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The Bright Messenger

by Algernon Blackwood · English · Gutenberg #43594 · 722,608 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Bright Messenger

Author: Algernon Blackwood


        
Release date: August 29, 2013 [eBook #43594]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BRIGHT MESSENGER ***

THE BRIGHT MESSENGER




    OTHER WORKS BY
    ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

    JULIUS LeVALLON
    THE WAVE: An Egyptian Aftermath
    TEN MINUTE STORIES
    DAY AND NIGHT STORIES
    THE PROMISE OF AIR
    THE GARDEN OF SURVIVAL
    THE LISTENER and Other Stories
    THE EMPTY HOUSE and Other Stories
    THE LOST VALLEY and Other Stories
    JOHN SILENCE: Physician Extraordinary

    _With Violet Pearn_
    KARMA: A Reincarnation Play

    _With Wilfred Wilson_
    THE WOLVES OF GOD and other Fey Stories

    E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY




    THE BRIGHT MESSENGER
    BY
    ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

    AUTHOR OF
    "JULIUS LeVALLON," "THE WOLVES OF GOD," ETC.

    NEW YORK
    E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
    681 FIFTH AVENUE




    Copyright 1922, by
    E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

    _All Rights Reserved_

    _Printed in the United States of America_




To the Unstable




THE BRIGHT MESSENGER

CHAPTER I


Edward Fillery, so far as may be possible to a man of normal passions
and emotions, took a detached view of life and human nature. At the age
of thirty-eight he still remained a spectator, a searching, critical,
analytical, yet chiefly, perhaps, a sympathetic spectator, before the
great performance whose stage is the planet and whose performers and
auditorium are humanity.

Knowing himself outcast, an unwelcome deadhead at the play, he had yet
felt no bitterness against the parents whose fierce illicit passion had
deprived him of an honourable seat. The first shock of resentment over,
he had faced the situation with a tolerance which showed an unusual
charity, an exceptional understanding, in one so young.

He was twenty when he learned the truth about himself. And it was his
wondering analysis as to why two loving humans could be so careless of
their offspring's welfare, when the rest of Nature took such pains in
the matter, that first betrayed, perhaps, his natural aptitude. He had
the innate gift of seeing things as they were, undisturbed by personal
emotion, while yet asking himself with scientific accuracy why and how
they came to be so. These were invaluable qualities in the line of
knowledge and research he chose for himself as psychologist and doctor.
The terms are somewhat loose. His longing was to probe the motives of
conduct in the first place, and, in the second, to correct the results
of wrong conduct by removing faulty motives. Psychiatrist and healer,
therefore, were his more accurate titles; psychiatrist and healer, in
due course, he became.

His father, an engineer of ability and enterprise, prospecting in the
remoter parts of the Caucasus for copper, and making a comfortable
fortune in so doing, was carried off his feet suddenly by the beauty of
a Khaketian peasant girl, daughter of a shepherd in these lonely and
majestic mountains, whose intolerable grandeur may well intoxicate a
man to madness. A dangerous and disgraceful episode it seems to have
been between John Fillery, hitherto of steady moral fibre, and this
strange, lovely pagan girl, whose savage father hunted the pair of them
high and low for weeks before they finally eluded him in the azalea
valleys beyond Artvine.

Great passion, possibly great love, born of this enchanted land whose
peaks touch heaven, while their lower turfy slopes are carpeted with
lilies, azaleas, rhododendrons, contributed to the birth of Edward,
who first saw the light in a secret chamber of a dirty Tiflis house,
above the Koura torrent. That same night, when the sun dipped beneath
the Black Sea waters two hundred miles to the westward, his mother had
looked for the last time upon her northern lover and her wild Caucasian
mountains.

Edward, however, persisted, visible emblem of a few weeks' primal
passion in a primal land. Intense desire, born in this remote
wilderness of amazing loveliness, lent him, perhaps, a strain of
illicit, almost unearthly yearning, a secret nostalgia for some lost
vale of beauty that held fiercer sunshine, mightier winds and fairer
flowers than those he knew in this world.

At the age of four he was brought to England; his Russian memories
faded, though not the birthright of his primitive blood. Settling in
London, his father increased his fortune as consulting engineer, but
did not marry. To the short vehement episode he had given of his very
best; he remained true to his gorgeous memory and his sin; the cream
of his life, its essence and its perfume, had been spent in those wild
wind-swept azalea valleys beyond Artvine. The azalea honey was in his
blood, the scent of the lilies in his brain; he still heard the Koura
and Rion foaming down towards ancient Colchis. Edward embodied for him
the spirit of these sweet, passionate memories. He loved the boy, he
cherished and he spoilt him.

But Edward had stuff in him that rendered spoiling harmless. A
vigorous, independent youngster, he showed firmness and character
as a lad. To the delight of his father he knew his own mind early,
reading and studying on his own account, possessed at the same time
by a vehement love of nature and outdoor life that was far more than
the average English boy's inclination to open air and sport. There lay
some primal quality in his blood that was of ancient origin and leaned
towards wildness. There seemed almost, at the same time, a faunish
strain that turned away from life.

As a tiny little fellow he had that strange touch of creative
imagination other children have also known--an invisible playmate. It
had no name, as it, apparently, had no sex. The boy's father could
trace it directly to no fairy tale read or heard; its origin in the
child's mind remained a mystery. But its characteristics were unusual,
even for such fanciful imaginings: too full-fledged to have been
created gradually by the boy's loneliness, it seemed half goblin and
half Nature-spirit; it replaced, at any rate, the little brothers and
sisters who were not there, and the father, led by his conscience,
possibly, to divine or half divine its origin, met the pretence with
sympathetic encouragement.

It came usually with the wind, moreover, and went with the wind, and
wind accordingly excited the child. "Listen! Father!" he would exclaim
when no air was moving anywhere and the day was still as death. Then:
"Plop! So there you are!" as though it had dropped through empty space
and landed at his feet. "It came from a tremenjus height," the child
explained. "The wind's up _there_, you see, to-day." Which struck the
parent's mind as odd, because it proved later true. An upper wind, far
in the higher strata of air, came down an hour or so afterwards and
blew into a storm.

Fire and flowers, too, were connected with this invisible playmate.
"_He'll_ make it burn, father," the child said convincingly, when the
chimney smoked and the coals refused to catch, and then became very
busy with his friend in the grate and about the hearth, just as though
he helped and superintended what was being invisibly accomplished.
"It's burning better, anyhow," agreed the father, astonished in spite
of himself as the coals began to glow and spurt their gassy flames.
"Well done; I am very much obliged to you and your little friend."

"But it's the only thing he can do. He likes it. It's his work really,
don't you see--keeping up the heat in things."

"Oh, it's his natural job, is it? I see, yes. But my thanks to him, all
the same."

"Thank you very much," said grave Edward, aged five, addressing his
tiny friend among the fire-irons. "I'm much mobliged to you."

Edward was a bit older when the flower incident took place--with the
geranium that no amount of care and coaxing seemed able to keep alive.
It had been dying slowly for some days, when Edward announced that he
saw its "inside" flitting about the plant, but unable to get back into
it. "It's got out, you see, and can't get back into its body again, so
it's dying."

"Well, what in the world are we to do about it?" asked his father.

"I'll ask," was the solemn reply. "Now I know!" he cried, delighted,
after asking his question of the empty air and listening for the
answer. "Of course. Now I see. Look, father, there it is--its spirit!"
He stood beside the flower and pointed to the earth in the pot.

"Dear me, yes! Where d'you see it? I--don't see it quite."

"He says I can pick it up and put it back and then the flower will
live." The child put out a hand as though picking up something that
moved quickly about the stem.

"What's it look like?" asked his father quickly.

"Oh, sort of trinangles and things with lines and corners," was the
reply, making a gesture as though he caught it and popped it back
into the red drooping blossoms. "There you are! Now you're alive
again. Thank you very much, please"--this last remark to the invisible
playmate who was superintending.

"A sort of geometrical figure, was it?" inquired the father next day,
when, to his surprise, he found the geranium blooming in full health
and beauty once again. "That's what you saw, eh?"

"It was its spirit, and it was shiny red, like fire," the child
replied. "It's heat. Without these things there'd be no flowers at all."

"Who makes everything grow?" he asked suddenly, a moment later.

"You mean _what_ makes them grow."

"Who," he repeated with emphasis. "Who builds the bodies up and looks
after them?"

"Ah! the structure, you mean, the form?"

Edward nodded. His father had the feeling he was not being asked for
information, but was being cross-examined. A faint pressure, as of
uneasiness, touched him.

"They develop automatically--that means naturally, under the laws of
nature," he replied.

"And the laws--who keeps them working properly?"

The father, with a mental gulp, replied that God did.

"A beetle's body, for instance, or a daisy's or an elephant's?"
persisted the child undeceived by the theological evasion. "Or mine, or
a mountain's----?"

John Fillery racked his brain for an answer, while Edward continued his
list to include sea-anemones, frost-patterns, fire, wind, moon, sun
and stars. All these forms to him were bodies apparently.

"I know!" he exclaimed suddenly with intense conviction, clapping his
hands together and standing on his toes.

"Do you, indeed! Then you know more than the rest of us."

"_They do_, of course," came the positive announcement. "The other
kind! It's their work. Yours, for instance"--he turned to his playmate,
but so naturally and convincingly that a chill ran down his father's
spine as he watched--"is fire, isn't it? You showed me once. And water
stops you, but wind helps you ..." and he continued long after his
father had left the room.

With advancing years, however, Edward either forgot his playmate or
kept its activities to himself. He no longer referred to it, at any
rate. His energies demanded a bigger field; he roamed the fields and
woods, climbed the hills, stayed out all night to see the sunrise, made
fires even when fires were not exactly needed, and hunted with Red
Indians and with what he called "Windy-Fire people" everywhere. He was
never in the house. He ran wild. Great open spaces, trees and flowers
were what he liked. The sea, on the other hand, alarmed him. Only wind
and fire comforted him and made him happy and full of life. He was a
playmate of wind and fire. Water, in large quantities at any rate, was
inimical.

With concealed approval, masking a deep love fulfilled yet incomplete,
his father watched the growth of this fiercer strain that mere covert
shooting could not satisfy, nor ordinary sporting holidays appease.

"England's too small for you, Edward, isn't it?" he asked once
tentatively, when the boy was about fifteen.

"The English people, you mean, father?"

"You find them dull, don't you? And the island a bit cramped--eh?"

Edward waited without replying. He did not quite understand what his
indulgent father intended, or was leading up to.

"You'd like to travel and see things and people for yourself, I mean?"

He watched the boy without, as he thought, the latter noticing. The
answer pleased but puzzled him.

"We're all much the same, aren't we?" said Edward.

"Well--with differences--yes, we are. But still----"

"It's only the same over and over again, isn't it?" Then, while his
father was thinking of this reply, and of what he should say to it, the
boy asked suddenly with arresting intensity:

"Are we the only people--the only sort of beings, I mean? Just men
and women like us all over the world? No others of any sort--bigger,
for instance, or--more wild and wonderful?" Then he added, a thrust
of strange yearning in his face and eyes: "More beautiful?" He almost
whispered the last words.

His father winced. He divined the origin of that strange inquiry.
Upon those immense and lonely mountains, distant in space and time
for him, imagination, rich and pagan, ran, he well knew, to vast and
mighty beings, superior to human, benignant and maleficent, akin to
the stimulating and exhilarating conception of the gods, and certainly
non-human.

"Nothing, Edward, that we know of. Why should there be?"

"Oh, I don't know, dad. I just wondered--sometimes. But, as you say,
we've not a scrap of evidence, of course."

"Not a scrap," agreed his father. "Poetic legends ain't evidence."

The mind ruled the heart in Edward; he had his father's brains, at any
rate; and all his powers and longings focused in a single line that
indicated plainly what his career should be. The Public Schools could
help him little; he went to Edinburgh to study medicine; he passed
eventually with all possible honours; and the day he brought home the
news his father, dying, told him the secret of his illegitimate birth.




CHAPTER II


The subsequent twenty years or so may be summarized.

Alone in the world, of a loving, passionate nature, he deliberately set
all thought of marriage on one side as an impossibility, and directed
his entire energy into the acquirement of knowledge; reading, studying,
experimenting far outside the circle of the ordinary medical man. The
attitude of detachment he had adopted became a habit. He believed it
was now his nature.

The more he learned of human frailty and human faculties, the greater
became the charity he felt towards his fellow-kind. In his own being,
it seemed, lay something big, sweet, simple, a generosity that longed
to share with others, a tolerance more ready to acquit than to condemn,
above all, a great gift of understanding sympathy that, doubtless, was
the explanation of his singular insight. Rarely he found it in him to
blame; forgiveness, based upon the increasing extent of his experience,
seemed his natural view of human mistakes and human infirmities. His
one desire, his one hope, was to serve the Race.

Yet he himself remained aloof. He watched the Play but took no part in
it. This forgiveness, too, began at home. His grievance had not soured
or dejected him, his father's error presenting itself as a problem to
be pondered over, rather than a sin to blame. Some day, he promised
himself, he would go and see with his own eyes the Khaketian tribe
whence his blood was partially derived, whence his un-English yearnings
for a wilder scale of personal freedom amid an unstained, majestic
Nature were first stolen. The inherited picture of a Caucasian vale of
loveliness and liberty lay, indeed, very deep in his nature, emerging
always like a symbol when he was profoundly moved. At any crisis in his
life it rose beckoning, seductive, haunting beyond words.... Curious,
ill-defined emotions with it, that drove him towards another standard,
another state, to something, at any rate, he could neither name nor
visualize, yet that seemed to dwarf the only life he knew. About it
was a touch of strange unearthly radiance that dimmed existence as he
knew it. The shine went out of it. There was involved in this symbolic
"Valley" something wholly new both in colour, sound and outline, yet
that remained obstinately outside definition.

First, however, he must work, develop himself, and broaden, deepen,
extend in every possible way the knowledge of his kind that seemed his
only love.

He began in a very practical way, setting up his plate in a mean
quarter of the great metropolis, healing, helping, learning with his
heart as well as with his brain, observing life at closest quarters
from its beginning to its close, his sympathies becoming enriched the
more he saw, and his mind groping its way towards clearer insight the
more he read, thought, studied. His wealth made him independent; his
tastes were simple; his wants few. He observed the great Play from the
Pit and Gallery, from the Wings, from Behind the Scenes as well.

Moving then, into the Stalls, into a wealthier neighbourhood, that
is, he repeated the experience among another class, finding, however,
little difference except in the greater artificiality of his types,
the larger proportion of mental and nervous ailments, of hysteria,
delusion, imaginary troubles, and the like. The infirmities due to
idleness, enflamed vanity and luxury offered a new field, though to him
a less attractive one. The farther from simplicity, from the raw facts
of living, the more complicated, yet the more trivial, the resulting
disabilities. These, however, were quite as real as those, and harder,
indeed, to cure. Idle imagination, fostered by opportunity and means,
yet forced by conventionality to wear infinite disguises, brought a
strange, if far from a noble, crop of disorders into his ken. Yet he
accepted them for serious treatment, whatever his private opinion may
have been, while his patience, tact and sympathy, backed by his insight
and great knowledge, brought him quick success. He was soon in a fair
way to become a fashionable doctor.

But the field, he found, was restricted somewhat. His quest was
knowledge, not fame or money. He chose his cases where he could,
though actually refusing nothing. He specialized more and more with
afflictions of a mental kind. He was immensely successful in restoring
proportion out of disorder. He revealed people to themselves. He
taught them to recover lost hope and confidence. He used little
medicine, but stimulated the will towards a revival of fading vitality.
Auto-suggestion, rather than suggestion or hypnotism, was his method.
He healed. He began to be talked about.

Then, suddenly, his house was sold, his plate was taken down, he
vanished.

Human beings object to sudden changes whose secret they have not been
told and cannot easily guess; his abrupt disappearance caused talk and
rumours, led, of course, by those, chiefly disappointed women, who
had most reason to be grateful for past services. But, if the words
charlatan and quack were whispered, he did not hear them; he had taken
the post of assistant in a lunatic asylum in a northern town, because
the work promised him increase of knowledge and experience in his own
particular field. The talk he left behind him mattered as little as the
small pay attached to the humble duties he had accepted.

London forgot him, but he did not forget what London had taught him.

A new field opened, and in less than two years, opportunity, combined
with his undoubted qualifications, saw him Head of an establishment
where he could observe at first hand the facts and phenomena that
interested him most. Humane treatment, backed by profound insight into
the derangements of the poor human creatures under his charge, brought
the place into a fame it had never known before. He spent five years
there in profound study and experiment; he achieved new results and
published them. His _Experimental Psychology_ caused a sensation. His
name was known. He was an Authority.

At this time he was well past thirty, a tall, dark,
distinguished-looking man, of appearance grave and even sombre;
imposing, too, with his quiet, piercing eyes, but sombre only until the
smile lit up his somewhat rugged face. It was a face that nobody could
lie to, but to that smile the suffering heart might tell its inmost
secrets with confidence, hope, trust, and without reserve.

There followed several years abroad, in Paris, Rome, St. Petersburg,
Moscow; Vienna and Zurich he also visited to test there certain lines
of research and to meet personally their originators.

This period was partly a holiday, partly an opportunity to know at
first hand the leaders in mental therapeutics, psychology and the
rest, and also that he might find time to digest and arrange his
own accumulation of knowledge with a view, later, to undertaking
the life-work to which his previous experience was but preliminary.
Fame had come to him unsought; his published works alone ensured his
going down to posterity as a careful but daring and original judge
of the human species and its possibilities. It was the supernormal
rather than the merely abnormal powers that attracted him. In the
subconscious, as, equally, in the superconscious, his deep experience
taught him, lay amazing powers of both moral and physical healing,
powers as yet but little understood, powers as limitless as they seemed
incredible, as mysterious in their operation as they were simple in
their accessibility. And auto-suggestion was the means of using them.
The great men whom he visited welcomed him with open arms, added to
his data, widened yet further his mental outlook. Sought by high and
low in many countries and in strangest cases, his experience grew and
multiplied, his assortment of unusual knowledge was far-reaching; till
he stood finally in wonder and amazement before the human being and its
unrealized powers, and his optimism concerning the future progress of
the race became more justified with every added fact.

Yet, perhaps, his greatest achievement was the study of himself; it was
probably to this deep, intimate and honest research into his own being
that his success in helping others was primarily due. For in himself,
though mastered and co-ordinated by his steady will, rendered harmless
by his saving sense of humour and (as he believed) by the absence of
any harboured grievance against others--in his very own being lay all
those potential elements of disorder, those loose unravelled threads
of alien impulse and suppressed desire, which can make for dangerous
disintegration, and thus produce the disturbing results classed
generally under alienation and neurosis.

The incongruous elements in him were the gift of nature; γνῶθι σεαυτόν
was the saving attitude he brought to that gift, redeeming it. This
phrase, borrowed, he remembered with a smile, for the portal of the
ancient Mysteries, remained his watchword. He was able to thank the
fierce illicit love that furnished his body and his mental make-up
for a richer field of first-hand study than years of practice among
others could have supplied. He belonged by temperament to the unstable.
But--he was aware of it. He realized the two beings in him: the
reasoning, scientific man, and the speculative dreamer, visionary,
poet. The latter wondered, dreamed among a totally different set of
values far below and out of sight. This deeper portion of himself was
forever beating up for recognition, clamouring to be used, yet with
the strange shyness that reminded him of a loving woman who cannot be
certain her passion is returned. It hinted, threatened, wept and even
sulked. It rose like a flame, bringing its own light and wind, blessed
his whole being with some divine assurance, and then, because not
instantly accepted, it retired, leaving him empty, his mind coloured
with unearthly yearnings, with poignant regrets, yet perfumed as though
the fairness of Spring herself had lit upon his heart and kissed it
into blossom on her passage north. It presented its amazing pictures,
and withdrew. Elusive, as the half memory of some radiant dream, whose
wonder and sweetness have been intense to the point of almost pain, it
hovered, floating just out of reach. It lay waiting for that sincere
belief which would convince that its passion was returned. And a
fleeting picture of a wild Caucasian valley, steeped in sunshine and
flowers, was always the first sign of its awakening.

Though not afraid of reason, it seemed somehow independent of the
latter's processes. It was his reason, however, he well knew that
dimmed the light in its grand, terrible eyes, causing it to withdraw
the instant he began to question. Precise, formal thinking shut the
engines off and damped the furnaces. His love, his passion, none the
less, were there, hiding with belief, until some bright messenger,
bringing glad tidings, should reveal the method of harmonious union
between reason and vision, between man's trivial normal faculties and
his astounding supernormal possibilities.

"This element of feeling in our outlook on Nature is a satisfaction in
itself, but our plea for allowing it to operate in our interpretation
of Nature is that we get closer to some things through feeling than
we do through science. The tendency of feeling is always to see
things whole. We cannot, for our life's sake, and for the sake of our
philosophical reconstruction, afford to lose in scientific analysis
what the poets and artists and the lovers of Nature all see. It is
intuitively felt, rather than intellectually perceived, the vision of
things as totalities, root and all, all in all; neither fancifully, nor
mystically, but sympathetically in their wholeness."

To these words of Professor T. Arthur Thomson's, he heartily
subscribed, applying their principle to his own particular field.




CHAPTER III


The net result of his inquiries and research, when, at the age of
nearly forty, he established his own Private Home for unusual,
so-called hopeless cases in North-West London--it was free to all, and
as Spiritual Clinique he thought of it sometimes with a smile--may be
summed up in the single sentence that man is greater than he knows, and
that completer realization of his full possibilities lies accessible to
his subconscious and superconscious powers. Herein he saw, indeed, the
chief hope of progress for humanity.

And it was to the failures, the diseased, the evil and the broken
that he owed chiefly his inspiring optimism, since it was largely in
collapse that occurred the sporadic upheaval of those super-normal
forces which, controlled, co-ordinated, led, must eventually bring
about the realization he foresaw.

The purpose, however, of these notes is not to furnish a sensational
story of various patients whom he studied, healed, or failed to heal.
Its object is to give some details of one case in particular whose
outstanding peculiarities affected his theories and convictions,
leaving him open-minded still, but with a breath of awe in his heart
perhaps, before a possibility his previous knowledge had ruled entirely
out of court, even if--which is doubtful--he had ever considered it as
a possibility at all.

He had realized early that the individual manifests but an
insignificant portion of his being in his ordinary existence, the
normal self being the tip of his consciousness only, yet whose fuller
expression rises readily to adequate evocation; and it was the study
of genius, of prodigies, so-called, and of certain faculties shown
sometimes in hysteria, that led him to believe these were small jets
from a sea of power that might, indeed ought, to be realizable at
will. The phenomena all pointed, he believed, to powers that seemed as
superior to cerebral functions as they were independent of these.

Man's possible field of being, in other words, seemed capable of
indefinite extension. His heart glowed within him as he established,
step by step, these greater powers. He dared to foresee a time when the
limitations of separate personality would have been destroyed, and the
vast brotherhood of the race become literally realized, its practical
unity accomplished.

The difficulties were endless and discouraging. The inventive powers of
the bigger self, its astonishing faculty for dramatizing its content in
every conceivable form, blocked everywhere the search for truth.

It could, he found, also detach a portion of its content into a series
of separate personalities, each with its individual morals, talents,
tendencies, each with its distinct and separate memory. These fragments
it could project, so to speak, masquerading convincingly as separate
entities, using strange languages, offering detailed knowledge of
other conditions, distant in time and space, suggesting, indeed, to
the unwary that they were due to obsessing spirits, and leaving the
observer in wonder before the potential capacity of the central self
disgorging them.

The human depths included, beyond mere telepathy and extended
telepathy, an expansion of consciousness so vast as to be, apparently,
limitless. The past, on rare occasions even the future, lay open; the
entire planetary memory, stored with rich and pregnant accumulated
experience, was accessible and shareable. New aspects of space and time
were equally involved. A vision of incredible grandeur opened gradually
before his eyes.

The surface consciousness of to-day was really rather a trumpery
affair; the gross lethargy of the vast majority _vis à vis_ the
greater possibilities afflicted him. To this surface consciousness
alone was so-called evil possible--as ignorance. As "ugly is only
half-way to a thing," so evil is half-way to good. With the greater
powers must come greater knowledge, shared as by instantaneous wireless
over the entire planet, and misunderstanding, chief obstacle to
progress always, would be impossible. A huge unity, sense of oneness
must follow. Moral growth would accompany the increase of faculty.
And here and there, it seemed to him, the surface ice had thawed
already a little; the pressure of the great deeps below caused cracks
and fissures. Auto-suggestion, prototype of all suggestion, offered
mysterious hints of the way to reach the stupendous underworld, as the
Christian Scientists, the miraculous healers, the New Thought movement,
saints, prophets, poets, artists, were finding out.

The subliminal, to state it shortly, might be the divine. This was the
hope, though not yet the actual belief, that haunted and inspired him.
Behind his personality lurked this strange gigantic dream, ever beating
to get through....

In his Private Home, helping, healing, using his great gifts of
sympathy and insight, he at the same time found the material for
intimate study and legitimate experiment he sought. The building
had been altered to suit his exact requirements; there were private
suites, each with its door and staircase to the street; one part of it
provided his own living quarters, shut off entirely from the patients'
side; in another, equally cut off and self-contained, yet within easy
communication of his own rooms, lived Paul Devonham, his valued young
assistant. There was a third private suite as well. The entire expenses
he defrayed himself.

Here, then, for a year or two he worked indefatigably, with the measure
of success and failure he anticipated; here he dreamed his great dream
of the future of the race, in whose progress and infinite capacities
he hopefully believed. Work was his love, the advancement of humanity
his god. The war availed itself of his great powers, as also of his
ready-made establishment, both of which he gave without a thought of
self. New material came as well from the battlefields into his ken.

The effect of the terrible five years upon him was in direct proportion
to his sincerity. His mind was not the type that shirks conclusions,
nor fears to look facts in the face. For really new knowledge he was
ever ready to yield all previous theories, to scrap all he had held
hitherto for probable. His mind was open, he sought only Truth.

The war, above all the Peace, shook his optimism. If it did not wholly
shatter his belief in human progress, it proved such progress to be so
slow that his Utopia faded into remotest distance, and his dream of
perfectibility became the faintest possible star in his hitherto bright
sky of hope.

He felt shocked and stupefied. The reaction was greater than at
first he realized. He had often pitied the mind that, aware only
of its surface consciousness, uninformed by thrill or shift of the
great powers below and above, lived unwarned of its own immenser
possibilities. To such, the evidence for extended human faculties must
seem explicable by fraud, illusion, derangement, to be classed as
abnormal rubbish worthy only of the alienist's attention as diseases.
To him such minds, though able, with big intellects among them, had
ever seemed a prejudiced, fossilized, prehistoric type. Restricted by
their very nature, violently resisting new ideas, they might be intense
within their actual scope, but, with vision denied them, they never
could be really great.

One effect of the shock he had undergone will be evident by merely
stating that he now understood this type of mind a good deal better
than before.




CHAPTER IV


The war was over, though the benefits of the long anticipated peace
still kept provocatively, exasperatingly, out of reach, when, about the
middle of September, Dr. Fillery received a letter that interested him
deeply.

The shattered world was still distraught, uneasy. Nervously eager to
resume its former activities, it was yet waiting for the word that
should give it the necessary confidence to begin. Doubt, insecurity,
uncertainty everywhere dominated human minds. Those who hoped for a
renewal of the easy, careless mood of pre-war days were dismayed to
find this was impossible; others who had allowed an optimistic idealism
to prophesy a New Age, looked about them bewilderingly and in vain for
signs of its fair birth. The latter, to whom, perhaps, Dr. Fillery
belonged, were more bitterly disappointed, more cruelly shocked, than
the former. The race, it seemed to many unshirking eyes, had leaped
back centuries at a single spring; the gulf of primal savagery which
had gaped wide open for five years, proving the Stone Age close beneath
the surface of so-called civilization, had not yet fully closed. Its
jaws still dripped blood, hatred, selfishness; the Race was still
dislocated by the convincing disproof of progress, horrified at the
fierce reality which had displaced the two-pence coloured dream it had
been complacently worshipping hitherto. Men in the mass undoubtedly
were savages still.

To Dr. Fillery, an honest, though not a necessarily fundamental
pessimism, seemed justified. He believed in progress still, but as
his habit was, he faced the facts. His attitude lost something of its
original enthusiasm. Looking about him, he saw no big constructive
movement; the figure who more than any other was altering the face
of the world with his ideas as well as his armies, was avowedly
destructive only. He found himself a sobered and a saddened man.

His Private Home, having accomplished splendid work, had just
discharged its last shell-shocked patient; it was now empty again,
the staff, carefully chosen and proved by long service, dismissed
on holidays, the building itself renovated and repaired against the
arrival later of new patients that were expected.

Devonham, his assistant, away for a period of rest in Switzerland,
would be back in a week or two, and Dr. Fillery, before resuming his
normal work, found himself with little to do but watch the progress of
the cleaners, painters and carpenters at work.

Into this brief time of leisure dropped the strange, perplexing letter
with an effect distinctly stimulating. It promised an unusual case, a
patient, if patient the case referred to could properly be called, a
young man "who if you decide after careful reflection to reject, can
be looked after only by the State, which means, of course, an Asylum
for the Insane. I know you are no longer head of the Establishment in
Liverpool, but that you confine yourself to private work along similar
lines, though upon a smaller scale, and that you welcome only cases
that have been given up as hopeless. I honour your courage and your
sympathy, I know your skill. So far as a cure is conceivable, this one
is hopeless certainly, but its unusual, indeed, its unique character,
entitles it, I believe, to be placed among your chosen few. Love,
sympathy, patience, combined with the closest observation, it urgently
demands, and these qualities, associated with unrivalled skill, you
must allow me, again, to think you alone possess among healers and
helpers of strange minds.

"For over twenty years, in the solitudes of these Jura forests and
mountains, I have cared for him as best I could, and with a devotion a
child of my own might have expected. But now, my end not far away, I
cannot leave him behind me here uncared for, yet the alternative, the
impersonal and formal care of an Institute, must break my heart and
his. I turn to you.

"My advanced age and growing infirmities, in these days of unkind
travel, prohibit my bringing him over. Can your great heart suggest a
means, since I feel sure you will not refuse the care of this strange
being whose nature and peculiarities indicate your especial care, and
yours alone? Is it too much to wonder if you yourself could come and
see him--here in the remote mountain châlet where I have tended and
cared for him ever since his mother died in bearing him over twenty
years ago?

"I have taught him what seemed wise and best; I have guarded and
observed him; he knows little or nothing of an outside world of men and
women, and is ignorant of life in the ordinary meaning of the word.
What precisely he may be, to what stratum of consciousness he belongs,
what kind of being he is, I mean...." The last two lines were then
scored through, though left legible. "I feel with Arago, that he is
a rash man who pronounces the word 'impossible' anywhere outside the
sphere of pure mathematics." More sentences were here scored through.

"Dare I say--to you, as master, teacher, great open-minded soul--that
to _human_ life, as we know it, he does not, perhaps, belong?

"In writing--in this letter--I find it impossible to give you full
details. I had intended to set them down; my pen refuses; in the
plain English at my disposal--well, simply, it is not credible. But I
have kept full notes all these years, and the notes belong to you. I
enclose an imperfect painting I made of him some four years ago. I am
no artist; for background you must imagine what lay beyond my little
skill--the blazing glory of the immense wood-fires that he loves to
make upon the open mountain side, usually at dawn after a night of
prayer and singing, while waiting for the strange power he derives
(as we all do, indeed, at second or third hand), from the worship of
what is to him his mighty father, the life-giving sun. Wind, as the
'messengers' of the sun, he worships too.... Both sun and wind, that
is, produce an unusual state approaching ecstasy.

"Counting upon you, I have hypnotized him, suggesting that he forget
all the immediate past (in fact to date), and telling him he will like
you in place of me--though with him it is an uncertain method.

"I am now old in years. I have lived and loved, suffered and dreamed
like most of us; my hands have been warmed at the fires of life, of
which, let me add, I am not ignorant. You have known, I believe,
my serious, as also my lighter imaginative books; my occasional
correspondence with your colleague Paul Devonham has been of help and
guidance to me. We are not, therefore, wholly strangers.

"The twenty years spent in these solitudes among simple peasant folk,
with a single object of devotion to fill my days, have been, I would
tell you, among the best of my long existence. My renouncement of the
world was no renouncement. I am enriched with wonder and experience
that amaze me, for the world holds possibilities few have ever dreamed
of, and that I myself, filled as I am with the memory of their
contemplation, can hardly credit even now. Perhaps in an earlier stage
of evolution, as Delboeuf believes, man was fully aware of _all_ that
went on within himself--a region since closed to us, owing to attention
being increasingly directed outwards. Into some such region I have had
a glimpse, it seems. I feel sometimes there was as much fact as fancy,
perhaps, in the wise old Hebrew who stated poetically--recently, too,
compared with the stretch of time my science deals with--'The Sons of
God took to themselves daughters of the children of men...."

The letter here broke off, as though interrupted by something
unexpected and unusual; it was signed, indeed, "John Mason," but signed
in pencil and at the bottom of an unwritten blank sheet. It had not
all been written, either, at one time, or on the same day; there were
intervals, evidently, perhaps of hours, perhaps of days, between the
paragraphs. Dr. Fillery read, re-read, then read again the strange
epistle, coming each time to the same conclusion--the writer was dying
in the very act of forming the last sentences. Their incoherence, the
alteration in the style, were thus explained. He had felt the end of
life so close that he had written his signature, probably addressed the
envelope as well, knowing the page might never be filled up. It had not
been filled up.

Something behind the phrases, behind the intensity of the actual
words, beyond the queer touches that revealed a mind betrayed by
solitude, the hints possibly of a deluded intelligence--there was
something that rang true and stimulated him more than ordinarily. The
reference to Devonham, too, was definite enough. Dr. Fillery remembered
vaguely a correspondence during recent crowded years with a man named
Mason, living away in Switzerland somewhere, and that Devonham had
asked him questions from time to time about what he called, with his
rough-and-ready and half-humorous classification, "pagan obsession,"
"worshipper of fire and wind," referring it to the writer of the
letters, named John Mason. "Non-human delusion," he had also called it
sometimes. They had come to refer to it, he remembered, as "N. H." in
fact.

He now looked up those Notes, for the mention of the books caused him
an uncomfortable feeling of neglected opportunity, and John Mason was
an honoured name.

"You know, I believe ... my books," the writer said. Could this
be, he asked himself anxiously, John Mason, the eminent geologist?
Had Devonham not realized who he was? Must he blame his assistant,
whose jealous care and judgment saved him so many foolish, futile,
un-real cases, reserving what was significant and important only?

The Notes established his mistakes and his assistant's--perhaps
intentional?--ignorance. The writer of this curious letter was
unquestionably the author of those fairy books for children, old
and young, whose daring speculations had suggested that other types
and races, ages even before the Neanderthal man, had dwelt side by
side with what is known as modern man upon this time-worn planet.
Behind the literary form of legend and fairy tale, however, lay a
curious conviction. Atlantis was of yesterday compared with earlier
civilizations, now extinct by fire and flood and general upheaval,
which once may have inhabited the globe. The present evolutionary
system, buttressed by Darwin and the rest, was but a little recent
insignificant series, trivial both in time and space, when set beside
the mightier systems that had come and gone. Their evidence he
found, not in clumsy fossils and footprints on cooled rocks, but in
the _minds_ of those who had followed and eventually survived them:
memories of Titan Wars and mighty beings, and gods and goddesses of
non-human kind, to whose different existence the physical conditions of
an over-heated planet presented no impossibility. The human species,
this trumpery, limited, self-satisfied super-animal man, was not the
only type of being.

Yet John Mason, in his day, had held the chair at Edinburgh University,
his lectures embodied common-sense and knowledge, with acutest
imaginative insight. His earliest writings were the text-books of the
time. His name, when Edward Fillery was medical student there, still
hovered like well-loved incense above the old-town towers.

The Notes now intrigued him. No blame attached to Devonham for having
missed the cue, Devonham could not know everything; geology was not in
his line of work and knowledge; and Mason was a common name. Rather
he blamed himself for not having been struck by the oddness of the
case--the Mason letters, the pagan obsession, worshipper of wind and
fire, the strange "N. H."

"A competent indexer, at any rate," he said to himself with a smile, as
he turned up the details easily.

These were very scanty. Devonham evidently had deemed the case of
questionable value. The letters from Mason, with the answers to them,
he could not find.

The slight record was headed "_Mason_, John," followed by an
address "Chez Henri Petavel, peasant, Jura Mountains, Vaud, French
Switzerland," and details how to reach this apparently remote valley by
mule and carriage and foot-path. Name of Mason's protégé not given.

"_Sex, male_; age--born 1895; parentage, couple of mystical
temperament, sincere, but suffering from marked delusions, believers in
Magic (various, but chiefly concerned with Nature and natural forces,
once known, forgotten to-day, of immense potency, accessible to certain
practices of logical but undetailed kind, able apparently to intensify
human consciousness).

"_Subject_, of extremely quick intelligence, yet betrays ignorance of
human conditions; intelligence superior to human, though sometimes
inferior; long periods of quiescence, followed by immense, almost
super-human, activity and energy; worships fire and air, chiefly the
former, calling the sun his father and deity.

"Abhors confined space; this shown by intense desire for heat, which,
together with free space (air), seem conditions of well-being.

"Fears (as in claustrophobia) both water and solidity (anything
massive).

"Has great physical power, yet indifferent to its use; women
irresistibly attracted to him, but his attitude towards other sex seems
one of gentleness and pity; love means nothing. Has, on the other hand,
extraordinarily high ideal of service. Is puzzled by quarrels and
differences of personal kind. Half-memories of vast system of myriad
workers, ruled by this ideal of harmonious service. Faithful, true,
honest; falseness or lies impossible ... lovable, pathetic, helpless
type----"

The Notes broke off abruptly.

Dr. Fillery, wondering a little that his subordinate's brief but
suggestive summary had never been brought to his notice before, turned
a moment to glance at the rough water-colour drawing he held in his
hand. He looked at it for some moments with absorption. The expression
of his face was enigmatical. He was more than surprised that Devonham
had not drawn his attention to the case in detail. Placing his hand so
as to hide the lower portion of the face, he examined the eyes, then
turned the portrait upside down, gazing at the eyes afresh. He seemed
lost in thought for a considerable time. A faint flush stole into his
cheek, and a careful observer might have noticed an increase of light
about the skin. He sighed once or twice, and presently, laying the
portrait down again, he turned back to the _dossier_ upon the table in
front of him.

"Very accurate and careful," he said to himself with satisfaction as
he noticed the date Devonham had set against the entries--"June 20th,
1914."

The war, therefore, had interrupted the correspondence.

Devonham had made further notes of his own in the margin here and there:

"Does this originate primarily from Mason's mind, communicated thence
to his protégé?" He agreed with his assistant's query.

"If so, was it transferred to Mason's mind before that? By the father
or mother? The mother was, obviously, his--Mason's--great love. Yet the
father was his life friend. Mason's great passion was suppressed. He
never told it. It found no outlet."

"Admirable," was the comment spoken below his breath.

"Boy born as result of some 'magical' experiment intensely believed
(not stated in detail), during course of which father died suddenly.

"Mason tended mother, then lived alone in remote place where all had
occurred.

"Did Mason inherit entire content of parents' beliefs, dramatizing this
by force of unexpressed but passionate love?

"Did not Mason's mind, thus charged, communicate whole business to the
young mind he has since formed, a plastic mind uninfluenced by normal
human surroundings and conditions of ordinary life?

"Transfer of a sex-inspired mania?"

Then followed another note, summarizing evidently Devonham's judgment:

"Not worth F.'s investigation until examined further. N.B.--Look up
Mason first opportunity and judge at first hand."

Dr. Fillery, glancing from the papers to the portrait, smiled a little
again as he signified approval.

But the last entry interested him still more. It was dated July 13,
1914.

"Mason reports boy's prophecy of great upheaval coming. Entire
race slips back into chaos of primitive life again. Entire Western
Civilization crumbles. Modern inventions and knowledge vanish. Nature
spirits reappear.... Desires return of all previous letters. These sent
by registered post."

A few scattered notes on separate sheets of paper lay at the end of
the carefully typed _dossier_, but these were very incomplete, and
Devonham's handwriting, especially when in pencil, was not of the
clearest.

"Non-human claim, though absurd, not traceable to any antecedent
causes given by letters. What is Mason's past mental and temperamental
history? Is he not, through the parents, the cause? Mania seems
harmless, both to subject and others. No suffering or unhappiness.
Therefore not a case for F., until further examined by self. Better see
Mason and his subject first. Wrote July 24th proposing visit."

Dr. Fillery's eyes twinkled. His forehead relaxed. He looked back. He
remembered details. Devonham's holiday that year, he recalled, was
due on August 1st; he had intended going out mountain climbing in
Switzerland.

The final note of all, also in half-legible writing, seemed to refer
to the treatment Mason had asked advice about, and the line Devonham
had suggested:

"Natural life close to Nature cannot hurt him. But I advise watch him
with fire and with heights--heat, air! That is, he may decide his
physical body is irksome and seek to escape it. Teach him natural
history--botany, geology, insects, animals, even astronomy, but always
giving him reasons and explanations. _Above all_--let him meet girls of
his own age and fall in love. Fullest natural expression, but guarded
without his knowing it...."

For a long time Dr. Fillery sat with the notes and papers before him,
thinking over what he had read. Devonham's advice was clever enough,
but without insight, sound and astute, yet lacking divination.

The twinkle in his eyes, caused by the final entry, died away. His
face was grave, his manner preoccupied, intense. He gazed long at the
portrait in his hand.... It was dusk when he finally rose, replaced
the _dossier_, locked the cabinet, and went out into another room, and
thence into the hall. Taking his hat and stick, he left the house,
already composing in his mind the telegram instructing Devonham, while
apologizing for the interrupted holiday, to bring the subject of the
Notes to England with him. A telegraph girl met him on the very steps
of the house. He took the envelope from her, and opened it. He read the
message. It was dated Bâle, the day before:

    "Arriving end week with interesting patient. Details index
    under Mason. Prepare private suite.
                                     "DEVONHAM."




CHAPTER V


It was, however, some two weeks later before Dr. Fillery was on his
way to the station to meet Devonham and his companion. A slight delay,
caused apparently by the necessity of buying an outfit, had intervened
and given time for an exchange of letters, but Devonham had contented
himself chiefly with telegrams. He did not wish his chief to know
too much about the case in advance. "Probably he regrets the Notes
already," thought the doctor, as the car made its way slowly across
crowded London. "He wants my first unbiased judgment; he's right, of
course, but it's too late for that now."

The delay, however, had been of value. The Home was in working order
again, the staff returned, the private suite all ready for its
interesting occupant, whom in thought he had already named "N. H."; for
in the first place he did not know his name as yet, and in the second
he felt towards him a certain attitude of tolerant, half-humorous
scepticism.

Cut off from his own kind for so many years, educated, perhaps
half-educated only, by too speculative and imaginative a mind,
equally warped by this long solitude, a mind unduly stretched by the
contemplation of immense geological perspectives, filled, too, with
heaven knows what strange stories of pantheistic Nature-feeling--"N.
H." might be distinctly interesting, but hardly all that Mason had
thought him. "Unique" was a word rarely justified; the peculiarities
would prove to be mere extravagances that had, of necessity, remained
uncorrected by the friction of intercourse with his own kind. The rest
was inheritance, equally unpruned; a mind living in a side-eddy, a
backwater with Nature....

At the same time Dr. Fillery admitted a certain anticipatory excitement
he could not wholly account for, an undercurrent of wonder he ascribed
to his Khaketian blood.

He had written once only to his assistant, sending briefest
instructions to say the rooms would be ready, and that the young man
must believe he was an invited guest coming on a visit. "Let him expect
complete freedom of movement and occupation without the smallest idea
of restraint in any way. He is merely coming to stay for as long as
he pleases with a friend of Mason. Impress him with a sense of hearty
welcome." And Devonham, replying, had evidently understood the wisdom
of this method. "He is also greatly pleased with your name--the sound
of it," was stated in the one letter that he wrote, "and as names mean
a lot to him, so much the better. The sound of it gives him pleasure;
he keeps repeating it over to himself; he already likes you. My name he
does not care about, saying it quickly, sharply. But he trusts me. His
trust in anyone who shows him kindness is instantaneous and complete.
He invariably expects kindness, however, from everyone--gives it
himself equally--and is baffled and puzzled by any other treatment."

So Devonham, with "N. H.", who attached importance to names and
expected kindness from people as a natural thing, would be in London
town within the hour. Straight from his forests and mountains for the
first time in his life, he would find himself in the heart of the
greatest accumulation of human beings on the planet, the first city of
the world, the final expression of civilization as known to the human
race.

"'N. H.' in London town," thought Dr. Fillery, his mouth twitching
with the smile that began in his quiet eyes. "Bless the lad! We must
make him feel at home and happy. He shall indeed have kindness. He'll
need a woman's touch as well." He reflected a moment. "Women are a
great help in doubtful cases--the way a man reacts to them," he mused.
"Only they must be distinct in type to be of value." And his mind ran
quickly, comprehensively over the women of his acquaintance, pausing,
as it did so, upon two in particular--a certain Lady Gleeson, and
Iraida--sometimes called Nayan--Khilkoff, the daughter of his Russian
friend, the sculptor.

His mind pondered for some moments the two he had selected. It was not
the first time he had made use of them. Their effect respectively upon
a man was invariably instinctive and illuminating.

The two were radically different feminine types, as far removed from
one another as pole from pole, yet each essentially of her sex. Their
effect, respectively, upon such a youth must be of value, and might be
even illuminating to the point of revelation. Both, he felt sure, would
not be indifferent to the new personality.

It was, however, of Nayan Khilkoff that he thought chiefly. Of that
rare, selfless, maternal type which men in all ages have called saint
or angel, she possessed that power which evoked in them all they could
feel of respect, of purity, of chivalry, that love, in a word, which
holds as a chief ingredient, worship. Her beauty, beyond their reach,
was of the stars; it was the unattainable in her they loved; her beauty
was of the soul. Nayan was spiritual, not as a result of painful effort
and laborious development, but born so. Her life, moreover, was one of
natural service. Personal love, exclusive devotion to an individual,
concentration of her being upon another single being--this seemed
impossible to her. She was at the same time an enigma: there was an
elusive flavour about her that made people a little in awe of her, a
flavour not of this earth, quite. She carried an impersonal attitude
almost to the point of seeming irresponsive to common human things and
interests.

The other woman, Lady Gleeson, Angela her Christian name, was equally
a simple type, though her simplicity was that of the primitive female
who is still close to the Stone Age--a savage. She adorned herself to
capture men. She was the female spider that devours its mates. She
wanted slaves. To describe her as selfish were inadequate, for she was
unaware that any other ideal existed in life but that of obtaining
her own pleasure. There was instinct and emotion, but, of course, no
heart. Without morals, conscience or consideration, she was the animal
of prey that obeys the call of hunger in the most direct way possible,
regardless of consequences to herself or others. Her brain was quick,
her personality shallow. When talking she "rattled on." Devonham had
well said once: "You can hear her two thoughts clicking, both of them
in trousers!" Sir George, recently knighted, successful with large
concessions in China, was indulgent. The male splendour of the youth
was bound to stimulate her hunger, as his simplicity, his loneliness,
and in a sense his pathetic helplessness, would certainly evoke the
tenderness in Nayan. "He'll probably like her dear, ridiculous name,
too," Dr. Fillery felt, "the nickname they gave her because she's the
same to everybody, whichever way you take her--Nayan Khilkoff." Yet
her real name was more beautiful--Iraida. And, as he repeated it half
aloud, a soft light stole upon his face, shone in the deep clear eyes,
and touched even the corners of the rather grim mouth with another, a
tenderer expression, before the sternness quickly returned to it.

"N. H." would meet, thus, two main types of female life. He, apparently
an exceedingly male being, would face the onslaught of passion and
heart, of lust and love, respectively; and it was his reactions to
these onslaughts that Fillery wished to observe. They would help his
diagnosis, they might guide his treatment.

It was a warm and muggy afternoon, the twilight passing rapidly into
darkness now; one of those late autumn days when summer heat flits
back, but light is weak. The covered sky increased the clammy warmth,
which was damp, unhealthy, devitalizing. No wind stirred. The great
city was sticky and depressing. Yet people approved the heat, although
it tired them. "It shortens the winter, anyhow," was the general
verdict, when expressed at all. They referred unconsciously to the
general dread of strikes.

London was hurried and confused. An air of feverish overcrowding
reigned in the great station, when he left the car and went in on foot.
No sign of order, system, direction, was visible. The scene might have
been a first rehearsal of some entirely new experiment. Grumbling and
complaint rose from all sides in an exasperated chorus. He tried to
ascertain how late the train was and on which platform it might be
expected, but no one knew for certain, and the grudging replies to
questions seemed to say, "You've no right to ask anything, and if you
keep on asking there will be a strike. So that's that!"

He listened to the talk and watched the facial expressions and the
movements of the half-resigned and half-excited concourse of London
citizens. The clock was accurate, and everyone was kind to ladies;
stewed tea, stale cake with little stones in it, vile whisky and very
weak beer were obtainable at high prices. There were no matches. The
machine for supplying platform-tickets was broken. He saw men paying
more thought and attention to the comfort of their dogs than to their
own. The great, marvellous, stupid, splendid race was puzzled and
exasperated. Then, suddenly, the train pulled in, full of returned
exiles longing to be back again in "dear old England."

"Thank God, it's come," sighed the crowd. "Good! We're English. Forgive
and forget!" and prepared to tip the porters handsomely and carry their
own baggage.

The confusion that followed was equally characteristic, and equally
remarkable, displaying greatness side by side with its defects. There
was no system; all was muddled, yet all was safe. Anyone could claim
what luggage they liked, though no one did so, nor dreamed, it seemed,
of doing so. There was an air of decent honesty and trust. There were
ladies who discovered that all men are savages; there were men--and
women--who were savages. People shook hands warmly, smiled with honest
affection, said light, careless good-byes that hid genuine emotion;
helped one another with parcels, offered one another lifts. There
were few taxicabs, one perhaps to every thirty people. And in this
general scrimmage, Dr. Fillery, at first, could see no sign of his
expected arrivals; he walked from end to end of the platform littered
with luggage and thronged with bustling people, but nowhere could he
discover the familiar outline of Devonham, nor anyone who answered to
the strange picture that already stood forth sharply in his mind.

"There's been a mistake somewhere," he said to himself; "I shall find
a telegram when I get back to the house explaining it"--when, suddenly
and without apparent cause, there stole upon him a curious lift of
freedom--a sharp sense of open spaces he was at a loss to understand.
It was accompanied by an increase of light. For a second it occurred
to him that the great enclosing roof had rolled back and blown away,
letting in air and some lost ray of sunshine. A lovely valley flitted
across his thought. Almost he was aware of flowers, of music, of
rhythmic movement.

"Edward! there you are. I thought you hadn't come," he heard close
behind him, and, turning, saw the figure of Devonham, calm and alert as
usual. At his side stood a lean, virile outline of a young man, topping
Devonham by several inches, with broad but thin shoulders, figure
erect yet flexible, whose shining and inquiring eyes of blue were the
most striking feature in a boyish face, where strength, intensity and
radiant health combined in an unusual degree.

"Here is our friend, LeVallon," added Devonham, but not before the
figure had stepped lightly and quickly forward, already staring at him
and shaking his outstretched hand.

So this was "N. H.," and LeVallon was his name. The calm, searching
eyes held a touch of bewilderment in them, the eyes of an honest,
intelligent animal, thought Fillery quickly, adding in spite of
himself and almost simultaneously, "but of a divine animal." It was
a look he had never in his life before encountered in any human
eyes. Mason's water-colour sketch had caught something, at least, of
their innocence and question, of their odd directness and intensity,
something, too, of the golden fire in the hair. He wore a broad-brimmed
felt hat of Swiss pattern, a Bernese overcoat, a low, soft-collared
shirt, with blue tie to match.

Buffeted and pushed by the frenzied travellers, they stood and faced
each other, shaking hands, eyes looking into eyes, two strangers,
doctor and patient possibly, but friends most certainly, both felt
instantly. They liked one another. Once again the scent of flowers
danced with light above the piled-up heaps of trunks, rugs, packages. A
cool wind from mountains seemed to blow across the dreadful station.

"You've arrived safely," began Dr. Fillery, a little taken aback
perhaps. "Welcome! And not too tired, I hope----" when the other
interrupted him in a man's deep voice, full of pleasant timbre:

"Fill-er-y," he said, making the "F" sound rather long, "I need you. To
see you makes me happy."

"Tired," put in Devonham breathlessly, "good heavens, not he! But I am.
Now for a porter and the big luggage. Have you got a taxi?"

"The car is here," said Fillery, letting go with a certain reluctance
the hand he held, and paying little attention to anything but the
figure before him who used such unexpected language. What was it? What
did it mean? Whence came this sudden sense of intensity, light, of
order, system, intelligence into the racial scene of muddled turmoil
all about him? There seemed an air of speeding up in thought and action
near him, compared to which the slow stupidity, unco-ordinated and
confused on all sides, became painful, gross, and even ludicrous.

Someone bumped against him with violence, but quite needlessly, since
the simplest judgment of weight and distance could have avoided the
collision. In such ordinary small details he was aware of another, a
higher, standard close. A man on his left, trying to manage several
bundles, appeared vividly as of amazing incompetence, with his
miscalculation, his clumsy movement, his hopeless inability to judge
cause and effect. Yet he had two arms, ten fingers, two legs, broad
shoulders and deep chest. Misdirection of his great strength made it
impossible for him to manage the assortment of light parcels. Next
to him, however, stood a woman carrying a baby--there was no error
there. The panting engine just beyond them, again, set a standard of
contemptuous, impersonal intelligence that, obeying Nature's laws,
dwarfed the humans generally. But it was another, a quasi-spiritual
standard that had flashed to him above all. In some curious way
the competent "dead" machinery that obeyed the Law with faultless
efficiency, and the woman obeying instinct with equally unconscious
skill--these two energies were akin to the new standard he was now
startlingly aware of.

He looked up, as though to trace this sudden new consciousness of
bright, quick, rapid competence--almost as of some immense power
building with consistent scheme and system--that had occurred to him;
and he met again the direct, yet slightly bewildered eyes that watched
him, watched him with confidence, sweetness, and with a questioning
intensity he found intriguing, captivating, and oddly stimulating. He
felt happiness.

"By yer leave!" roared a porter, as they stepped aside just in time to
save being pushed by the laden truck--just in time to save himself,
that is, for the other, Fillery noticed, moved like a chamois on its
native rocks, so surely, lightly, swiftly was he poised.

"This! Ah, you must excuse it," the doctor exclaimed with a smile of
apology almost, "we've not yet had time to settle down after the war,
you see." He pointed with a sweep of his hand to the roaring, dim-lit
cavern where confusion reigned supreme, the G.H.Q. of travel in the
biggest city of the Empire.

"I've got a porter," cried Devonham, beckoning vigorously a little
further down the platform. "You wait there. I'll be along in a minute
with the stuff." He was hot, flustered, exhausted.

"You struggle. It was like this all the way. Is there no knowledge?"
LeVallon asked in his deep, quiet tones.

"We do," said Fillery. "With us life is always struggle. But there is
more system than appears. The confusion is chiefly on the surface."

"It is dark and there is so little air," observed the other. "And they
all work against each other."

Fillery laughed into the other's eyes; they laughed together; and it
seemed suddenly to the doctor that their beings somehow merged, so
that, for a second, he knew the entire content of his companion's
mind--as if there was nothing in LeVallon he did not understand.

"You--are a builder," LeVallon said abruptly. But as he said it his
companion caught, on the wing as it were, another meaning. He became
curiously aware of the smallness, of the remote insignificance of the
little planet whereon this dialogue took place, yet at the same time of
its superb seductive loveliness. In him rose a feeling, as on wings,
that he was not chained in his familiar, daily personality, but that an
immense, delicious freedom lay within reach. He could be everywhere at
once. He could do everything.

"Wait here while I help Devonham. Then we'll get into the car and be
off." He moved away, threading a path with difficulty.

"I wait in peace. I am happy," was the reply.

And with those few phrases, uttered in the quiet, deep voice, sounding
in his ears and in his very blood, the older man went towards the spot
where Devonham struggled with a porter, a pile of nondescript luggage
and a truck: "I wait in peace.... You struggle, you work against each
other.... It is dark, there is little air.... You are a builder...."

But not these singular words alone remained alive in his mind; there
remained in his heart the sense of that vitality of open spaces, keen
air and brighter light he had experienced--and, with it, the security
of some higher, faultless standard. His brain, indeed, had recognized
a consciousness of swifter reactions, of surer movements, of more
intelligent co-ordination, compared to which the people about him
behaved like stupid, almost like half-witted beings, the one exception
being the instinctive action of the mother in carrying her baby, and
the other, the impersonal, accurate, competence of the dead machinery.

But, more than this reasoned change, there burned suddenly in his heart
an inexplicable exhilaration and brightness, a wonder that he could
attribute only to another mode of life. His Khaketian blood, he knew,
might be responsible for part of it, but not for all. The invigorating
mountain wind, the sunlight, the rhythmic sound, the scent of wild
flowers, these were his own personal interpretations of a quickened
sense he could not analyse as yet. As he held the young man's hand,
as he gazed into his direct blue eyes, this sense had increased in
intensity. LeVallon had some marvellous quality or power that was new
to him, while yet not entirely unfamiliar. What was it? And how did the
youth perceive this sense in him so surely that he took its presence
for granted, accepted, even played upon it? He experienced, as it were,
a brilliant intensification of spirit. Some portion of him already knew
exactly what LeVallon was.

Across the ugly turmoil and confusion of the huge dingy railway
terminus had moved wondrously some simple power that brought
in--Beauty. Some very deep and ancient conception had touched him and
gone its way again. The stupendous beauty of a simple, common day
appeared to him. His subconscious being, of course, was deeply stirred.
That was the truth, phrase it as he might. His heart was lifted as by
a primal wind at dawn upon some mountain top. The heaviness of the
day was gone. Fatigue, too, vanished. The "civilized" folk appeared
contemptible and stupid. Something direct from Nature herself poured
through him. And it was from the atmosphere of LeVallon this new
vitality issued radiating.

He found a moment or two, while alone with Devonham, to exchange a few
hurried sentences. As they bent over bags and bundles he asked quick
questions. These questions and answers between the two experienced men
were brief but significant:

"Yes, quiet as a lamb. Just be kind and sympathetic. You looked up the
Notes? Well, that can't be helped now, though I had rather you knew
nothing. My mistake, of course."

"The content of his mind is accessible to me--telepathically--in any
case."

"But at one remove more distant, because unexpressed."

Fillery laughed. "Quite right. I admit it's a pity. But tell me more
about him--anything I ought to know--at once."

"Quiet as a lamb, I told you," repeated the other, "and most of the
way over too. But puzzled--my God, Edward, his criticisms would make
a book."

"Normal? Intelligent criticisms?"

"Intelligent above ordinary. Normal--no."

"Hysteria?"

"Not a sign."

"Health?"

"Perfect, magnificent, as you see. He's less tired now than when we
started three days ago, whereas I'm fagged out, though in climbing
condition."

"Origin of delusions--any indication?"

Devonham looked up quickly. His eyes flashed a peculiarly searching
glance--something watchful in it perhaps. "No delusion at all of any
sort. As for origin of his ideas--the parents probably, but stimulated
and allowed unchecked growth by Mason. Affected by Nature beyond
anything _we_ know."

"By Nature. Ah!" He checked himself. "And what peculiarities?" he
asked.

"His terror of water, for instance. Crossing the Channel he was like a
frightened child. He hid from it, kept his hands over his eyes even, so
as not to see it."

"Give any reason?"

"All he said was 'It is unknown, an enemy, and can destroy me, I cannot
understand its secret ways. Fire and wind are not in it. I cannot work
with it.' No, it was not fear of drowning that he meant. He found
comfort, too, in the repetition of your name."

"Appetite, pulse, temperature?" asked Fillery, after a brief pause.

"First two very strong; temperature always slightly above normal."

"Other peculiarities?"

"He became rather excited before a lighted match once--tried to kneel,
almost, but I stopped it."

"Fire?"

"That's it. Instinct of worship presumably."

The barrow was laden, the porter was asking where the car was. They
prepared to move back to the companion, whom Fillery had never failed
to observe carefully over his shoulder during this rapid conversation.
"N. H." had not moved the whole time: he stood quietly, looking about
him, a curious figure, aloof somehow from his surroundings, so tall
and straight and unconcerned he seemed, yet so poised, alert, virile,
vigorous. It was not his clothes that made him appear unusual, nor was
it his eyes and hair alone, though all three contributed their share.
Yet he seemed dressed up, his clothes irksome to him. He was uncommon,
an attractive figure, and many a pair of eyes, female eyes especially,
Fillery noticed, turned to examine him with undeniable curiosity.

"And women?" the doctor asked quickly in a lowered voice, as they
followed the porter's barrow towards LeVallon, who already smiled at
their approach--the most engaging, trustful, welcoming smile that
Fillery had ever seen upon a human countenance.

He lowered his head to catch the reply. But Devonham only laughed and
shrugged his shoulders. "All attracted," he mumbled in a half whisper,
"and eager to help him."

"And he----?"

"Gentle, astonished, but indifferent, oh, supremely indifferent."

LeVallon came forward to meet them, and Fillery took his hand and led
him to the car. The luggage was bundled in, some behind and some on the
roof. Fillery and LeVallon sat side by side. The car started.

"We shall get home in half an hour," the doctor mentioned, turning to
his companion. "We'll have a good dinner and then get to bed. You are
hungry, I know."

"Thank you," was the reply, "thank you, dear Fillery. I want sleep
most. Will there be trees and air near me? And stars to see?"

"Your windows open on to a garden with big trees, there will be plenty
of fresh air, and you will hear the sparrows chattering at dawn. But
London, of course, is not the country. Oh, we'll make you comfortable,
never fear."

"Dear Fillery, I thank you," said LeVallon quietly, and without more
ado lay back among the soft cushions and closed his eyes. Hardly a
word was said the whole way out to the north-west suburb, and when
they arrived the "patient" was too overcome with sleep to wish to eat.
He went straight to his room, found a hot bath into which he tumbled
first, and then leaped into his bed and was sound asleep almost before
the door was closed. Upon a table beside the bed Dr. Fillery, with
his own hands, arranged bread, butter, eggs and a jug of milk in case
of need. Nurse Robbins, an experienced, tactful young woman, he put
in special charge. He thought of everything, divining his friend's
possible needs instinctively, noticing with his keen practised eye
several details for himself at the same time. The splendid physical
condition, frame-work, muscular development he noted--no freakish
bulky masses produced by gymnastic exercises, but the muscles laid
on flowingly, smooth and firm and ample, without a trace of fat, and
the whole in the most admirable proportion possible. The leanness
was deceptive; the body was of immense power. The quick, certain,
unerring movements he noticed too; perfect, swift co-ordination between
brain and physical response, no misdirection, no miscalculation, the
reactions extremely rapid. He thought with a smile of something between
deer and tiger. The poise and balance and accuracy conveyed intense joy
of living. Yet above and beyond these was something else he could not
name, something that stirred in him wonder, love, a touch of awe, and a
haunting suggestion of familiarity.

He saw him into bed, he saw him actually asleep. The strong blue eyes
looked up into his own with their intense and innocent gaze for a
moment; he held the firm, dry muscular hand; ten seconds later the eyes
were closed in sleep, the grip of the powerful but slender fingers
relaxed.

"Good night, my friend, and sleep deeply. To-morrow we'll see to
everything you need. Be happy here and comfortable with us, for you are
welcome and we love you." His voice trembled slightly.

"Good night, dear Fill-er-y," the musical tones replied, and he was off.

The windows were wide open. "N. H." had thrown aside the pyjamas and
blankets. On this cool, damp night of late autumn he covered his big,
warm, lithe body with a single sheet only.

Fillery went out quietly, an expression of keen approval and enjoyment
on his face--not a smile exactly, but that look of deep content,
betraying a fine inner excitement of happiness, which is the mother of
all smiles. As he softly opened the door the draught blew through from
the open windows, stirring the white curtains by the bed. It came from
the big damp garden where the trees stood, already nearly leafless,
and where no flowers were. And yet a scent of flowers came faintly
with it. He caught an echo of faint sound like music. There was the
invigorating hint of forests too. It seemed a living wind that blew
into the house.

Dr. Fillery paused a moment, sniffed with surprise and sharp enjoyment,
listened intently, then switched the light off and went out, closing
the door behind him. There was a flash of wonder in his eyes, and a
thrill of some remote inexplicable happiness ran through his nerves.
An instant of complete comprehension had been his, as if another
consciousness had, for that swift instant, identified itself with his
own.




CHAPTER VI


Edward Fillery was glad that Paul Devonham, good friend and skillful
colleague, was his assistant; for Devonham, competent as himself in
knowledge and experience, found explanations for all things, and had
in his natural temperament a quality of sane judgment which corrected
extravagances.

Devonham was agnostic, because reason ruled his life. Devoid of
imagination, he had no temptations. Speculative, within limits, he
might be, but he belonged not to the unstable. Not that he thought he
knew everything, but that he refused to base action on what he regarded
as unknown. A clue into the unknown he would follow up as keenly,
carefully, as Fillery himself, but he went step by step, with caution,
declining to move further until the last step was of hardened concrete.
To the powers of the subconscious self he set drastic limits, admitting
their existence of course, but attaching small value to their use or
development. His own deeper being had never stirred or wakened. Of
this under-sea, this vast background in himself, he remained placidly
uninformed. A comprehensive view of a problem--the flash of vision
he never knew--thus was perhaps denied him, but so far as he went he
was very safe and sure. And his chief was the first to appreciate his
value. He appreciated it particularly now, as the two men sat smoking
after their late dinner, discussing details of the new inmate of the
Home.

Fillery, aware of the strong pull upon his own mixed blood, aware of
a half-wild instinctive sympathy towards "N. H.," almost of a natural
desire now, having seen him, to believe him "unique" in several ways,
and, therefore, conscious of a readiness to accept more than any
evidence yet justified--feeling these symptoms clearly, and remembering
vividly his experiences in the railway station, he was glad, for
truth's sake, that Devonham was there to clip extravagance before it
injured judgment. A weak man, aware of his own frailties, excels a
stronger one who thinks he has none at all. The two colleagues were a
powerful combination.

"In your view, it's merely a case of a secondary--anyhow of a
divided--personality?" he asked, as soon as the other had recovered a
little from his journey, and was digesting his meal comfortably over a
pipe. "You have seen more of him than I have. Of insanity, at any rate,
there is no sign at all, I take it? His relations with his environment
are sound?"

"None whatever." Devonham answered both questions at once. "Exactly."

He took off his pince-nez, cleaned them with his handkerchief, and then
replaced them carefully. This gave him time to reflect, as though he
was not quite sure where to begin his story.

"There are certainly indications," he went on slowly, "of a divided
personality, though of an unusual kind. The margin between the
two--between the normal and the secondary self--is so very slight.
It is not clearly defined, I mean. They sometimes merge and
interpenetrate. The frontier is almost indistinguishable."

Fillery raised his eyebrows.

"You feel uncertain which is the main self, and which the split-off
secondary personality?" he inquired, with surprise.

Devonham nodded. "I'm extremely puzzled," he admitted. "LeVallon's
most marked self, the best defined, the richest, the most fully
developed, seems to me what _we_ should call his Secondary Self--this
'Nature-being' that worships wind and fire, is terrified by a large
body of water, is ignorant of human ways, probably also quite
_un_-moral, yet alive with a kind of instinctive wisdom we credit
usually to the animal kingdom--though far beyond anything animals can
claim----"

"Briefly, what we mean by the term 'N. H.,'" suggested Fillery, not
anxious for too many details at the moment.

"Exactly. And I propose we always refer to that aspect of him as
'N. H.,' the other, the normal ordinary man, being LeVallon, his
right name." He smiled faintly.

"Agreed," replied his chief. "We shall always know then exactly which
one we're talking of at a given moment. Now," he went on, "to come
to the chief point, and before you give me details of what happened
abroad, let me hear your own main conclusion. What is LeVallon? What is
'N. H.'?"

Devonham hesitated for some time. It was evident his respect for his
chief made him cautious. There was an eternal battle between these
two, keen though always good-natured, even humorous, the victory not
invariably perhaps with the assistant. Later evidence had often proved
Fillery's swifter imagination correct after all, or, alternately, shown
him to be wrong. They kept an accurate score of the points won and lost
by either.

"You can always revise your conclusions later," Fillery reminded him
slyly. "Call it a preliminary conclusion for the moment. You've not had
time yet for a careful study, I know."

But Devonham this time did not smile at the rally, and his chief
noticed it with secret approval. Here was something new, big, serious,
it seemed. Devonham, apparently, was already too interested to care who
scored or did not score. His Notes of 1914 indeed betrayed his genuine
zeal sufficiently.

"LeVallon," he said at length--"to begin with him! I think
LeVallon--without any flavour of 'N. H.'--is a fine specimen of a
normal human being. His physique is magnificent, as you have seen, his
health and strength exceptional. The brain, so far as I have been able
to judge, functions quite normally. The intelligence, also normal, is
much above the average in quickness, receptivity of ideas, and judgment
based on these. The emotional development, however, puzzles me; the
emotions are not entirely normal. But"--he paused again, a grave
expression on his face--"to answer your question as well as my limited
observation of him, of LeVallon, allows--I repeat that I consider him a
normal young man, though with peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of his
own, as with most other normal young fellows who are individuals, that
is," he added quickly, "and not turned out in bundles cut to measure."

"So much for LeVallon. Now what about 'N. H.'?"

He repeated the question, fixing the assistant with his steady gaze. He
had noticed the confusion in the reply.

"My dear Edward----" began Devonham, after a considerable pause. Then
he stuck fast, sighed, settled his glasses carefully upon his aquiline,
sharp nose, and relapsed into silence. His forehead became wrinkled,
his mouth much pursed.

"Out with it, Paul! This isn't a Court of Law. I shan't behead you if
you're wrong." Yet Fillery, too, spoke gravely.

The other kept his eyes down; his face still wore a puzzled look.
Fillery detected a new expression on the keen, thoughtful features, and
he was pleased to see it.

"To give you the truth," resumed his assistant, "and all question
of who is right or who is wrong aside, I tell you frankly--I am not
sure. I confess myself up against it. It--er--gives me the creeps a
little----" He laughed awkwardly. That swift watchful look, as of a man
who plays a part, flashed and vanished.

"Your feeling, anyhow?" insisted his friend. "Your general feeling?"

"A general judgment based on general feeling," said the other in a
quiet tone, "has little value. It is based, necessarily, as you know,
upon intuition, which I temperamentally dislike. It has no facts to
go upon. I distrust generalizations." He took a deep breath, inhaled
a lot of smoke, exhaled it with relief, and made an effort. It went
against the grain in him to be caught without an explanation.

"'N. H.' in my opinion, and so far as my limited observation of him----"

Fillery allowed himself a laugh of amused impatience. "Leave out the
personal extras for once, and burn your bridges. Tell me finally what
you think about 'N. H.' We're not scoring points now."

Thus faced with an alternative, Devonham found his sense of humour
again and forgot himself. It cost him an effort, but he obeyed the
bigger and less personal mind.

"I really don't know exactly _what_ he is," he confessed again. "He
puzzles me completely. It _may_ be"--he shrugged his shoulders,
compelled by his temperament to hedge--"that he represents, as I first
thought, the content of his parents' minds, the subsequent addition of
Mason's mind included."

"That's possible, usual and comprehensible enough," put in the doctor,
watching him with amused concentration, but with an inner excitement
scarcely concealed.

"Or" resumed Devonham, "it _may_ be that through these----"

"Through his mental inheritance from his parents and from Mason,
yes----"

"----he taps the most primitive stores and layers of racial memory we
know. The world-memory, if I dare put it so, full proof being lacking,
is open to him----"

"Through his subconscious powers, of course?"

"That is your usual theory, isn't it? We have there, at any rate,
a working hypothesis, with a great mass of evidence--generally
speaking--behind it."

"Don't be cynical, Paul. Is this 'N. H.' merely a Secondary
Personality, or is it the real central self? That's the whole point."

"You jump ahead, as usual," replied Devonham, really smiling for the
first time, though his face instantly grew serious again. "Edward," he
went on, "I do not know, I cannot say, I dare not--dare not guess. 'N.
H.' is something entirely new to me, and I admit it." He seemed to find
his stride, to forget himself. "I feel far from cynical. 'N. H.,' in my
opinion, is exceptional. My notes suggested it long ago. He has, for
instance--at least, so it seems to me--peculiar powers."

"Ah!"

"Of suggestion, let us put it."

"Of suggestion, yes. Get on with it, there's a good fellow. I felt
myself an extraordinary vitality about him. I noticed it at once at
Charing Cross."

"I saw you did." Devonham looked hard at him. "You were humming to
yourself, you know."

"I didn't know," was the surprised reply, "but I can well believe it. I
felt a curious pleasure and exhilaration."

Devonham, shrugging his shoulders slightly, resumed: "During the
'LeVallon' periods he is ordinary, though unusually observant,
critical and intelligent; during the 'N. H.' periods he
becomes--er--super-normal. If you felt this--felt anything in the
station, it was because something in you--called up the 'N. H.' aspect."

"It's quick of you to guess that," said Fillery, with quick
appreciation. "You noticed a change in me, well--but the other----? He
divined my 'foreign' blood, you think?"

"It is enough that you responded and felt kinship. Put it that way. 'N.
H.' seems to me"--he took a deeper breath and gave a sort of gasp--"in
some ways--a unique--being--as I said before."

"Tell me, if you can," said Fillery, lighting his own pipe and settling
back into his chair, "tell me a little about your first meeting with
him in the Jura Mountains, what happened and so forth. I remember,
of course, your Notes. After your telegram, I read 'em carefully."
He glanced round at his companion. "They were very honest, Paul, I
thought. Eh?" He was unable to refuse himself the pleasure of the
little dig. "Honest you always are," he added. "We couldn't work
together otherwise, could we?"

Devonham, deep in his own thoughts, did not accept the challenge. He
turned in his chair, puffing at his pipe.

"I can give you briefly what happened and how things went," he said.
"The place, then, first: an ordinary peasant châlet in a remote Jura
valley, difficult of access, situated among what they call the upper
pastures. I reached it by _diligence_ and mule late in the afternoon.
A peasant in a lower valley directed me, adding that 'le monsieur
anglais' was dead and buried two days before----"

"Mason, that is?"

The other nodded. "And adding that 'le fou'----"

"LeVallon, of course?"

"----would eat me alive at sight. He spoke with respect, however, even
awe. He hoped I had come to take him away. The countryside was afraid
of him.

"The valley struck me as intolerably lonely, but of unusual beauty. Big
forests, great rocks, and tumbling streams among cliffs and pastures
made it exceptional. The châlet was simple, clean and comfortable. It
was really an ideal spot for a thinker or a student. The first thing I
noticed was a fire burning on a pile of rock in front of the building.
The sun was setting, and its last rays lit the entire little glen--a
mere gully between precipices and forest slopes--but especially lit up
the pile of rocks where the fire burned, so that I saw the smoke, blue,
red and yellow, and the figure kneeling before it. This figure was a
man, half naked, and of magnificent proportions. When I shouted----"

"You _would_ shout, of course." Yet he did not say it critically.

"----the figure rose and turned and came to meet me. It was LeVallon."

Devonham paused a moment. Fillery's eyes were fixed upon him.

"I admit," Devonham went on, conscious of the other's inquiring and
intent expression, "I was surprised a bit." He smiled his faint,
unwilling smile. "The figure made me start. I was aware of an emotion
I am not subject to--what I called just now the creeps. I thought, at
last, I had really seen a--a vision. He looked so huge, so wonderful,
so radiant. It was, of course, the effect of coloured smoke and
magnifying sunset, added to his semi-nakedness. To the waist he was
stripped. But, at first, his size, his splendour, a kind of radiance
borrowed from the sunlight and the fire, seemed to enlarge him beyond
human. He seemed to dominate, even to fill the little valley.

"I stood still, uncertain of my feelings. There was, I think, a trace
of fear in me. I waited for him to come up to me. He did so. He
stretched out a hand. I took it. And what do you think he said?"

Fillery, the inner excitement and delight increasing in him as he
listened, stared in silence. There was no lightness in him now.

"'Are you Fillery?' That's what he said, and the first words he
uttered. 'Are you Fillery?' But spoken in a way I find difficult to
reproduce. He made the name sound like a rush of wind. 'F,' of course,
involves a draught of breath between the teeth, I know. But _he_ made
the name sound exactly like a gush of wind through branches--that's the
nearest I can get to it."

"Well--and then?"

"Don't be impatient, Edward. I try to be accurate. But really--what
happened next is a bit beyond any experience that we--I--have yet come
across. And, as to what I felt--well, I was tired, hungry, thirsty. I
wanted, normally, rest and food and drink. Yet all these were utterly
forgotten. For a moment or two--I admit it--I felt as if I had come
face to face with something not of this earth quite." He grinned. "A
touch of gooseflesh came to me for the first time in my life. The
fellow's size and radiance in the sunlight, the fact that he stood
there worshipping fire--always, to me, the most wonderful of natural
phenomena--his grandeur and nakedness--the way he pronounced your name
even--all this--er--upset my judgment for the moment." He paused again.
He hesitated. "A visual hallucination, due to fatigue, can be, of
course, very detailed sometimes," he added, a note of challenge in his
tone.

Fillery watched his friend narrowly, as he stumbled among the
details of what he evidently found a difficult, almost an impossible
description.

"Natural enough," he put in. "You'd hardly be human yourself if you
felt nothing at such a sight."

"The loneliness, too, increased the effect," went on the other, "for
there was no one nearer than the peasants who had directed me a
thousand feet below, nor was there another building of any sort in
sight. Anyhow, it seemed, I managed my strange emotions all right, for
the young man took to me at once. He left the fire, if reluctantly,
singing to himself a sort of low chanting melody, with perhaps five or
six notes at most in it, and far from unmusical----"

"He explained the fire? Was he actually worshipping, I mean?"

"It was certainly worship, judging by the expression of his face and
his gestures of reverence and happiness. But I asked no questions. I
thought it best just to accept, or appear to accept, the whole thing as
natural. He said something about the Equinox, but I did not catch it
properly and did not ask. This had evidently been taught him. It was,
however, the 22nd of September, oddly enough, though the gales had not
yet come."

"So you got into the châlet next?" asked the other, noticing the gaps,
the incoherence.

"He put his coat on, sat down with me to a meal of bread and milk and
cheese--meat there seemed none in the building anywhere. This meal was,
if you understand me, obeying a mere habit automatically. He did just
what it had been his habit to do with Mason all these years. He got
the stuff himself--quickly, effectively, no fumbling anywhere--and,
from that moment, hardly spoke again until we left two days later. I
mean that literally. All he said, when I tried to make him talk, was,
'You are not Fillery,' or 'Take me to Fillery. I need him.'

"I almost felt that I was living with some marvellously trained animal,
of extraordinary intelligence, gentle, docile, friendly, but unhappy
because it had lost its accustomed master. But on the other hand--I
admit it--I was conscious of a certain power in his personality beyond
me to explain. That, really, is the best description I can give you."

"You mentioned the name of Mason?" asked Fillery, avoiding a dozen more
obvious and natural questions.

"Several times. But his only reply was a smile, while he repeated the
name himself, adding your own after it: 'Mason Fillery, Mason Fillery,'
he would say, smiling with quiet happiness. 'I like Fillery!'"

"The nights?"

"Briefly--I was glad to see the dawn. We had separate rooms, my own
being the one probably where Mason had died a few days before. But it
was not that I minded in the least. It was the feeling--the knowledge
in fact--that my companion was up and about all night in the building
or out of doors. I heard him moving, singing quietly to himself, the
wooden veranda creaked beneath his tread. He was active all through the
darkness and cannot have slept at all. When I came down soon after dawn
he was running over the slopes a mile away, running towards the châlet,
too, with the speed and lightness of a deer. He had been to some
height, I think, to see the sun rise and probably to worship it----"

"And your journey? You got him away easily?"

"He was only too ready to leave, for it meant coming to _you_. I
arranged with the peasants below to have the châlet closed up, took
my charge to Neuchâtel, and thence to Berne, where I bought him an
outfit, and arrived in due course, as you know, at Charing Cross."

"His first sight of cities, people, trains, steamers and the rest, I
take it. Any reactions?"

"The troubles I anticipated did not materialize. He came like a lamb,
the most helpless and pathetic lamb I ever saw. He stared but asked no
questions. I think he was half dazed, even stupefied with it all."

"Stupefied?"

"An odd word to use, I know. I should have said perhaps 'automatic'
rather. He was so open to my suggestions, doing what my mind expected
him to do, but nothing more--ah! with one exception."

Fillery meant to hear an account of that exception, though the other
would willingly have foregone its telling evidently. It was related,
Fillery felt sure, to the unusual powers Devonham had mentioned.

"Oh, you shall hear it," said the latter quickly, "for what it's
worth. There's no need to exaggerate, of course." He told it rapidly,
accurately, no doubt, because his mind was honest, yet without comment
or expression in his voice and face. He supplied no atmosphere.

"I had got him like a lamb, as I told you, to Paris, and it was during
the Customs examination the--er--little thing occurred. The man,
searching through his trunk, pulled out a packet of flat papers and
opened it. He looked them over with puzzled interest, turning them
upside down to examine them from every possible angle. Then he asked a
trifle unpleasantly what they were. I hadn't the smallest idea myself,
I had never seen them before; they were very carefully wrapped up.
LeVallon, whose sudden excitement increased the official's interest,
told him that they were star-and-weather maps. It doubtless was the
truth; he had made them with Mason; but they were queer-looking papers
to have at such a time, hidden away, too, at the bottom of the trunk;
and LeVallon's manner and expression did not help to disarm the man's
evident suspicion. He asked a number of pointed questions in a very
disagreeable way--who made them, for what purpose, how they were used,
and whether they were connected with aviation. I translated, of course.
I explained their innocence----"

"LeVallon's excitement?" asked Fillery. "What form did it take?
Rudeness, anger, violence of any sort?" He was aware his friend would
have liked to shirk these details.

"Nothing of the kind." He hesitated briefly, then went on. "He behaved,
rather, as though--well, as a devout Catholic might have behaved if his
crucifix or some holy relic were being mauled. The maps were sacred.
Symbols possibly. Heaven knows what! He tried to take them back. The
official, as a natural result, became still more suspicious and, of
course, offensive too. My explanations and expostulations were quite
useless, for he didn't even listen to them."

Devonham was now approaching the part of the story he least wished
to describe. He played for time. He gave details of the ensuing
altercation.

"What happened in the end?" Fillery at length interrupted. "What did
LeVallon do? There were no arrests, I take it?" he added with a smile.

Paul coughed and fidgeted. He told the literal truth, however.

"LeVallon, after listening for a long time to the conversation he could
not understand, suddenly took his fingers off the papers. The man's
dirty hand still held them tightly on the grimy counter. LeVallon
began--or--he suddenly began to breathe--well--heavily rather."

"Rhythmically?"

"Heavily," insisted the other. "In a curious way, anyhow," he added,
determined to keep strictly to the truth, "not unlike Heathcote when he
put himself automatically into trance and then told us what was going
on at the other end of England. You remember the case." He paused a
moment again, as if to recall exactly what had occurred. "It's not
easy to describe, Edward," he continued, looking up. "You remember that
huge draughty hall where they examine luggage at the Lyons Station.
I can't explain it. But that breathing somehow caught the draughts,
used them possibly, in any case increased them. A wind came through
the great hall. I can't explain it," he repeated, "I can only tell you
what happened. That wind most certainly came pouring steadily through,
for I felt it myself, and saw it blow upon the fluttering papers. The
heat in the _salle_ at the same moment seemed to grow intense. Not an
oppressive heat, though. Radiant heat, rather. It felt, I mean, like
a fierce sunlight. I looked up, almost expecting to see a great light
from which it came. It was then--at this very moment--the Frenchman
turned as if someone touched him."

"_You_ felt anything, Paul?"

"Yes," admitted the other slowly.

Fillery waited.

"A--what I must call--a thrill." His voice was lower now.

"Of----?" his Chief persisted.

Devonham waited a full ten seconds before reply. He again shrugged his
shoulders a little. Apparently he sought his words with honest care
that included also intense reluctance and disapproval:

"Loveliness, romance, enchantment; but, above all, I think--power." He
ground out the confession slowly. "By power I mean a sort of confidence
and happiness."

"Increase of vitality, call it. Intensification of your consciousness."

"Possibly. A bigger perspective suddenly, a bigger scale of life;
something--er--a bit wild, but certainly--er--uncommonly stimulating.
The best word, I think, is liberty, perhaps. An immense and careless
sense of liberty." And Fillery, knowing the value of superlatives in
Devonham's cautious mind, felt satisfied. He asked quietly what the
official did next.

"Stood stock still at first. Then his face changed; he smiled; he
looked up understandingly, sympathetically, at LeVallon. He spoke: 'My
father, too,' he said with admiration, 'had a big telescope. Monsieur
is an astronomer.'

"'One of the greatest,' I added quickly; 'these charts are of infinite
value to France.' No sense of comedy touched me anywhere, the ludicrous
was absent. The man bowed, as carefully, respect in every gesture, he
replaced the maps, marked the trunk with his piece of chalk, and let us
go, helping in every way he could."

Devonham drew a long breath, glad that he had relieved himself of his
unwelcome duty. He had told the literal truth.

"Of course, of course," Fillery said, half to himself perhaps.
"A breath of bigger consciousness, his imagination touched, the
subconscious wakened, and intelligence the natural result." He turned
to his colleague. "Interesting, Paul, very," he added in a louder tone,
"and not easy to explain, I grant. The official we do not know, but
you, at any rate, are not a good subject for hypnotic suggestion!"

For some time Devonham said nothing. Presently he spoke:

"Fillery, I tell you--really I love the fellow. He's the most lovable
thing in human shape I ever saw. He gets into your heart so strangely.
We must heal him."

The other sighed, quickly smothering it, yet not before Devonham had
noticed it. They did not look at one another for some seconds, and
there was a certain tenseness, a sense of deep emotion in the air that
each, possibly, sought to hide from the other.

Devonham was the first to break the silence that had fallen between
them.

"To be quite frank--it's LeVallon that appeals most to me," he said,
as if to himself, "whereas you, Edward, I believe, are more--more
interested in the other aspect of him. It's 'N. H.' that interests you."

No challenge was intended, yet the glove was flung. Fillery said
nothing for a minute or two. Then he looked up, and their eyes met
across the smoke-laden atmosphere. It was close on midnight. The world
lay very still and hushed about the house.

"It is," he said quietly, "a pathetic and inspiring case. He is
deserving of"--he chose his words slowly and with care--"our very
best," he concluded shortly.

"And now," he added quickly, "you're tired out, and I ought to have let
you have a night's sleep before taxing you like this." He poured out
two glasses of whisky. "Let us drink anyhow to success and healing of
body, mind--and soul."

"Body, mind and--nerves," said Devonham slowly, as he drank the toast.

"The reason I had none of the trouble I anticipated," remarked
Devonham, as he sipped the reviving liquor, "is simple enough."

"There are two periods, of course. I guessed that."

"Exactly. There is the LeVallon period, when he is quiescent, normal,
very charming into the bargain, more like a good child or trained
animal or happy peasant, if you like it better, than a grown man. And
there is the 'N. H.' period, when he is--otherwise."

"Ah!"

"I arrived just at the transition moment, so to speak. It was during
the change I reached the châlet."

"Precisely." Fillery looked up, smiled and nodded.

"That's about the truth," repeated Devonham, putting his glass down. He
thought for a moment, then added slowly, "I think that fire of his, the
worship, singing--at the autumnal equinox--marked the change. 'N. H,'
at once after that, slipped back into the unconscious state. LeVallon
emerged. It was with LeVallon only or chiefly, _I_ had to deal. He
became so very quiet, dazed a little, half there, as we call it, and
almost entirely silent. He retained little, if any, memory of the 'N.
H.' period, although it lies, I think, just beneath the surface only.
The LeVallon personality, you see, is not very positive, is it? It
seems a quiet, negative state, a condition almost of rest, in fact."

Fillery listening attentively, made no rejoinder.

"We may expect," continued Devonham, "these alternating states, I
think. The frontier between them is, as I said, a narrow one. Indeed,
often they merge or interpenetrate. In my judgment, the main, important
part of his consciousness, that parent Self, is LeVallon--_not_ 'N.
H.'" The voice was slightly strident.

"Ah!"

It so happened that, in the act of exchanging these last words, they
both looked up toward the ceiling, where a moth buzzed round and round,
banging itself occasionally against the electric light. Whether it was
this that drew their sight upwards simultaneously, or whether it was
that some other sound in the stillness of the night had caught their
strained attention, is uncertain. The same thought, at any rate, was
in both minds at that instant, the same freight of meaning trailing
behind it invisibly across the air. Their hearts burned within them;
the two faces upward turned, the lips a little parted as when listening
is intense, the heads thrown back. For in the room above that ceiling,
asleep at this moment, lay the subject of their long discussion; only
a few inches of lath and plaster separated them from the strange being
who, dropping out of space, as it were, had come to make his home with
them. A being, lonely utterly in the world, unique in kind perhaps, his
nature as yet undecipherable, lay trustingly unconscious in that upper
chamber. The two men felt the gravity, the responsibility of their
charge. The same thought had vividly touched them both at the same
instant.

A few minutes later they were still standing, facing one another.
They were of a height, but compared to Fillery's big frame and rugged
head, his friend's appearance was almost slight. Devonham, for all his
qualifications, looked painfully like a shopwalker. They exchanged this
steady gaze for a few seconds without speaking. Then the older man
said quietly:

"Paul, I understand, and I respect your reticence. I think I can agree
with it."

He placed a hand upon the other's shoulder, smiling gently, even
tenderly.

"You have told me much, but you have not told me all! The chief
part--you have intentionally omitted."

"For the present, at any rate," was the reply, given without flinching.

"Your reasons are sound, your judgment perhaps right. I ask no
questions. What happened, what you saw, at the châlet; the 'peculiar
powers' you mentioned; all, in fact, that you think it wise to keep to
yourself for the moment, I leave there willingly."

He spoke gravely, sincere emotion in the eyes and tone. It was in a
lower voice he added:

"The responsibility, of course, is yours."

Devonham returned the steady gaze, pondering his reply a moment.

"I can--and do accept it," he answered. "You have read my thoughts
correctly as usual, Edward. I think you know quite enough already--what
with my Notes and Mason's letter--even too much. Besides, why
complicate it with an account of what were doubtless mere mental
pictures--hallucinations--on my part? This is a matter," he went on
slowly, "a case, we dare not trifle with; there may be strange and
terrible afflictions in it later; we must remain unbiased." The anxiety
deepened on his face.

"True, true," murmured the other. "God bless the boy! May his own gods
bless him!"

"In other words, it will need your clearest, soundest judgment, your
finest skill, your very best, as you said yourself just now." He used
a firmer, yet also a softer tone suddenly: "Edward, you know your own
mind, its contents, its suppressions, its origin; your refusal of the
love of women, your deep powerful dreams that you have suppressed and
put away. Promise me"--the voice and manner were very earnest--"that
you will not communicate these to him in any way, and that you will
keep your judgment absolutely unbiased and untainted." He looked at his
old friend and paused. "Only your purest judgment of what is to come
can help. You promise."

Fillery sighed a scarcely noticeable sigh. "I promise you, Paul. You
are wise--and you are right," he said. "On the other hand, let me say
one thing to you in my turn. This theory of heredity and of mental
telepathic transference--the idea that all his mind's content is
derived from his parents and from Mason--we cannot, remember, force
this transference and interchange _too_ far. I ask only this: be fair
and open yourself with all that follows."

Devonham raised his voice: "Nor can we, apparently, set limits to it,
Edward. But--to be fair and open-minded--I give my promise too."

Thus, in the little downstairs room of a Private Home for Incurable
Mental Cases, _not_ a Lunatic Asylum, though sometimes perhaps next
door to it, these two men, deeply intrigued by a new "Case" that
passed their understanding, as it exceeded their knowledge, practice
and experience, swore to each other to observe carefully, to report
faithfully, and to experiment, if experiment proved necessary, with
honest and affectionate uprightness.

Their views were, obviously, not the same. Devonham, temperamentally
opposed to radical innovations, believed it was a case of divided
personality--hundreds of such cases had passed through their hands.
Forced to accept extended telepathy--that all minds can on occasion
share one another's content, and that even a racial and a world-memory
can be tapped--he feared that his Chief might influence LeVallon, and
twist, thus, the phenomena to a special end. He knew Edward Fillery's
story. He feared, for the sake of truth, the mental transference. He
had, perhaps, other fears as well.

Fillery, on the other hand, believing as much, and knowing more than
his colleague, saw in "N. H." a unique possibility. He was thrilled
and startled with a half-impossible hope. He felt as if someone ran
beside his life, bearing impossible glad tidings, an unexpected,
half-incredible figure, the tidings marvellously bright. He hoped, he
already wished to think, that "N. H." might shadow forth a promise of
some magical advance for the ultimate benefit of the Race....

The thinkers were crying on the housetops that progress was a myth,
that each wave of civilization at its height reached the same average
level without ever passing further. The menace to the present
civilization, already crumbling, was in full swing everywhere;
knowledge, culture, learning threatened in due course with the chaos
of destruction that has so far been the invariable rule. The one hope
of saving the world, cried religion, lay in substituting spiritual for
material values--a Utopian dream at best. The one chance, said science,
on the other hand, was that civilization to-day is continuous and not
isolated.

The best hope, believed Fillery, the only hope, lay in raising the
individual by the drawing up into full consciousness of the limitless
powers now hidden and inactive in his deeper self--the so-called
subliminal faculties. With these greater powers must come also greater
moral development.

Already, with his uncanny insight, derived from knowledge of himself,
he had piercingly divined in "N. H." a being, whatever he might be,
whose nature acted automatically and directly upon the subconscious
self in everybody.

That bright messenger, running past his life, had looked, as with fire
and tempest, straight into his eyes.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was long after one o'clock when the two men said good-night, and
went to their rooms. Devonham was soon in bed, though not soon asleep.
Exhausted physically though he was, his mind burned actively. His
recent memories were vivid. All he had purposely held back from
Fillery returned with power....

The uncertainty whether he had experienced hallucination, or had
actually, as by telepathic transfer from LeVallon, touched another
state of consciousness, kept sleep far away....

His brain was far too charged for easy slumber. He feared for his dear,
faithful friend, his colleague, the skilful, experienced, yet sorely
tempted mind--tempted by Nature and by natural weaknesses of birth and
origin--who now shared with him the care and healing of a Case that
troubled his being too deeply for slumber to come quickly.

Yet he had done well to keep these memories from Edward Fillery. If
Fillery once knew what _he_ knew, his judgment and his scientific
diagnosis must be drawn hopelessly away from what he considered the
best treatment: the suppression of "N. H." and the making permanent of
"LeVallon."...

He fell asleep eventually, towards dawn, dreaming impossible, radiant
dreams of a world he might have hoped for, yet could not, within the
limits of his little cautious, accurate mind, believe in. Dreams that
inspire, yet sadden, haunted his release from normal consciousness.
Someone had walked upon his life, leaving a growth of everlasting
flowers in their magical tread, though his mind--his stolid, cautious
mind--had no courage for the plucking....

And while he slept, as the hours slipped from west to east, his chief
and colleague, lying also sleepless, rose suddenly before the late
autumn dawn, and walked quietly along the corridor towards the Private
Suite where the new patient rested. His mind was quiet, yet his inner
mind alert. His thoughts, his hopes, his dreams, these lay, perhaps,
beyond human computation. He was calmer far than his assistant, though
more strangely tempted.

It was just growing light, the corridor was cold. A cool, damp air came
through the open windows and the linoleum felt like ice against the
feet. The house lay dead and silent. Pausing a moment by a window, he
listened to the chattering of early sparrows. He felt chill and hungry,
unrested too, though far from sleepy. He was aware of London--bleak,
heavy, stolid London town. The troubles of modern life, of Labour,
Politics, Taxes, cost of living, all the common, daily things came in
with the cheerless morning air.

He reached the door he sought, and very softly opened it.

The radiance met him in the face, so that he almost gasped. The scent
of flowers, the sting of sharp, keen forest winds, the exhilaration of
some distant mountain-top. There was, actually, a tang of dawn, known
only to those who have tasted the heights at sunrise with the heart.
And into his heart, singing with happy confidence, rose a sense of
supreme joy and confidence that mastered all little earthly woes and
pains, and walked among the stars.

The occupant of the bed lay very still. His shining hair was spread
upon the pillow. The splendid limbs were motionless. The chest and arms
were bare, the single covering sheet tossed off. The strange, wild face
wore happiness and peace upon its skin, the features very calm, the
mouth relaxed. It almost seemed a god lay sleeping there upon a little
human bed.

How long he stood and stared he did not know, but suddenly, the light
increased. The curtains stirred about the bed.

With a marvellous touch the separate details merged and quickened into
life. The room was changed. The occupant of the bed moved very swiftly,
as through the open window came the first touch of exhilarating light.
Gold stole across the lintel, breaking over the roofs of slates beyond.
The leafless elm trees shimmered faintly. The telegraph wires shone.
There was a running sparkle. It was dawn.

The figure leaped, danced--no other word describes it--to the open
window where the light and air gushed in, spread wide its arms, lowered
its radiant head, began to sing in low, melodious rhythmic chant--and
Fillery, as silently as he had come, withdrew and closed the door
unseen. His heart moved strangely, but--his promise held him....




CHAPTER VII


The following days it seemed to both Fillery and Devonham that their
discussion of the first night had been pitched in too intense, too
serious a key. Their patient was so commonplace again, so ordinary. He
made himself quite at home, seemed contented and uncurious, taking it
for granted he had come to stay for ever, apparently.

Apart from his strange beauty, his size, virility and a general
impression he conveyed of immense energies he was too easy-going to
make use of, he might have passed for a peasant, a countryman to
whom city life was new; but an educated, or at least half-educated,
countryman. He was so big, yet never gauche. He was neither stupid
nor ill-informed; the garden interested him, he knew much about the
trees and flowers, birds and insects too. He discussed the weather,
prevailing wind, moisture, prospects of change and so forth with a
judgment based on what seemed a natural, instinctive knowledge. The
gardener looked on him with obvious respect.

"Such nice manners and such a steady eye," Mrs. Soames, the matron,
mentioned, too, approvingly to Devonham. "But a lot in him he doesn't
understand himself, unless I'm wrong. Not much the matter with his
nerves, anyhow. Once he's married--unless I'm much mistaken--eh, sir?"

He was quiet, talking little, and spent the morning over the books
Fillery had placed purposely in his sitting-room, books on simple
physics, natural history and astronomy. It was the latter that absorbed
him most; he pored over them by the hour.

Fillery explained the situation so far as he thought wise. The young
man was honesty and simple innocence, but only vaguely interested in
the life of the great city he now experienced for the first time. He
had in his luggage a copy of the Will by which Mason had left him
everything, and he was pleased to know himself well provided for. Of
Mason, however, he had only a dim, uncertain, almost an impersonal
memory, as of someone encountered in a dream.

"I suppose something's happened to me," he said to Fillery, his
language normal and quite ordinary again. He spoke with a slight
foreign accent. "There was somebody, of course, who looked after me and
lived with me, but I can't remember who or where it was. I was very
happy," he added, "and yet ... I miss something."

Dr. Fillery, remembering his promise, did not press him.

"It will all come back by degrees," he remarked in a sympathetic tone.
"In the meantime, you must make yourself at home here with us, for as
long as you like. You are quite free in every way. I want you to be
happy here."

"I live with you always," was the reply. "There are things I want to
tell you, ask you too." He paused, looking thoughtful. "There was
someone I told all to once."

"Come to me with everything. I'll help you always, so far as I can." He
placed a hand upon his knee.

"There are feelings, big feelings I cannot reach quite, but that make
me feel different"--he smiled beautifully--"from--others." Quick as
lightning he had changed the sentence at the last word, substituting
"others" for "you." Had he been aware of a slight uneasy emotion in
his listener's heart? It had hardly betrayed itself by any visible
sign, yet he had instantly divined its presence. Such evidences of a
subtle, intimate, understanding were not lacking. Yet Fillery admirably
restrained himself.

"There are bright places I have lost," he went on frankly, no sign of
shy reserve in him. "I feel confused, lost somewhere, as if I didn't
belong here. I feel"--he used an odd word--"doubled." His face shaded a
little.

"Big overpowering London is bound to affect you," put in Fillery,
who had noticed the rapid discernment, "after living among woods and
mountains, as you have lived, for years. All will come right in a
little time; we must settle down a bit first----"

"Woods and mountains," repeated the other, in a half-dreamy voice,
his eyes betraying an effort to follow thought elsewhere. "Of course,
yes--woods and mountains and hot living sunlight--and the winds----"

His companion shifted the conversation a little. He suggested a line of
reading and study.... They talked also of such ordinary but necessary
things as providing a wardrobe, of food, exercise, companionship of
his own age, and so forth--all the commonplace details of ordinary
daily life, in fact. The exchange betrayed nothing of interest, nothing
unusual. They mentioned theatres, music, painting, and, beyond the
natural curiosity of youth that was ignorant of these, no detail was
revealed that need have attracted the attention of anybody, neither
of doctor, psychologist, nor student of human nature. With the single
exception that the past years had been obliterated from memory, though
much that had been acquired in them remained, there was not noticeable
peculiarity of any sort. Both language and point of view were normal.

This was obviously LeVallon. The "N. H." personality scarcely cast a
shadow even. Yet "N. H.," the doctor was quick to see, lay ready and
waiting just below the surface. There was no doubt in _his_ mind which
was the central self and which its transient projection, the secondary
personality. Again, as he sat and talked, he had the odd impression
that someone with bright tidings ran swiftly past his life, perhaps
towards it.

The swift messenger was certainly not LeVallon. LeVallon, indeed, was
but a shadow cast before this glad, bright visitant. Thus he felt,
at any rate. LeVallon was an empty simulacrum left behind while "N.
H." rested, or was active upon other things, things natural to him,
elsewhere. LeVallon was an arm, a limb, a feeler that "N. H." thrust
out. At Charing Cross, for instance, for a brief moment only, "N.
H." had peered across his shoulder, then withdrawn again. In the car
had sat by his side LeVallon. The being he now chatted with was also
LeVallon only.

But in his own heart, deep down, hidden yet eager to break loose, lay
his own deeper self that burned within him. This, the important part
of him, yearned towards "N. H." And up rose the strange symbol that
always appeared when his deepest, perhaps his subliminal self was
stirred. That lost radiant valley in the haunted Caucasus shone close
and brimming over ... with light, with flowers, with splendid winds and
fire, symbols of a vaster, grander, happier life, though perhaps a life
not yet within the range of normal human consciousness.... The fiery
symbol flashed and passed.

Curious thoughts and pictures rose flaming in his mind, persistent
ideas that bore no possible relation to his intellectual, reasoning
life. Passing across the background of his brain, as with waves of
heat and colour, they were correlated somewhere with harmonious sound.
Music, that is, came with them, as though inspiration brought its own
sound with it that made singing natural. They haunted him, these vague,
pleasurable phantasmagoria that were connected, he felt sure, with
music, as with childhood's lost imaginings. For a long time he searched
in vain for their source and origin. Then, suddenly, he remembered.
He heard his father's gruff, humorous voice: "There's not a scrap of
evidence, of course...." And, sharply, vividly, the buried memory gave
up its dead. His childish question went crashing through the air: "Are
we the only beings in the world?"

"Nothing is ever lost," he reminded himself with a smile that Devonham
assuredly never saw. "Every seed must bear its fruit in time."

And emotion surged through him from the remorseless records of his
underself. The childhood's love, with its correlative of deep, absolute
belief, returned upon him, linked on somehow to that old familiar
symbol he knew to mean his awakening subconscious being--a flowering
Caucasian vale of sun and wind. A belief, he realized, especially a
belief of childhood, remains for ever inexpugnable, eternal, prolific
seed of future harvests.

The unstable in him betrayed its ineradicable, dangerous streak. There
rose upon him in a cloud strange notions that inflamed imagination
sweetly. Later reading, indeed, had laid flesh upon the skeleton of
the boyish notion, though derived in the first instance he certainly
knew not whence. The literature and tradition of the East, he recalled,
peopled the elements with conscious life, to which the world's
fairy-tales--remnant of lost knowledge possibly--added nerves and heart
and blood. In all human bodies, at any rate, dwelt not necessarily
always human spirits, human souls....

He checked himself with a smile he would have liked to call a chuckle,
but that yet held some inexplicable happiness at its heart. His
rugged, eager face, its expression bitten deeply by experience, turned
curiously young. There rushed through him the Eastern conception
of another system of life, another evolution, deathless, divine,
important, the Order of the _Devas_, a series of Nature Beings entirely
apart from human categories. They included many degrees, from fairies
to planetary spirits, the gods, so called; and their duties, work and
purposes were concerned, he remembered, with carrying out the Laws
of Nature, the busy tending of all forms and structures, from the
elaborately marvellous infusoria in a drop of stagnant water, the
growth of crystals, the upbuilding of flowers and trees, of insects,
animals, humans, to the guidance and guardianship of those vaster forms
of heavenly bodies, the stars, the planets and the mighty suns, whose
gigantic "bodies," inhabited by immenser consciousness, people empty
space.... A noble, useful, selfless work, God's messengers....

He checked himself again, as the rich, ancient notion flitted across
his stirring memory.

"Delightful, picturesque conceptions of the planet's young, fair
ignorance!" he reminded himself, smiling as before.

Whereupon rose, bursting through his momentary dream, with full-fledged
power, the great hope of his own reasoned, scientific Dream--that
man is greater than he knows, and that the progress of the Race was
demonstrable.

For, to the subliminal powers of an awakened Race these Nature Beings
with their special faculties, must lie open and accessible. The
human and the non-human could unite! Nature must come back into the
hearts of men and win them again to simple, natural life with love,
with joy, with naked beauty. Death and disease must vanish, hope and
purity return. The Race must develop, grow, become in the true sense
_universal_. It could know God!

The vision flashed upon him with extraordinary conviction, so that he
forgot for the moment how securely he belonged to the unstable. The
smile of happiness spread, as it were, over his entire being. He glowed
and pulsed with its delicious inward fire. Light filled his being for
an instant--an instant of intoxicating belief and certainty and vision.
The instant inspiration of a dream went lost and vanished. He had drawn
upon childhood and legendary reading for the substance of a moment's
happiness. He shook himself, so to speak. He remembered his patients
and his duties, his colleague too....

Nothing, meanwhile, occurred to arouse interest or attention. LeVallon
was quite docile, ordinary; he needed no watching; he slept well, ate
well, spent his leisure with his books and in the garden. He complained
often of the lack of sunlight, and sometimes he might be seen taking
some deep breaths of air into his lungs by the open window or on the
balcony. The phases of the moon, too, interested him, and he asked
once when the full moon would come and then, when Devonham told him,
he corrected the date the latter gave, proving him two hours wrong.
But, on the whole, there seemed little to differentiate him from the
usual young man whose physique had developed in advance of his mental
faculties; his knowledge in some respects certainly was backward, as in
the case of arrested development. He seemed an intelligent countryman,
but an unusually intelligent countryman, though all the time another
under-intelligence shone brightly, betraying itself in remarks and
judgments oddly phrased.

Dr. Fillery took him, during the following day or two, to concerts,
theatres, cinemas. He enjoyed them all. Yet in the theatres he was
inclined to let his attention wander. The degree of alertness varied
oddly. His critical standard, moreover, was curiously exacting; he
demanded the real creative interpretation of a part, and was quick to
detect a lack of inspiration, of fine technique, of true conception in
a player. Reasons he failed to give, and argument seemed impossible to
him, but if voice or gesture or imaginative touch failed anywhere, he
lost interest in the performer from that moment.

"He has poor breath," he remarked. "He only imitates. He is outside."
Or, "She pretends. She does not feel and know. Feeling--the feeling
that comes of fire--she has not felt."

"She does not understand her part, you mean?" suggested Fillery.

"She does not burn with it," was the reply.

At concerts he behaved individually too. They bored as well as puzzled
him; the music hardly stirred him. He showed signs of distress at
anything classical, though Wagner, Debussy, the Russians, moved him and
produced excitement.

"He," was his remark, with emphasis, "has _heard_. He gives me freedom.
I could fly and go away. He sets me free ..." and then he would say no
more, not even in reply to questions. He could not define the freedom
he referred to, nor could he say where he could go away _to_. But
his face lit up, he smiled his delightful smile, he looked happy.
"Stars," he added once in a tone of interest, in reply to repeated
questions, "stars, wind, fire, away from _this!_"--he tapped his head
and breast--"I feel more alive and real."

"It's real and true, that music? That's what you feel?"

"It's beyond this," he replied, again tapping his body. "_They have
heard._"

The cinema interested him more. Yet its limits seemed to perplex him
more than its wonder thrilled him. He accepted it as a simple, natural,
universal thing.

"They stay always on the sheet," he observed with evident surprise.
"And I hear nothing. They do not even sing. Sound and movement go
together!"

"The speaking will come," explained Fillery. "Those are pictures
merely."

"I understand. Yet sound is natural, isn't it? They ought to be heard."

"Speech," agreed his companion, "is natural, but singing isn't."

"Are they not alive enough to sing?" was the reply, spoken to himself
rather than to his neighbour, who was so attentive to his least
response. "Do they only sing when"--Fillery heard it and felt something
leap within him--"when they are paid or have an audience?" he finished
the sentence quickly.

"No one sings naturally of their own accord--not in cities, at any
rate," was the reply.

LeVallon laughed, as though he understood at once.

"There is no sun and wind," he murmured. "Of course. They cannot."

It was the cinemas that provided most material for observation, Fillery
found. There was in a cinema performance something that excited his
companion, but excited him more than the doctor felt he was justified
in encouraging. Obviously the other side of him, the "N. H." aspect,
came up to breathe under the stimulus of the rapid, world-embracing,
space-and-time destroying pictures on the screen. Concerts did not
stimulate him, it seemed, but rather puzzled him. He remained wholly
the commonplace LeVallon--with one exception: he drew involved patterns
on the edge of his programmes, patterns of a very complicated yet
accurate kind, as though he almost saw the sounds that poured into
his ears. And these ornamented programmes Dr. Fillery preserved.
Sound--music--seemed to belong to his interpretation of movement. About
the cinema, however, there seemed something almost familiar, something
he already knew and understood, the sound belonging to movement only
lacking.

Apart from these small incidents, LeVallon showed nothing unusual,
nothing that a yokel untaught yet of natural intelligence might not
have shown. His language, perhaps, was singular, but, having been
educated by one mind only, and in a region of lonely forests and
mountains, remote from civilized life, there was nothing inexplicable
in the odd words he chose, nor in the peculiar--if subtle and
penetrating--phrases that he used. Invariably he recognized the
spontaneous, creative power as distinguished from the derivative that
merely imitated.

He found ways of expressing himself almost immediately, both in speech
and writing, however, and with a perfection far beyond the reach of a
half-educated country lad; and this swift aptitude was puzzling until
its explanation suddenly was laid bare. He absorbed, his companion
realized at last, as by telepathy, the content of his own, of Fillery's
mind, acquiring the latter's mood, language, ideas, as though the two
formed one being.

The discovery startled the doctor. Yet what startled him still more
was the further discovery, made a little later, that he himself could,
on occasions, become so identified with his patient that the slightest
shade of thought or feeling rose spontaneously in his own mind too.

He remained, otherwise, almost entirely "LeVallon"; and, after a full
report made to Devonham, and the detailed discussion thereon that
followed, Dr. Fillery had no evidence to contradict the latter's
opinion: "LeVallon is the real true self. The other personality--'N.
H.' as we call it--is a mere digest and accumulation of material
supplied by his parents and by Mason."

"Let us wait and see what happens when 'N. H.' appears and _does_
something," Fillery was content to reply.

"If," answered Devonham, with sceptical emphasis, "it ever does appear."

"You think it won't?" asked Fillery.

"With proper treatment," said Devonham decisively, "I see no reason
why 'N. H.' should not become happily merged in the parent self--in
LeVallon, and a permanent cure result."

He put his glasses straight and stared at his chief, as much as to say
"You promised."

"Perhaps," said Fillery. "But, in my judgment, 'LeVallon' is too slight
to count at all. I believe the whole, real, parent Self is 'N. H.,'
and the only life LeVallon has at all is that which peeps up through
him--from 'N. H.'"

Fillery returned his serious look.

"If 'N. H.' is the real self, and I am right," he added slowly, "you,
Paul, will have to revise your whole position."

"I shall," returned Devonham. "But--you will allow this--it is a lot to
expect. I see no reason to believe in anything more than a subconscious
mind of unusual content, and possibly of unusual powers and extent," he
added with reluctance.

"It is," said Fillery significantly, "a lot to expect--as you said just
now. I grant you that. Yet I feel it possible that----" he hesitated.

Devonham looked uncomfortable. He fidgeted. He did not like the pause.
A sense of exasperation rose in him, as though he knew something of
what was coming.

"Paul," went on his chief abruptly in a tone that dropped instinctively
to a lower key--almost a touch of awe lay behind it--"you admit no
deity, I know, but you admit purpose, design, intelligence."

"Well," replied the other patiently, long experience having taught him
iron restraint, "it's a blundering, imperfect system, inadequately
organized--if you care to call that intelligence. It's of an extremely
intricate complexity. I admit that. Deity I consider an unnecessary
assumption."

"The love and hate of atoms alone bowls you over," was the unexpected
comment. "The word 'Laws' explains nothing. A machine obeys the laws,
but intelligence conceived that machine--and a man repairs and keeps
it going. Who--what--keeps the daisy going, the crystal, the creative
thought in the imagination? An egg becomes a leaf-eating caterpillar,
which in turn becomes a honey-eating butterfly with wings. A yolk turns
into feathers. Is that accomplished without intelligence?"

"Ask our new patient," interrupted Devonham, wiping his glasses with
unnecessary thoroughness.

"Which?"

Devonham startled, looked up without his glasses. It seemed the
question made him uneasy. Putting the glasses on suddenly, he stared at
his chief.

"I see what you mean, Edward," he said earnestly, his interest deeply
captured. "Be careful. We know nothing, remember, nothing of life.
Don't jump ahead like this or take your dreams for reality. We have our
duty--in a case like this."

Fillery smiled, as though to convey that he remembered his promise.

"Humanity," he replied, "is a very small section of the universe.
Compared to the minuter forms of life, which _may_ be quite as
important, if not more so, the human section is even negligible;
while, compared to the possibility of greater forms----" He broke off
abruptly. "As you say, Paul, we know nothing of life after all, do we?
Nothing, less than nothing! We observe and classify a few results,
that's all. We must beware of narrow prejudice, at any rate--you and I."

His eyes lost their light, his speech dried up, his ideas, dreams,
speculations returned to him unrewarded, unexpressed. With natures in
whom the subconscious never stirred, natures through whom its magical
fires cast no faintest upward gleam, intercourse was ever sterile,
unproductive. Such natures had no background. Even a fact, with them,
was detached from its true big life, its full significance, its divine
potentialities!...

"We must beware of prejudice," he repeated quietly. "We seek truth
only."

"We must beware," replied Devonham, as he shrugged his shoulders,
"of suggestion--of auto-suggestion above all. We must remember
how repressed desires dramatize themselves--especially," he added
significantly, "when aided by imagination. We seek only facts." On his
face appeared swiftly, before it vanished again, an expression of keen
anxiety, almost of affliction, yet tempered, as it were, by surprise
and wonder, by pity possibly, and certainly by affection.




CHAPTER VIII


To Devonham, meanwhile, LeVallon's behaviour was polite and kind and
distant; he did not show distrust of any sort, but he betrayed a
certain diffidence, reserve and caution. Trust he felt; sympathy he did
not feel. To the amusement of Fillery, he suggested almost a kind of
mild contempt when dealing with him, and this amusement was increased
by the fact that it obviously annoyed Devonham, while it gratified
his chief. For towards Fillery, LeVallon behaved with an intimate and
understanding sympathy that proved his instantaneous affection based
upon mutual comprehension. It seemed that LeVallon and Fillery had
known one another always.

It was doubtless, due to this innate sympathy between them that Edward
Fillery's rare gift of absorbing the content of another's mind, even to
the point of taking on that other's conditions, physical and emotional
at the same time, was so successful. By means of a highly developed
power of auto-suggestion, he had learned so to identify his own mind,
thought, feeling with those of a patient, that there resulted a kind of
merging by which he literally became that patient. He felt with him.
As a subject sees the pictures in the hypnotiser's mind, perceives
his thoughts, divines his slightest will, so Fillery, reversing the
process, could realize for the moment exactly what his patient was
thinking, feeling, desiring. It was of great use to him in his strange
practice.

This gift, naturally, varied in degree, and was not invariably
successful. In some cases he only felt, the emotion alone being thus
transferred; in others he only saw what the patient saw, or thought
he saw, the accompanying emotion being omitted; in others again, as
in cases of vision at a distance, either of time or space, he had
been able to follow the "travelling sight" of his patient, whose
consciousness in trance was operating far away, and thus to check for
subsequent verification exactly what that patient saw. He had shared
strange experiences with others--with a man, for instance, in whom
sight was transferred to the tip of his index finger, so that he could
read a book by passing that finger along the printed line; with a
woman, again, in whom "exteriorized consciousness" manifested itself,
so that, if the air several inches from her face was pinched or struck,
the impact was received and an actual bruise produced upon her skin.

This extension of consciousness, its seeds already in his nature,
he had trained and developed to a point where he could almost rely
upon auto-suggestion bringing about quickly the desired conditions.
Its success, however, as mentioned, was variable. With "N. H.,"
especially now, this variableness was marked; sometimes it was so
easily accomplished as to seem natural and without a conscious effort,
while at other times it failed completely. Since it was in no sense an
attempt to transfer anything from his own mind to that of the patient,
Fillery felt that his promise to his colleague was not involved.

The following scene describes the first time in which the process
took place with his new patient. Fillery himself wrote down the
words, supplied the detailed description, filled in the emotion and
psychology, but exactly as these occurred and as he felt them, both
when these took place, respectively, in his own consciousness and in
that of his patient. Part of the time he was present, part of it he
was not visibly so, being screened from observation, yet so placed
that he could note everything that happened. It is clear, however,
that his mind was so intimately _en rapport_ with the thoughts and
feelings of "N. H.," that he experienced in his own being all that
"N. H." experienced. The description was written immediately after
the occurrence, though some of it, the spoken language in particular,
was jotted down in his hiding place at the actual moment.

The interlacing of the two minds, their interpenetration, as it were,
one occasionally dominating the other, is curious to trace and far from
difficult to disentangle. Similarly the interweaving of LeVallon and
"N. H." is noticeable. The description given by Devonham of the portion
of the occurrence he witnessed personally, or heard about from Nurse
Robbins and the attendants--this description reduces the whole thing
to the commonplace level of "a slight seizure accompanied by signs of
violence and moments of delirium due to excitement and fatigue, and
soon cured by sleep."

The occurrence took place precisely at the period when the moon was at
the full.




CHAPTER IX


The body I'm in and using is 22, as they call it, and from a man named
Mason, a geologist, I receive sums of money, regularly paid, with which
I live. They call it "live." A roof and walls protect me, who do not
need protection; my body, which it irks, is covered with wool and cloth
and stuff, fitting me as bark fits a tree and yet not part of me; my
feet, which love the touch of earth and yearn for it, are cased in dead
dried skin called leather; even my head and hair, which crave the sun
and wind, are covered with another piece of dead dried skin, shaped
like a shell, but an ugly shell, in which, were it shaped otherwise,
the wind and rustling leaves might sing with flowers.

Before 22 I remember nothing--nothing definite, that is. I opened my
eyes in a soft, but not refreshing case standing on four iron legs,
and well off the ground, and covered with coarse white coverings piled
thickly on my body. It was a bed. Slabs of transparent stuff kept out
the living sunshine for which I hungered; thick solid walls shut off
the wind; no stars or moon showed overhead, because an enormous lid hid
every bit of sky. No dew, therefore, lay upon the sheets. I smelt no
earth, no leaves, no flowers. No single natural sound entered except
the chattering of dirty sparrows which had lost its freshness. I was in
a hospital.

One comely figure alone gave me a little joy. It was soft and slim
and graceful, with a smell of fern and morning in its hair, though
that hair was lustreless and balled up in ugly lumps, with strips of
thin metal in it. They called it nurse and sister. It was the first
moving thing I saw when my eyes opened on my limited and enclosed
surroundings. My heart beat quicker, a flash of thin joy came up
in me. I had seen something similar before somewhere; it reminded
me, I mean, of something I had known elsewhere; though but a shabby,
lifeless, clumsy copy of this other glorious thing. Though not real, it
stirred this faint memory of reality, so that I caught at the skirts
of moonlight, stars and flowers reflected in a forest pool where my
companion played for long periods of happiness between our work. The
perfume and the eyes did that. I watched it for a bit, as it moved
away, came close and looked at me. When the eyes met mine, a wave of
life, but of little life, surged faintly through me.

They were dim and pitiful, these eyes; mournful, unlit, unseeing. The
stars had set in them; dull shadows crowded. They were so small. They
were hungry too. They were unsatisfied. For some minutes it puzzled
me, then I understood. That was the word--unsatisfied. Ah, but I could
alter that! I could comfort, help, at any rate. My strength, though
horribly clipped and blocked, could manage a little thing like that! My
smaller rhythms I could put into it.

The eyes, the smile, the whole soft comely bundle, so pitifully hungry
and unsatisfied, I rose and seized, pressing it close inside my own
great arms, and burying it all against my breast. I crushed it, but
very gently, as I might crush a sapling. My lips were amid the ferny
hair. I breathed upon it willingly, glad to help.

It was a poor unfinished thing, I felt at once, soft and yielding where
it should have been resilient and elastic as fresh turf; the perfume
had no body, it faded instantly; there was so little life in it.

But, as I held it in my big embrace, smothering its hunger as best I
could within my wave of being, this bundle, this poor pitiful bundle,
screamed and struggled to get free. It bit and scratched and uttered
sounds like those squeaks the less swift creatures make when the
swifter overtake them.

I was too surprised to keep it to me; I relaxed my hold. The instant I
did so the figure, thus released, stood upright like a young birch the
wind sets free. The figure looked alive. The hair fell loose, untidily,
the puny face wore colour, the eyes had fire in them. I saw that fire.
It was a message. Memory stirred faintly in me.

"Ah!" I cried. "I've helped you anyhow a little!"

The scene that followed filled me with such trouble and bewilderment
that I cannot recall exactly what occurred. The figure seemed to
spit at me, yet not with grace and invitation. There was no sign of
gratitude. I was entirely misunderstood, it seemed. Bells rang, as the
figure rushed to the door and flung it open. It called aloud; similar,
though quite lifeless figures came in answer and filled the room. A
doctor--Devonham, they called him--followed them. I was most carefully
examined in a dozen curious ways that tickled my skin a little so
that I smiled. But I lay quite still and silent, watching the whole
performance with a confusion in my being that baffled my comprehending
what was going on. Most of the figures were frightened.

Then the doctor gave place to Fillery, whose name has rhythm.

To him I spoke at once:

"I wished to comfort and revive her," I told him. "She is so starved. I
was most gentle. She brings a message only."

He made no reply, but gazed at me with the corners of his mouth both
twitching, and in his eyes--ah, his eyes had more of the sun in them--a
flash of something that had known fire, at least, if it had not kept it.

"My God! I worship thee," I murmured at the glimpse of the Power I must
own as Master and creator of my being. "Even when thou art playful, I
adore thee and obey."

Then four other figures, shaped like the doctor but wholly mechanical,
a mere blind weight operating through them, held my arms and legs. Not
the least desire to move was in me luckily. I say "luckily," because,
had I wished it, I could have flung them through the roof, blown down
the little walls, caught up a dozen figures in my arms, and rushed
forth with them towards the Powers of Fire and Wind to which I belonged.

Could I? I felt that I could. The sight of the true fire, small though
it was, in the comely figure's and the doctor's eyes, had set me in
touch again with my home and origin. This touch I had somehow lost;
I had been "ill," with what they called nervous disorder and injured
reason. The lost touch was now restored. But, luckily, as I said, there
was no desire in me to set free these other figures, to help them in
any way, after the reception my first kindly effort had experienced. I
lay quite still, held by these four grotesque and puny mechanisms. The
comely one, with the others similar to her, had withdrawn. I felt very
kindly towards them all, but especially towards the doctor, Fillery,
who had shown that he knew my deity and origin. None of them were worth
much trouble, anyhow. I felt that too. A mild, sweet-toned contempt was
in me.

"Dangerous," was a word I caught them whispering as they went. I
laughed a little. The four faces over me made odd grimaces, tightening
their lips, and gripping my legs and arms with greater effort. The
doctor--Fillery--noticed it.

"Easy, remember," he addressed the four. "There's really no need to
hold. It won't recur." I nodded. We understood one another. And, with a
smile at me, he left the room, saying he would come back after a short
interval. A link with my source, a brother as it were, went with him. I
was lonely....

I began to hum songs to myself, little fragments of a great natural
music I had once known but lost, and I noticed that the four figures,
as I sang, relaxed their grip of my limbs considerably. To tell the
truth, I forgot that they were holding me; their grip, anyhow, was
but a thread I could snap without the smallest effort. The songs
were happiness in me. Upon free leaping rhythms I careered with an
exhilarating rush of liberty; all about space I soared and sank; I
was picked up, flung far, riding the crest of immense waves of orderly
vibration that delighted me. I let myself go a bit, let my voice out,
I mean. No effort accompanied my singing. It was automatic, like
breathing almost. It was natural to me. These rhythmical sounds and the
patterns that they wove in space were the outlines of forms it was my
work to build. This expressed my nature. Only my power was blocked and
stifled in this confining body. The fire and air which were my tools I
could not control. I have forgotten--forgotten----!

"Got a voice, ain't he?" observed one of the figures admiringly.

"Lunies can do 'most anything they have a mind to."

"Grand Opera isn't it."

"Yes," mentioned the fourth, "but he'll lift the roof off presently.
We'd better stop him before there's any trouble."

I stopped of myself, however: their remarks interested me. Also while I
had been singing, although I called it humming only, they had gradually
let go of me, and were now sitting down on my bed and staring with
quite pleasant faces. All their dim eight eyes were fixed on me. Their
forms were not built well.

"Where did you get that from, Guv'nor?" asked the one who had spoken
first. "Can you give me the name of it?"

The sound of his own voice was like the scratching of a pin after the
enormous rhythm that now ceased.

"Ain't printed, is it?" he went on, as I stared, not understanding what
he meant. "I've got a sister at the Halls," he explained. "She'd make a
hit with that kind of thing. Gave me quite a twist inside to hear it,"
he added, turning to the others.

The others agreed solemnly with dull stupid faces. I lay and listened
to their talk. I longed to help them. I had forgotten how.

"A bit churchy, I thought it," said one. "But, I confess, it stirred me
up."

"Churchy or not, it's the stuff," insisted the first.

"Oh, it's the stuff to give 'em, right enough." And they looked at me
admiringly again. "Where did you get it, if I may ask?" replied Number
One in a more respectful tone. His face looked quite polite. The lips
stretched, showing yellow teeth. It was his smile. But his eyes were
a little more real. Oh, where was my fire? I could have built the
outline better so that he was real and might express far more. I have
forgotten----!

"I hear it," I told him, "because I'm in it. It's all about me. It
never stops. It's what we build with----"

Number One seemed greatly interested.

"Hear it, do you? Why, that's odd now. You see"--he looked at his
companions apologetically, as though he knew they would not believe
him--"my father was like that. He heard his music, he always used to
say, but we laughed at him. He was a composer by trade. Oh, his stuff
was printed too. Of course," he added, "there's musical talent in the
family," as though that explained everything. He turned to me again.
"Give us a little more, Mister--if you don't object, that is," he
added. And his face was soft as he said it. "Only gentle like--if you
don't mind."

"Yes, keep it down a bit," another put in, looking anxiously in the
direction of the closed door. He patted the air with his open palm,
slowly, carefully, as though he patted an animal that might rise and
fly at him.

I hummed again for them, but this time with my lips closed. The waves
of rhythm caught me up and away. I soared and flew and dropped and rose
again upon their huge coloured crests. Curtains and sheets of quiet
flame in palest gold flared shimmering through the sound, while winds
that were full of hurricanes and cyclones swept down to lift the fire
and dance with it in spirals. The perfume of great flowers rose. There
were flowers everywhere, and stars shone through it all like showers of
gold. Ah! I began to remember something. It was flowers and stars as
well as human forms we worked to build....

But I kept the fire from leaping into actual flame; the mighty winds
I held back. Even thus pent and checked, their powerful volume made
the atmosphere shake and pulse about us. Only I could not control them
now.... With an effort I came back, came down, as it were, and saw
the funny little faces staring at me with opened eyes and mouths, and
yellow teeth, pale gums, their skins gone whitish, their figures rigid
with their tense emotion. They were so poorly made, the patterns so
imperfect. The new respect in their manner was marked plainly. Suddenly
all four turned together towards the door. I stopped. The doctor had
returned. But it was Fillery again. I liked the feel of him.

"He wanted to sing, sir, so we let him. It seemed to relieve him a
bit," they explained quickly and with an air of helpless apology.

"Good, good," said the doctor. "Quite good. Any normal expression that
brings relief is good." He dismissed them. They went out, casting back
at me expressions of puzzled thanks and interest. The door closed
behind them. The doctor seated himself beside me and took my hand. I
liked his touch. His hand was alive, at any rate, although within my
own it felt rather like a dying branch or bunch of leaves I grasped.
The life, if thin, was real.

"Where's the rest of it?" I asked him, meaning the music. "I used to
have it all. It's left me, gone away. What's cut it off?"

"You're not cut off really," he said gently. "You can always get
into it again when you really need it." He gazed at me steadily for
a minute, then said in his quiet voice--a full, nice tone with wind
through a forest running in it: "Mason.... Dr. Mason...."

He said no more, but watched me. The name stirred something in me I
could not get at quite. I could not reach down to it. I was troubled by
a memory I could not seize.

"Mason," I repeated, returning his strong gaze. "What--who--was Mason?
And where?" I connected the name with a sense of liberty, also with
great winds and pools of fire, with great figures of golden skin and
radiant faces, with music, too, the music that had left me.

"You've forgotten for the moment," came the deep running voice I liked.
"He looked after you for twenty years. He gave his life for you. He
loved you. He loved your mother. Your father was his friend."

"Has he gone--gone back?"

"He's dead."

"I can get after him though," I said, for the name touched me with a
sense of lost companionship I wanted, though the reference to my father
and mother left me cold. "I can easily catch him up. When I move with
my wind and fire, the fastest things stand still." My own speed, once
I was free again, I knew outpaced easily the swiftest bird, outpaced
light itself.

"Yes," agreed the doctor; "only he doesn't want that now. You can
always catch him up when the time comes. Besides, he's waiting for you
anyhow."

I knew that was true. I sank back comforted upon the stuffy pillows and
lay silent. This tinkling chatter wearied me. It was like trickling
wind. I wanted the flood of hurricanes, the pulse of storms. My
building, shaping powers, my great companions--oh! where were they?

"He taught you himself, taught you all you know," I heard the tinkling
go on again, "but he kept you away from life, thinking it was best. He
was afraid for you, afraid for others too. He kept you in the woods
and mountains where, as he believed, you could alone express yourself
and so be happy. A hundred times, in babyhood and early childhood, you
nearly died. He nursed you back to life. His own life he renounced. Now
he is dead. He has left you all his money."

He paused. I said no word. Faint memories passed through my mind, but
nothing I could hold and seize. The money I did not understand at all,
except that it was necessary.

"He thought at first that you could not possibly live to manhood. To
his surprise you survived everything--illness, accident, disaster of
every sort and kind. Then, as you grew up, he realized his mistake.
Instead of keeping you away from life, he ought to have introduced you
to it and explained it--as I and Devonham are now trying to do. You
could not live for ever alone in woods and mountains; when he was gone
there would be no one to look after you and guide you."

The trickling of wind went on and on. I hardly listened to it. He
did it for his own pleasure, I suppose. It pleased and soothed him
possibly. Yet I remembered every syllable. It was a small detail to
keep fresh when my real memory covered the whole planet.

"Before he died, he recognized his mistake and faced the position
boldly. It was some years before the end; he was hale and hearty
still, yet the end, he knew, was in sight. While the power was still
strong in him, therefore, he did the only thing left to him to do. He
used his great powers. He used suggestion. He hypnotized you, telling
you to forget--from the moment of his death, but not before--forget
everything---- It was only partially successful."

The door opened, the comely figure glanced in, then vanished.

"She wants more help from me," I interrupted the monotonous tinkling
instantly, for pity stirred in me again as I saw her eager, hungry and
unsatisfied little eyes. "Call her back. I feel quite willing. It is
one of the lower forms we made. I can improve it."

Dr. Fillery, as he was called, looked at me steadily, his mouth
twitching at the corners as before, a flash of fire flitting through
his eyes. The fire made me like and trust him; the twitching, too, I
liked, for it meant he knew how absurd he was. Yet he was bigger than
the other figures.

"You can't do that," he said, "you mustn't," and then laughed outright.
"It isn't done, you know--here."

"Why not, sir?" I asked, using the terms the figures used. "I feel like
that."

"Of course, you do. But all you feel can't be expressed except
at the proper times and places. The consent of the other party
always is involved," he went on slowly, "when it's a question of
expressing--anything you feel."

This puzzled me, because in this particular instance the other party
had asked me with her eyes to comfort her. I told him this. He laughed
still more. Caught by the sound--it was just like wind passing among
tall grasses on a mountain ridge--I forgot what he was talking about
for the moment. The sound carried me away towards my own rhythms.

"You've got such amazing insight," he went on tinkling to himself, for
I heard, although I did not listen. "You read the heart too easily, too
quickly. You must learn to hide your knowledge." The laughter which
ran with the words then ended, and I came back to the last thing I had
definitely listened to--"express, expressing," was the phrase he used.

"You told me that self-expression is the purpose for which I'm
here----?"

"I believe it is," he agreed, more solemnly.

"Only sometimes, then?"

"Exactly. If that expression involves another in pain or trouble or
discomfort----"

"Ah! I have to choose, you mean. I have to know first what the other
feels about it."

I began to understand better. It was a game. And all games delighted me.

"You may put it roughly so, yes," he explained, "you're very quick.
I'll give you a rule to guide you," he went on. I listened with an
effort; this tinkling soon wearied me; I could not think long or much;
my way, it seemed, was feeling. "Ask yourself always how what you do
will affect another," Dr. Fillery concluded. "That's a safe rule for
you."

"That is of children," I observed. We stared at each other a moment.
"Both sides keep it?" I asked.

"Childish," he agreed, "it certainly is. Both sides, yes, keep it."

I sighed, and the sigh seemed to rise from my very feet, passing
through my whole being. He looked at me most kindly then, asking why I
sighed.

"I used to be free," I told him. "This is not liberty. And why are we
not all free together?"

"It is liberty for two instead of only for one," he said, "and so, in
the long run, liberty for all."

"So that's where they are," I remarked, but to myself and not to him.
"Not further than that." For what I had once known, but now, it seemed,
forgotten, was far beyond such a foolish little game. We had lived
without such tiny tricks. We lived openly and unafraid. We worked in
harmony. We lived. Yes--but who was "we"? That was the part I had
forgotten.

"It's the growth and development of civilization," I heard the little
drift of wind go whistling thinly, "and it won't take you long to
become quite civilized at this rate, more civilized, indeed, than
most--with your swift intelligence and lightning insight."

"Civilization," I repeated to myself. Then I looked at his eyes which
hid carefully in their depths somewhere that tiny cherished flame I
loved. "Your ways are really very simple," I said. "It's all easy
enough to learn. It is so small."

"A man studying ants," he tinkled, "finds them small, but far from
simple. You may find complications later. If so, come to me."

I promised him, and the fire gleamed faintly in his eyes a moment. "He
entrusted you to me. Your mother," he added softly, "was the woman he
loved."

"Civilization," I repeated, for the word set going an odd new rhythm in
me that I rather liked, and that tired me less than the other things he
said. "What is it then? You are a Race, you told me."

"A Race of human beings, of men and women developing----"

"The comely ones?"

"Are the women. Together we make up the Race."

"And civilization?"

"Is realizing that we are a community, learning, growing, all its
members living for the others as well as for themselves."

Dr. Fillery told me then about men and women and sex, how children are
made, and what enormous and endless work was necessary merely to keep
them all alive and clothed and sheltered before they could accomplish
anything else of any sort at all. Half the labour of the majority was
simply to keep alive at all. It was an ugly little system he described.
Much I did not hear, because my thinking powers gave out. Some of it
gave me an awful feeling he called pain. The confusion and imperfection
seemed beyond repair, even beyond the worth of being part of it, of
belonging to it at all. Moreover, the making of children, without
which the whole thing must end, gave me spasms of irritation he called
laughter. Only the Comely Ones, and what he told me of them, made me
want to sing.

"The men," I said, "but do they see that it is ugly and ludicrous
and----"

"Comic," he helped me.

"Do they know," I asked, taking his unknown words, "that it's comic?"

"The glamour," he said, "conceals it from them. To the best among them
it is sacred even."

"And the Comely Ones?"

"It is their chief mission," he replied. "Always remember that. It's
sacred." He fixed his kind eyes gravely on my face.

"Ah, worship, you mean," I said. "I understand." Again we stared for
some minutes. "Yet all are not comely, are they?" I asked presently.

The fire again shone faintly in his eyes as he watched me a moment
without answering. It caught me away. I am not sure I heard his words,
but I think they ran like this:

"That's just the point where civilization--so far--has always stopped."

I remember he ceased tinkling then; our talk ceased too. I was
exhausted. He told me to remember what he had said, and to lie down and
rest. He rang the bell, and a man, one of the four who had held me,
came in.

"Ask Nurse Robbins to come here a moment, please," he said. And a
moment later the Comely One entered softly and stood beside my bed. She
did not look at me. Dr. Fillery began again his little tinkling. "...
wishes to apologize to you most sincerely, nurse, for his mistake. He
meant no harm, believe me. There is no danger in him, nor will he ever
repeat it. His ignorance of our ways, I must ask you to believe----"

"Oh, it's nothing, sir," she interrupted. "I've quite forgotten it
already. And usually he's as good as gold and perfectly quiet." She
blushed, glancing shyly at me with clear invitation.

"It will not recur," repeated the Doctor positively. "He has promised
me. He is very, very sorry and ashamed."

The nurse looked more boldly a moment. I saw her silver teeth. I saw
the hint of soft fire in her poor pitiful eyes, but far, far away and,
as she thought, safely hidden.

"Pitiful one, I will not touch you," I said instantly. "I know that you
are sacred."

I noticed at once that her sweet natural perfume increased about her
as I said the words, but her eyes were lowered, though she smiled a
little, and her little cheeks grew coloured. I saw her small teeth of
silvery marble again. Our work was visible. I liked it.

"You have promised me," said Dr. Fillery, rising to go out.

"I promise," I said, while the Comely One was arranging my pillows and
sheets with quick, clever hands, sometimes touching my cheek on purpose
as she did so. "I will not worship, unless it is commanded of me first.
The increased sweetness of her smell will tell me."

But indeed already I had forgotten her, and I no longer realized who
it was that tripped about my bed, doing numerous little things to make
me comfortable. My friend, the understanding one, companion of my big
friend, Mason, who was dead, also had left the room. His twitching
mouth, his laughter, and his shining eyes were gone. I was aware that
the Comely One remained, doing all manner of little things about me and
my bed, unnecessary things, but my pity and my worship were not asked,
so I forgot her. My thinking had wearied me, and my feeling was not
touched. I began to hum softly to myself; my giant rhythms rose; I went
forth towards my Powers of Wind and Fire, full of my own natural joy. I
forgot the Race with its men, its women, its rules and games, its tiny
tricks, its civilization. I was free for a little with my own.

One detail interfered a little with the rhythms, but only for a second
and very faintly even then. The Comely One's face grew dark.

"He's gone off asleep--actually," I heard her mutter, as she left the
room with a fling of her little skirts, shutting the door behind her
with a bang.

That bang was far away. I was already rising and falling in that
natural happy state which to me meant freedom. It is hard to tell
about, but that dear Fillery knows, I am sure, exactly what I know,
though he has forgotten it. He has known us somewhere, I feel. He
understands our service. But, like me, he has forgotten too.

What really happened to me? Where did I go, what did I see and feel
when my rhythms took me off?

Thinking is nowhere in it--I can tell him that. I am conscious of the
Sun.

One difficulty is that my being here confuses me. Here I am already
caught, confined and straitened. I am within certain limits. I can only
move in three ways, three measurements, three dimensions. The space I
am in here allows only little rhythms; they are coarse and slow and
heavy, and beat against confining walls as it were, are thrown back,
cross and recross each other, so that while they themselves grow less,
their confusion grows greater. The forms and outlines I can build with
them are poor and clumsy and insignificant. Spirals I cannot make. Then
I forget.

Into these small rhythms I cannot compress myself; the squeezing hurts.
Yet neither can I make them bigger to suit myself. I would break forth
towards the Sun.

Thus I feel cramped, confused and crippled. It is almost impossible
to tell of my big rhythms, for it is an attempt to tell of one thing
in terms of another. How can I fix fire and wind upon the point of a
pin, for instance, and examine them through a magnifying-glass? The Sun
remains. What I experience, really, when I go off into my own freedom
is release. My rhythms are of the Sun. They are his messengers, they
are my law, they are my life and happiness. By means of them I fulfill
the purpose of my being. I work, so Fillery calls it. I build.

That, at any rate, is literally true. My thinking stops at that
point, perhaps; but "I think" I mean by "release"--that I escape back
from being trapped by all these separate little individualities,
human beings each working on his own, for his own, and against all
the others--escape from this stifling tangle into the sweep of my
big rhythms which work together and in unison. I search for lost
companions, but do not find them--the golden skins and radiant faces,
the mighty figures and the splendid shapes.

_They_ work without effort, however. That is another difference.

I, too, work, only I work with them, and never against them. I can
draw upon them as they can draw upon me. We do draw on one another. We
know harmony. Service is our method and system.

My dear Fillery also wants to know who "we" are. How can I tell him?
The moment I try to "think," I seem to forget. This forgetting,
indeed, is one of the limits against which I bang myself, so that I am
flung back upon the tangle of criss-cross, tiny rhythms which confuse
and obliterate the very thing he wants to know. Yet the Sun I never
forget--father of fire and wind. My companions are lost temporarily.
I am shut off from them. It seems I cannot have them and the Race at
the same time. I yearn and suffer to rejoin them. The service we all
know together is great joy. Of love, this love between two isolated
individuals the Race counts the best thing they have--we know nothing.

Now, here is one thing I can understand quite clearly:

I have watched and helped the Race, as he calls it, for countless ages.
Yet from outside it. Never till now have I been inside its limits with
it. And a dim sense of having watched it through a veil or curtain
comes to me. I can faintly recall that I tried to urge my big rhythms
in among its members, as great waves of heat or sound might be launched
upon an ant-heap. I used to try to force and project my vast rhythms
into their tiny ones, hoping to make these latter swell and rise and
grow--but never with success. Though a few members, here and there,
felt them and struggled to obey and use their splendid swing, the rest
did not seem to notice them at all.... Indeed, they objected to the
struggling efforts of the few who did feel them, for their own small
accustomed rhythms were interfered with. The few were generally broken
into little pieces and pushed violently out of the way.

And this made me feel pitiful, I remember dimly; because these
smaller rhythms, though insignificant, were exquisite. They were of
extraordinary beauty. Could they only have been increased, the Race
that knew and used them must have changed my own which, though huge
and splendid of their kind, lacked the intense, perfect loveliness of
the smaller kind.

The Race, had it accepted mine and mastered them, must have carried
themselves and me towards still mightier rhythms which I alone could
never reach.

This, then, is clear to me, though very faint now. Fillery, who can
think for a long time, instead of like me for seconds only, will
understand what I mean. For if I tell him what "we" did, he may be able
to think out what "we" were.

"Your work?" he asked me too.

I'm not sure I know what he means by "work." We were incessantly
active, but not for ourselves. There was no effort. There was easy and
sure accomplishment--in the sense that nothing could stop or hinder
our fulfilling our own natures. Obstacles, indeed, helped our power
and made it greater, for everything feeds fire and opposition adds to
the pressure of wind. Our main activity was to make perfect forms. We
were form-builders. Apart from this, our "work" was to maintain and
keep active all rhythms less than our own, yet of our kind. I speak of
my own kind alone. We had no desire to be known outside our kind. We
worked and moved and built up swiftly, but out of sight--an endless
service.

"You are the Powers behind what we call Nature, then?" the dear Fillery
asked me. "You operate behind growing things, even behind inanimate
things like trees and stones and flowers. Your big rhythms, as you call
them, are our Laws of Nature. Your own particular department, your own
elements evidently, were heat and air."

I could not answer that. But, as he said it, I saw in his grey eyes the
flash of fire which so few of his Race possessed; and I felt vaguely
that he was one of the struggling members who was aware of the big
rhythms and who would be put away in little pieces later by the rest.
It made me pitiful. "Forget your own tiny rhythms," I said, "and come
over to us. But bring your tiny rhythms with you because they are so
exquisitely lovely. We shall increase them."

He did not answer me. His mouth twitched at the corners, and he had an
attack of that irritation which, he says, is relieved and expressed by
laughter. Yet the face shone.

The laughter, however, was a very quick, full, natural answer, all
the same. It was happy and enthusiastic. I saw that laughter made his
rhythms bigger at once. Then laughter was probably the means to use. It
was a sort of bridge.

"Your instantaneous comprehension of our things puzzles me," he said.
"You grasp our affairs in all their relations so swiftly. Yet it is all
new to you." His voice and face made me wish to stroke and help him, he
was so dear and eager. "How do you manage it?" he asked point blank.
"Our things are surely foreign to your nature."

"But they are of children," I told him. "They are small and so very
simple. There are no difficulties. Your language is block letters
because your self-expression, as you call it, is so limited. It all
comes to me at a glance. I and my kind can remember a million tiniest
details without effort."

He did not laugh, but his face looked full of questions. I could not
help him further. "A scrap, probably, of what you've taught us," I
heard him mumble, though no further questions came. "Well," he went on
presently, while I lay and watched the pale fire slip in tiny waves
about his eyes, "remember this: since our alphabet is so easy to you,
follow it, stick to it, do not go outside it. There's a good rule that
will save trouble for others as well as for yourself."

"I remember and I try. But it is not always easy. I get so cramped and
stiff and lifeless with it."

"This sunless, chilly England, of course, cannot feed you," he said.
"The sense of beauty in our Race, too, is very poor."

Once he suddenly looked up and fixed his eyes on my face. His manner
became very earnest.

"Now, listen to me," he said. "I'm going to read you something; I want
you to tell me what you make of it. It's private; that is, I have no
right to show it to others, but as no one would understand it--with the
exception possibly of yourself--secrecy is not of importance." And his
mouth twitched a little.

He drew a sheaf of papers from an inner pocket, and I saw they were
covered with fine writing. I laughed; this writing always made me
laugh--it was so laborious and slow. The writing I knew best, of
course, lay all over and inside the earth and skies. The privacy
also made me laugh, so strange seemed the idea to me, and so
impossible--this idea of secrecy. It was such an admission of ignorance.

"I will understand it quickest by reading it," I said. "I take in a
page at once--in your block letters."

But he preferred to read it out himself, so that he could note the
effect upon me, he explained, of definite passages. He saw that I
guessed his purpose, and we laughed together a moment. "When you tire
of listening," he said, "just tell me and I'll pause." I gave him my
hand to hold. "It helps me to stay here," I explained, and he nodded as
he grasped me in his warm firm clasp.

"It's written by one who _may_ have known you and your big rhythms,
though I can't be sure," he added. "One of--er--my patients wrote it,
someone who believed she was in communication with a kind of immense
Nature-spirit."

Then he began to read in his clear, windy voice:

"'I sit and weave. I feel strange; as if I had so much consciousness
that words cannot explain it. The failure of others makes my work more
hard, but my own purposes never fail, I am associated with those who
need me. The universal doors are open to me. I compass Creation.'"

But already I began to hum my songs, though to please him I kept
the music low, and he, dear Fillery, did not bid me stop, but only
tightened his grasp upon my hand. I listened with pleasure and
satisfaction. Therefore I hummed.

"'I am silent, seeking no expression, needing no communication,
satisfied with the life that is in me. I do not even wish to be known
about----'"

"That's where your Race," I put in, "is to me as children. All they do
must be shouted about so loud or they think it has not happened."

"'I do not wish to be forced to obtrude myself,'" he went on. "'There
are hosts like me. We do not want that which does not belong to us. We
do not want that hindrance, that opposition which rouses an undesirable
consciousness; for without that opposition we could never have known of
disobedience. We are formless. The formless is the real. That cannot
die. It is eternal.'"

Again he tightened his grasp, and this time also laid his eyes a moment
on my own, over the top of his paper, so that I kept my music back with
a great effort. For it was hard not to express myself when my own came
calling in this fashion.

He continued reading aloud. He selected passages now, instead of going
straight through the pages. The words helped memory in me; flashes of
what I had forgotten came back in sheets of colour and waves of music;
the phrases built little spirals, as it were, between two states. Of
these two states, I now divined, he understood one perfectly--his own,
and the other--mine--partially. Yet he had a little of both, I knew,
in himself. With me it was similar, only the understood state was not
the same with us. To the Race, of course, what he read would have no
meaning.

"The Comely One and the four figures," I said, "how they would turn
white and run if they could hear you, showing their yellow teeth and
dim eyes!"

His face remained grave and eager, though I could see the laughter
running about beneath the tight brown skin as he went on reading his
little bits.

"'We heard nothing of man, and were rarely even conscious of him,
although he benefited by our work in all that sustained and conditioned
him. The wise are silent, the foolish speak, and the children are thus
led astray, for wisdom is not knowledge, it is a realization of the
scheme and of one's own part in it.'"

He took a firmer, broader grip of my hand as he read the next bit. I
felt the tremble of his excitement run into my wrist and arm. His voice
deepened and shook. It was like a little storm:

"'Then, suddenly, we heard man's triumphant voice. We became conscious
of him as an evolving entity. Our Work had told. We had built his form
and processes so faithfully. We knew that when he reached his height we
must be submissive to his will.'"

A gust of memory flashed by me as I heard. Those small but perfect,
exquisite, lovely rhythms!

"Who called me here? Whose voice reached after me, bringing me into
this undesirable consciousness?" I cried aloud, as the memory went
tearing by, then vanished before I could recover it. At the same time
Fillery let go my hand, and the little bridge was snapped. I felt what
he called pain. It passed at once. I found his hand again, but the
bridge was not rebuilt. How white his skin had grown, I noticed, as I
looked up at his face. But the eyes shone grandly. "I shall find the
way," I said. "We shall go back together to our eternal home."

He went on reading as though I had not interrupted, but I found it less
easy to listen now.

I realized then that he was gone. He had left the room, though I had
not seen him go. I had been away.

It was some days ago that this occurred. It was to-day, a few hours
ago, that I seized the Comely One and tried to comfort her, poor hungry
member of this little Race.

But both occurrences help us--help dear Fillery and myself--to
understand how difficult it is to answer his questions and tell him
exactly what he wants to know.

"How long, O Lord, how long!" I hear his yearning cry. "Yet other
beings cannot help us; they can only tell us what their own part is."

After the door had clicked I knew release for a bit--release from a
state I partially understood and so found irksome, into another where
I felt at home and so found pleasurable. In the big rhythms my nature
expressed itself apparently. I rose, seeking my lost companions.
They--the Devonham and his busy little figures--called it sleep. It
may be "sleep." But I find there what I seek yet have forgotten, and
that with me were dear Fillery and another--a Comely One whom _he_
brings--as though we belong together and have a common origin. But this
other Comely One--who is it?




CHAPTER X


About a week after the arrival of LeVallon in London, Dr. Fillery came
out of the Home one morning early, upon some uninteresting private
business. He had left "LeVallon" happy with his books and garden,
Devonham was with him to answer questions or direct his energies; the
other "cases" in the establishment were moving nicely towards a cure.

The November air was clear and almost bright; no personal worries
troubled him. His mind felt free and light.

It was one of those mornings when Nature slips, very close and sweet,
into the heart, so close and sweet that the mind wonders why people
quarrel and disagree, when it is so easy to forgive, and the planet
seems but a big, lovely, happy garden, evil an impossible nightmare,
and personal needs few and simple.

He walked by cross roads towards Primrose Hill, entering Regent's Park
near the Zoo. An early white frost was rapidly melting in the sun. The
sky showed a faint tinge of blue. He saw floating sea-gulls. These, and
a faint breeze that stirred the yellowing last leaves of autumn, gave
his heart a sudden lift.

And this lift was in the direction of a forbidden corner. He was aware
of some exquisite dawn-wind far away stirring a million flowers,
dew sparkled, streams splashed and murmured. A valley gleamed and
vanished, yet left across his mind its shining trail.... For this lift
of his heart made him soar into a region where it was only too easy
to override temptation. Fillery, however, though his invisible being
soared, kept both visible feet firmly on the ground. The surface
was slippery, being melted by the sun, but frost kept the earth hard
and frozen underneath. His balance never was in danger. He remained
detached and a spectator.

She walked beside him nevertheless, a figure of purity and radiance,
perfumed, soft, delicious. She was so ignorant of life. That was her
wonder partly; for beauty was her accident and, while admirable, was
not a determining factor. Life, in its cruder sense, she did not know,
though moving through the thick of it. It neither touched nor soiled
her; she brushed its dirt and dust aside as though a non-conducting
atmosphere surrounded her. Her emotions, deep and searching, had
remained untorn. A quality of pristine innocence belonged to her, as
though, in the noisy clamour of ambitious civilized life, she remained
still aware of Eden. Her grace, her loveliness, her simplicity moved by
his side as naturally, it seemed to him, as air or perfume.

"Iraida," he murmured to himself, with a smile of joy. "Nayan Khilkoff.
All the men worship and adore you, yet respect you too. They cannot
touch you. You remain aloof, unstained." And, remembering LeVallon's
remarks in cinema and theatre, he could have sung at this mere thought
of her.

"Untouched by coarseness, something unearthly about your loveliness
of soul, a baby, a saint, and to all the men in Khilkoff's Studio,
a mother. Where do you really come from? Whence do you derive? Your
lovely soul can have no dealings with our common flesh. How many
young fellows have you saved already, how many floundering characters
redeemed! They crave your earthly, physical love. Instead you surprise
and disappoint and shock them into safety again--by giving to them
Love...!"

And, as he half repeated his vivid thoughts aloud, he suddenly saw her
coming towards him from the ornamental water, and instantly, wondering
what he should say to her, his mind contracted. The thing in him that
sang went backward into silence. He put a brake upon himself. But he
watched her coming nearer, wondering what brought her so luckily into
Regent's Park, and all the way from Chelsea, at such an hour. She moved
so lightly, sweetly; she was so intangible and lovely. He feared her
eyes, her voice.

They drew nearer. From looking to right and left, he raised his head.
She was close, quite close, a hundred yards away. That walk, that
swing, that poise of head and neck he could not mistake anywhere. His
whole being glowed, thrilled, and yet contracted as in pain.

A sentence about the weather, about her own, her father's, health,
about his calling to see them shortly, rose to his lips. He turned his
eyes away, then again looked up. They were now not twenty yards apart;
in another moment he would have raised his hat, when, with a sensation
of cold disappointment in him, she went past in totally irresponsive
silence. It was a stranger--a shop girl, a charwoman, a bus-conductor's
wife--anybody but she whom he had thought.

How could he have been so utterly mistaken? It amazed him. It was,
indeed, months since they had met, yet his knowledge of her appearance
was so accurate and detailed that such an error seemed incredible. He
had experienced, besides, the actual thrill.

The phenomenon, however, was not new to him. Often had he experienced
it, much as others have. He knew, from this, that she was somewhere
near, coming deliciously, deliberately towards him, moving every minute
firmly nearer, from a point in great London town which she had left
just at the precise moment which would time her crossing his own path
later. They would meet presently, if not now. Fate had arranged all
details, and something in him was aware of it before it happened.

The phenomenon, as a matter of fact, was repeated twice again in the
next half-hour: he saw her--on both occasions beyond the possibility
of question--coming towards him, yet each time it was a complete
stranger masquerading in her guise.

It meant, he knew, that their two minds--hearts, too, he wondered,
with a sense of secret happiness, enjoyed intensely then instantly
suppressed--were wirelessing to one another across the vast city, and
that both transmitter and receiver, their physical bodies, would meet
shortly round the corner, or along the crowded street. Strong currents
of desiring thought, he knew, he hoped, he wondered, were trying to
shape the crude world nearer to the heart's desire, causing the various
intervening passers-by to assume the desirable form and outline in
advance.

He reflected, following the habit of his eager mind; this wireless
discovery, after all, was the discovery of a universal principle in
Nature. It was common to all forms of life, a faint beginning of
that advance towards marvellous intercommunicating, semi-telepathic
brotherhood he had always hoped for, believed in.... Even plants, he
remembered, according to Bose....

Then, suddenly, half-way down Baker Street he found her close beside
him.

She was dressed so becomingly, so naturally, that no particular detail
caught his eye, although she wore more colour than was usual in the
dull climate known to English people. There was a touch of fur and
there were flowers, but these were part of her appearance as a whole,
and the hat was so exactly right, though it was here that Englishwomen
generally went wrong, that he could not remember afterwards what it
was like. It was as suitable as natural hair. It looked as if she had
grown it. The shining eyes were what he chiefly noticed. They seemed to
increase the pale sunlight in the dingy street.

She was so close that he caught her perfume almost before he recognized
her, and a sense of happiness invaded his whole being instantly, as he
took the slender hand emerging from a muff and held it for a moment.
The casual sentences he had half prepared fled like a flock of birds
surprised. Their eyes met.... And instantly the sun rose over a far
Khaketian valley; he was aware of joy, of peace, of deep contentment,
London obliterated, the entire world elsewhere. He knew the thrill, the
ecstasy of some long-forgotten dawn....

But in that brief second while he held her hand and gazed into her
eyes, there flashed before him a sudden apparition. With lightning
rapidity this picture darted past between them, paused for the tiniest
fraction of a second, and was gone again. So swiftly the figure shot
across that the very glance he gave her was intercepted, its angle
changed, its meaning altered. He started involuntarily, for he knew
that vision, the bright rushing messenger, someone who brought glad
tidings. And this time he recognized it--it was the figure of "N. H."

The outward start, the slight wavering of the eyelids, both were
noticed, though not understood, much less interpreted by the young
woman facing him.

"You are as much surprised as I am," he heard the pleasant, low-pitched
voice before his face. "I thought you were abroad. Father and I came
back from Sark only yesterday."

"I haven't left town," he replied. "It was Devonham went to
Switzerland."

He was thinking of her pleasant voice, and wondering how a mere voice
could soothe and bless and comfort in this way. The picture of the
flashing figure, too, preoccupied him. His various mind was ever busy
with several trains of thought at once, though all correlated. Why, he
was wondering, should that picture of "N. H." leave a sense of chill
upon his heart? Why had the first radiance of this meeting thus already
dimmed a little? Her nearness, too, confused him as of old, making
his manner a trifle brusque and not quite natural, until he found his
centre of control again. He looked quickly up and down the street,
moved aside to let some people pass, then turned to the girl again.
"Your holiday has done you good, Iraida," he said quietly; "I hope your
father enjoyed it too."

"We both enjoyed ourselves," she answered, watching him, something of
a protective air about her. "I wish you had been with us, for that
would have made it perfect. I was thinking that only this morning--as I
walked across Hyde Park."

"How nice of you! I believe I, too, was thinking of you both, as I
walked through Regent's Park." He smiled for the first time.

"It's very odd," she went on, "though you can explain it probably,"
she added, with a smile that met his own, increasing it, "or, at any
rate, Dr. Devonham could--but I've seen you several times this morning
already--in the last half-hour. I've seen you in other people in the
street, I mean. Yet I wasn't thinking of you at the actual moment, it's
two months since we've met, and I imagined you were abroad."

"Odd, yes," he said, half shyly, half curtly. "It's an experience many
have, I believe."

She gazed up at him. "It's very natural, I think, when people like each
other, Edward, and are in sympathy."

"Yet it happens with people who don't like each other too," he
objected, and at the same moment was vexed that he had used the words.

Iraida Khilkoff laughed. He had the feeling that she read his thoughts
as easily as if they were printed in red letters on his grey felt hat.

"There must be _some_ bond between them, though," she remarked, "an
emotion, I mean, whatever it may be--even hatred."

"Probably, Nayan," he agreed. "It's you now, not Devonham, that wants
to explain things. I think I must take you into the Firm, you could
take charge of the female patients with great success."

Whereupon she looked up at him with such a grave mothering expression
that he was aware of her secret power, her central source of strength
in dealing with men. Her innocence and truth were an atmosphere about
her, protecting her as naturally and neatly as the clothes upon her
body. She believed in men. He felt like a child beside her.

"I'm in the Firm already," she said, "for you made me a partner years
ago when I was so high," and her small gloved hand indicated the
stature of a little girl. "You taught me first."

He remembered the bleak northern town where fifteen years ago he
had known her father as a patient for some minor ailment, and the
friendship that grew out of the relationship. He remembered the child
of nine or ten who sat on his knee and repeated to him the Russian
fairy tales her mother told her; he recalled the charm, the wonder,
the extraordinary power of belief. Her words brought back again that
flowered Caucasian valley in the sunlight and this, again, flashed upon
the screen the strange bright figure that had already once intercepted
their glance, as though it somehow came between them....

"You have one advantage over me," he rejoined presently, "for in my
Clinique the people know that they need treatment, whereas in the
Studio you catch your patients unawares. They do not know they're ill.
You heal them without their being aware that they need healing."

"Yet some of our _habitués_ have found their way later to your
consulting-room," she reminded him.

"Merely to finish what you had first begun--a sort of convalescence.
You work in the big, raw world, I in a mere specialized corner of it."

He turned away, lest the power in her eyes overcome him. The traffic
thundered past, the people crowded, jostling them. He could have stood
there talking to her all day long, the London street forgotten or full
of flowers and Eden's trees and rippling summer streams. The pale
sunlight caught her face beside him and made it shine....

He longed to take her in his arms and fly through the dawn for ever,
for his clean mind saw her without clothing, her hair loose in the
wind, her white shape fleeing from him, yet beckoning across a gleaming
shoulder that he must overtake and capture her....

"I'm on my way to St. Dunstan's," he heard the musical voice. "A friend
of father's.... Come with me, will you?" And with her muff she touched
his arm, trying to make him turn her way. But just as he felt the touch
he saw the bright figure again. Swifter than himself and far more
powerful, it leaped dancing past and carried her away before his very
eyes. She waved her hand, her eyes faded like stars into the distance
of some unearthly spring--and she was gone. A pang of peculiar anguish
seized him, as the mental picture flashed with the speed of light and
vanished. For the figure seemed of elemental power, taking its own with
perfect ease....

He shook his head

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