were God. And down below there, rushing away from me,--countless miles
in a second,--where a little dark spot on the grey marked the position
of London, two doctors were struggling to restore life to the poor
hacked and outworn shell I had abandoned. I felt then such release,
such serenity as I can compare to no mortal delight I have ever known.

It was only after I had perceived all these things that the meaning of
that headlong rush of the earth grew into comprehension. Yet it was
so simple, so obvious, that I was amazed at my never anticipating the
thing that was happening to me. I had suddenly been cut adrift from
matter: all that was material of me was there upon earth, whirling
away through space, held to the earth by gravitation, partaking of the
earth-inertia, moving in its wreath of epicycles round the sun, and
with the sun and the planets on their vast march through space. But
the immaterial has no inertia, feels nothing of the pull of matter
for matter: where it parts from its garment of flesh, there it remains
(so far as space concerns it any longer) immovable in space. I was not
leaving the earth: the earth was leaving _me_, and not only the earth,
but the whole solar system was streaming past. And about me in space,
invisible to me, scattered in the wake of the earth upon its journey,
there must be an innumerable multitude of souls, stripped like myself
of the material, stripped like myself of the passions of the individual
and the generous emotions of the gregarious brute, naked intelligences,
things of newborn wonder and thought, marvelling at the strange release
that had suddenly come on them!

As I receded faster and faster from the strange white sun in the black
heavens, and from the broad and shining earth upon which my being had
begun, I seemed to grow, in some incredible manner, vast: vast as
regards this world I had left, vast as regards the moments and periods
of a human life. Very soon I saw the full circle of the earth, slightly
gibbous, like the moon when she nears her full, but very large; and
the silvery shape of America was now in the noonday blaze wherein (as
it seemed) little England had been basking but a few minutes ago. At
first the earth was large, and shone in the heavens, filling a great
part of them; but every moment she grew smaller and more distant. As
she shrunk, the broad moon in its third quarter crept into view over
the rim of her disc. I looked for the constellations. Only that part of
Aries directly behind the sun and the Lion, which the earth covered,
were hidden. I recognised the tortuous, tattered band of the Milky
Way, with Vega very bright between sun and earth; and Sirius and Orion
shone splendid against the unfathomable blackness in the opposite
quarter of the heavens. The Pole Star was overhead, and the Great Bear
hung over the circle of the earth. And away beneath and beyond the
shining corona of the sun were strange groupings of stars I had never
seen in my life--notably, a dagger-shaped group that I knew for the
Southern Cross. All these were no larger than when they had shone on
earth; but the little stars that one scarce sees shone now against the
setting of black vacancy as brightly as the first-magnitudes had done,
while the larger worlds were points of indescribable glory and colour.
Aldebaran was a spot of blood-red fire, and Sirius condensed to one
point the light of a world of sapphires. And they shone steadily: they
did not scintillate, they were calmly glorious. My impressions had an
adamantine hardness and brightness: there was no blurring softness,
no atmosphere, nothing but infinite darkness set with the myriads of
these acute and brilliant points and specks of light. Presently, when
I looked again, the little earth seemed no bigger than the sun, and
it dwindled and turned as I looked, until, in a second's space (as it
seemed to me), it was halved; and so it went on swiftly dwindling. Far
away in the opposite direction, a little pinkish pin's head of light,
shining steadily, was the planet Mars. I swam motionless in vacancy,
and, without a trace of terror or astonishment, watched the speck of
cosmic dust we call the world fall away from me.

Presently it dawned upon me that my sense of duration had changed: that
my mind was moving not faster but infinitely slower, that between each
separate impression there was a period of many days. The moon spun once
round the earth as I noted this; and I perceived clearly the motion of
Mars in his orbit. Moreover, it appeared as if the time between thought
and thought grew steadily greater, until at last a thousand years was
but a moment in my perception.

At first the constellations had shone motionless against the black
background of infinite space; but presently it seemed as though the
group of stars about Hercules and the Scorpion was contracting, while
Orion and Aldebaran and their neighbours were scattering apart.
Flashing suddenly out of the darkness there came a flying multitude
of particles of rock, glittering like dust-specks in a sunbeam, and
encompassed in a faintly luminous haze. They swirled all about me,
and vanished again in a twinkling far behind. And then I saw that a
bright spot of light, that shone a little to one side of my path, was
growing very rapidly larger, and perceived that it was the planet
Saturn rushing towards me. Larger and larger it grew, swallowing up the
heavens behind it, and hiding every moment a fresh multitude of stars.
I perceived its flattened, whirling body, its disc-like belt, and seven
of its little satellites. It grew and grew, till it towered enormous;
and then I plunged amid a streaming multitude of clashing stones and
dancing dust-particles and gas-eddies, and saw for a moment the mighty
triple belt like three concentric arches of moonlight above me, its
shadow black on the boiling tumult below. These things happened in
one-tenth of the time it takes to tell of them. The planet went by like
a flash of lightning; for a few seconds it blotted out the sun, and
there and then became a mere black, dwindling, winged patch against the
light. The earth, the mother mote of my being, I could no longer see.

So, with a stately swiftness, in the profoundest silence, the solar
system fell from me, as it had been a garment, until the sun was a mere
star amid the multitude of stars, with its eddy of planet-specks, lost
in the confused glittering of the remoter light. I was no longer a
denizen of the solar system: I had come to the Outer Universe, I seemed
to grasp and comprehend the whole world of matter. Ever more swiftly
the stars closed in about the spot where Antares and Vega had vanished
in a luminous haze, until that part of the sky had the semblance of
a whirling mass of nebulæ, and ever before me yawned vaster gaps of
vacant blackness, and the stars shone fewer and fewer. It seemed as if
I moved towards a point between Orion's belt and sword; and the void
about that region opened vaster and vaster every second, an incredible
gulf of nothingness, into which I was falling. Faster and ever faster
the universe rushed by, a hurry of whirling motes at last, speeding
silently into the void. Stars glowing brighter and brighter, with
their circling planets catching the light in a ghostly fashion as I
neared them, shone out and vanished again into inexistence; faint
comets, clusters of meteorites, winking specks of matter, eddying light
points, whizzed past, some perhaps a hundred millions of miles or so
from me at most, few nearer, travelling with unimaginable rapidity,
shooting constellations, momentary darts of fire, through that black,
enormous night. More than anything else it was like a dusty draught,
sunbeam-lit. Broader, and wider, and deeper grew the starless space,
the vacant Beyond, into which I was being drawn. At last a quarter of
the heavens was black and blank, and the whole headlong rush of stellar
universe closed in behind me like a veil of light that is gathered
together. It drove away from me like a monstrous jack-o'-lantern driven
by the wind. I had come out into the wilderness of space. Ever the
vacant blackness grew broader, until the hosts of the stars seemed
only like a swarm of fiery specks hurrying away from me, inconceivably
remote, and the darkness, the nothingness and emptiness, was about me
on every side. Soon the little universe of matter, the cage of points
in which I had begun to be, was dwindling, now to a whirling disc of
luminous glittering, and now to one minute disc of hazy light. In a
little while it would shrink to a point, and at last would vanish
altogether.

Suddenly feeling came back to me--feeling in the shape of overwhelming
terror: such a dread of those dark vastitudes as no words can describe,
a passionate resurgence of sympathy and social desire. Were there
other souls, invisible to me as I to them, about me in the blackness?
or was I indeed, even as I felt, alone? Had I passed out of being
into something that was neither being nor not-being? The covering
of the body, the covering of matter, had been torn from me, and the
hallucinations of companionship and security. Everything was black and
silent. I had ceased to be. I was nothing. There was nothing, save only
that infinitesimal dot of light that dwindled in the gulf. I strained
myself to hear and see, and for a while there was naught but infinite
silence, intolerable darkness, horror, and despair.

Then I saw that about the spot of light into which the whole world of
matter had shrunk there was a faint glow. And in a band on either side
of that the darkness was not absolute. I watched it for ages, as it
seemed to me, and through the long waiting the haze grew imperceptibly
more distinct. And then about the band appeared an irregular cloud
of the faintest, palest brown. I felt a passionate impatience; but
the things grew brighter so slowly that they scarce seemed to change.
What was unfolding itself? What was this strange reddish dawn in the
interminable night of space?

The cloud's shape was grotesque. It seemed to be looped along its lower
side into four projecting masses, and, above, it ended in a straight
line. What phantom was it? I felt assured I had seen that figure
before; but I could not think what, nor where, nor when it was. Then
the realisation rushed upon me. _It was a clenched Hand._ I was alone
in space, alone with this huge, shadowy Hand, upon which the whole
Universe of Matter lay like an unconsidered speck of dust. It seemed
as though I watched it through vast periods of time. On the forefinger
glittered a ring; and the universe from which I had come was but a spot
of light upon the ring's curvature. And the thing that the hand gripped
had the likeness of a black rod. Through a long eternity I watched
this Hand, with the ring and the rod, marvelling and fearing and
waiting helplessly on what might follow. It seemed as though nothing
could follow: that I should watch for ever, seeing only the Hand and
the thing it held, and understanding nothing of its import. Was the
whole universe but a refracting speck upon some greater Being? Were our
worlds but the atoms of another universe, and those again of another,
and so on through an endless progression? And what was I? Was I indeed
immaterial? A vague persuasion of a body gathering about me came into
my suspense. The abysmal darkness about the Hand filled with impalpable
suggestions, with uncertain, fluctuating shapes.

Then, suddenly, came a sound, like the sound of a tolling bell: faint,
as if infinitely far; muffled, as though heard through thick swathings
of darkness: a deep, vibrating resonance, with vast gulfs of silence
between each stroke. And the Hand appeared to tighten on the rod. And
I saw far above the Hand, towards the apex of the darkness, a circle
of dim phosphorescence, a ghostly sphere whence these sounds came
throbbing; and at the last stroke the Hand vanished, for the hour had
come, and I heard a noise of many waters. But the black rod remained
as a great band across the sky. And then a voice, which seemed to run
to the uttermost parts of space, spoke, saying, "There will be no more
pain."

At that an almost intolerable gladness and radiance rushed in upon
me, and I saw the circle shining white and bright, and the rod black
and shining, and many things else distinct and clear. And the circle
was the face of the clock, and the rod the rail of my bed. Haddon was
standing at the foot, against the rail, with a small pair of scissors
on his fingers; and the hands of my clock on the mantel over his
shoulder were clasped together over the hour of twelve. Mowbray was
washing something in a basin at the octagonal table, and at my side I
felt a subdued feeling that could scarce be spoken of as pain.

The operation had not killed me. And I perceived, suddenly, that the
dull melancholy of half a year was lifted from my mind.




THE SEA RAIDERS

I


Until the extraordinary affair at Sidmouth, the peculiar species
_Haploteuthis ferox_ was known to science only generically, on the
strength of a half-digested tentacle obtained near the Azores, and a
decaying body pecked by birds and nibbled by fish, found early in 1896
by Mr. Jennings, near Land's End.

In no department of zoological science, indeed, are we quite so much in
the dark as with regard to the deep-sea cephalopods. A mere accident,
for instance, it was that led to the Prince of Monaco's discovery
of nearly a dozen new forms in the summer of 1895, a discovery in
which the before-mentioned tentacle was included. It chanced that
a cachalot was killed off Terceira by some sperm whalers, and in
its last struggles charged almost to the Prince's yacht, missed it,
rolled under, and died within twenty yards of his rudder. And in its
agony it threw up a number of large objects, which the Prince, dimly
perceiving they were strange and important, was, by a happy expedient,
able to secure before they sank. He set his screws in motion, and
kept them circling in the vortices thus created until a boat could
be lowered. And these specimens were whole cephalopods and fragments
of cephalopods, some of gigantic proportions, and almost all of them
unknown to science!

It would seem, indeed, that these large and agile creatures, living
in the middle depths of the sea, must, to a large extent, for ever
remain unknown to us, since under water they are too nimble for nets,
and it is only by such rare unlooked-for accidents that specimens
can be obtained. In the case of _Haploteuthis ferox_, for instance,
we are still altogether ignorant of its habitat, as ignorant as we
are of the breeding-ground of the herring or the sea-ways of the
salmon. And zoologists are altogether at a loss to account for its
sudden appearance on our coast. Possibly it was the stress of a hunger
migration that drove it hither out of the deep. But it will be,
perhaps, better to avoid necessarily inconclusive discussion, and to
proceed at once with our narrative.

The first human being to set eyes upon a living _Haploteuthis_--the
first human being to survive, that is, for there can be little doubt
now that the wave of bathing fatalities and boating accidents that
travelled along the coast of Cornwall and Devon in early May was due
to this cause--was a retired tea-dealer of the name of Fison, who was
stopping at a Sidmouth boarding-house. It was in the afternoon, and he
was walking along the cliff path between Sidmouth and Ladram Bay. The
cliffs in this direction are very high, but down the red face of them
in one place a kind of ladder staircase has been made. He was near
this when his attention was attracted by what at first he thought to
be a cluster of birds struggling over a fragment of food that caught
the sunlight, and glistened pinkish-white. The tide was right out, and
this object was not only far below him, but remote across a broad waste
of rock reefs covered with dark seaweed and interspersed with silvery
shining tidal pools. And he was, moreover, dazzled by the brightness of
the further water.

In a minute, regarding this again, he perceived that his judgment was
in fault, for over this struggle circled a number of birds, jackdaws
and gulls for the most part, the latter gleaming blindingly when the
sunlight smote their wings, and they seemed minute in comparison with
it. And his curiosity was, perhaps, aroused all the more strongly
because of his first insufficient explanations.

As he had nothing better to do than amuse himself, he decided to make
this object, whatever it was, the goal of his afternoon walk, instead
of Ladram Bay, conceiving it might perhaps be a great fish of some
sort, stranded by some chance, and flapping about in its distress. And
so he hurried down the long steep ladder, stopping at intervals of
thirty feet or so to take breath and scan the mysterious movement.

At the foot of the cliff he was, of course, nearer his object than
he had been; but, on the other hand, it now came up against the
incandescent sky, beneath the sun, so as to seem dark and indistinct.
Whatever was pinkish of it was now hidden by a skerry of weedy
boulders. But he perceived that it was made up of seven rounded bodies,
distinct or connected, and that the birds kept up a constant croaking
and screaming, but seemed afraid to approach it too closely.

Mr. Fison, torn by curiosity, began picking his way across the
wave-worn rocks, and, finding the wet seaweed that covered them thickly
rendered them extremely slippery, he stopped, removed his shoes and
socks, and coiled his trousers above his knees. His object was, of
course, merely to avoid stumbling into the rocky pools about him, and
perhaps he was rather glad, as all men are, of an excuse to resume,
even for a moment, the sensations of his boyhood. At anyrate, it is to
this, no doubt, that he owes his life.

He approached his mark with all the assurance which the absolute
security of this country against all forms of animal life gives its
inhabitants. The round bodies moved to and fro, but it was only when he
surmounted the skerry of boulders I have mentioned that he realised the
horrible nature of the discovery. It came upon him with some suddenness.

The rounded bodies fell apart as he came into sight over the ridge,
and displayed the pinkish object to be the partially devoured body of
a human being, but whether of a man or woman he was unable to say.
And the rounded bodies were new and ghastly-looking creatures, in
shape somewhat resembling an octopus, and with huge and very long and
flexible tentacles, coiled copiously on the ground. The skin had a
glistening texture, unpleasant to see, like shiny leather. The downward
bend of the tentacle-surrounded mouth, the curious excrescence at the
bend, the tentacles, and the large intelligent eyes, gave the creatures
a grotesque suggestion of a face. They were the size of a fair-sized
swine about the body, and the tentacles seemed to him to be many feet
in length. There were, he thinks, seven or eight at least of the
creatures. Twenty yards beyond them, amid the surf of the now returning
tide, two others were emerging from the sea.

Their bodies lay flatly on the rocks, and their eyes regarded him with
evil interest; but it does not appear that Mr. Fison was afraid, or
that he realised that he was in any danger. Possibly his confidence
is to be ascribed to the limpness of their attitudes. But he was
horrified, of course, and intensely excited and indignant at such
revolting creatures preying upon human flesh. He thought they had
chanced upon a drowned body. He shouted to them, with the idea of
driving them off, and, finding they did not budge, cast about him,
picked up a big rounded lump of rock, and flung it at one.

And then, slowly uncoiling their tentacles, they all began moving
towards him--creeping at first deliberately, and making a soft purring
sound to each other.

In a moment Mr. Fison realised that he was in danger. He shouted again,
threw both his boots, and started off, with a leap, forthwith. Twenty
yards off he stopped and faced about, judging them slow, and behold!
the tentacles of their leader were already pouring over the rocky
ridge on which he had just been standing!

At that he 

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