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Title: The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories

Author: H. G. Wells

Release date: April 1, 2004 [eBook #11870]
Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COUNTRY
OF THE BLIND, AND OTHER STORIES ***

THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
AND OTHER STORIES

By H. G. Wells

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I. — THE JILTING OF JANE.
II. — THE CONE.
III. — THE STOLEN BACILLUS.
IV. — THE FLOWERING OF THE STRANGE ORCHID.
V. — IN THE AVU OBSERVATORY.
VI. — AEPYORNIS ISLAND.
VII. — THE REMARKABLE CASE OF DAVIDSON'S EYES.
VIII. — THE LORD OF THE DYNAMOS.
IX. — THE MOTH.
X. — THE TREASURE IN THE FOREST.
XI. — THE STORY OF THE LATE MR. ELVESHAM.
XII. — UNDER THE KNIFE.
XIII. — THE SEA RAIDERS.
XIV. — THE OBLITERATED MAN.
XV. — THE PLATTNER STORY.
XVI. — THE RED ROOM.
XVII. — THE PURPLE PILEUS

XVIII. — A SLIP UNDER THE MICROSCOPE.
XIX. — THE CRYSTAL EGG.
XX. — THE STAR.
XXI. — THE MAN WHO COULD WORK MIRACLES.
XXII. — A VISION OF JUDGMENT.
XXIII. — JIMMY GOGGLES THE GOD.
XXIV. — MISS WINCHELSEA'S HEART.
XXV. — A DREAM OF ARMAGEDDON.
XXVI. — THE VALLEY OF SPIDERS.
XXVII. — THE NEW ACCELERATOR.
XXVIII. — THE TRUTH ABOUT PYECRAFT.
XXIX. — THE MAGIC SHOP.
XXX. — THE EMPIRE OF THE ANTS.
XXXI. — THE DOOR IN THE WALL.
XXXII. — THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND.
XXXIII. — THE BEAUTIFUL SUIT.

INTRODUCTION
The enterprise of Messrs. T. Nelson & Sons and the friendly
accommodation of Messrs. Macmillan render possible this collection in one
cover of all the short stories by me that I care for any one to read again.
Except for the two series of linked incidents that make up the bulk of the
book called Tales of Space and Time, no short story of mine of the slightest
merit is excluded from this volume. Many of very questionable merit find a
place; it is an inclusive and not an exclusive gathering. And the task of
selection and revision brings home to me with something of the effect of
discovery that I was once an industrious writer of short stories, and that I
am no longer anything of the kind. I have not written one now for quite a
long time, and in the past five or six years I have made scarcely one a year.
The bulk of the fifty or sixty tales from which this present three-and-thirty
have been chosen dates from the last century. This edition is more definitive
than I supposed when first I arranged for it. In the presence of so conclusive
an ebb and cessation an almost obituary manner seems justifiable.
I find it a little difficult to disentangle the causes that have restricted the
flow of these inventions. It has happened, I remark, to others as well as to
myself, and in spite of the kindliest encouragement to continue from editors
and readers. There was a time when life bubbled with short stories; they
were always coming to the surface of my mind, and it is no deliberate
change of will that has thus restricted my production. It is rather, I think, a
diversion of attention to more sustained and more exacting forms. It was my
friend Mr. C.L. Hind who set that spring going. He urged me to write short
stories for the Pall Mall Budget, and persuaded me by his simple and
buoyant conviction that I could do what he desired. There existed at the
time only the little sketch, "The Jilting of Jane," included in this volume—at
least, that is the only tolerable fragment of fiction I find surviving from my
pre-Lewis-Hind period. But I set myself, so encouraged, to the experiment
of inventing moving and interesting things that could be given vividly in the
little space of eight or ten such pages as this, and for a time I found it a very
entertaining pursuit indeed. Mr. Hind's indicating finger had shown me an
amusing possibility of the mind. I found that, taking almost anything as a

starting-point and letting my thoughts play about it, there would presently
come out of the darkness, in a manner quite inexplicable, some absurd or
vivid little incident more or less relevant to that initial nucleus. Little men
in canoes upon sunlit oceans would come floating out of nothingness,
incubating the eggs of prehistoric monsters unawares; violent conflicts
would break out amidst the flower-beds of suburban gardens; I would
discover I was peering into remote and mysterious worlds ruled by an order
logical indeed but other than our common sanity.
The 'nineties was a good and stimulating period for a short-story writer.
Mr. Kipling had made his astonishing advent with a series of little blue-grey
books, whose covers opened like window-shutters to reveal the dusty sun-
glare and blazing colours of the East; Mr. Barrie had demonstrated what
could be done in a little space through the panes of his Window in Thrums.
The National Observer was at the climax of its career of heroic insistence
upon lyrical brevity and a vivid finish, and Mr. Frank Harris was not only
printing good short stories by other people, but writing still better ones
himself in the dignified pages of the Fortnightly Review. Longman's
Magazine, too, represented a clienthle of appreciative short-story readers
that is now scattered. Then came the generous opportunities of the Yellow
Book, and the National Observer died only to give birth to the New Review.
No short story of the slightest distinction went for long unrecognised. The
sixpenny popular magazines had still to deaden down the conception of
what a short story might be to the imaginative limitation of the common
reader—and a maximum length of six thousand words. Short stories broke
out everywhere. Kipling was writing short stories; Barrie, Stevenson,
Frank-Harris; Max Beerbohm wrote at least one perfect one, "The Happy
Hypocrite"; Henry James pursued his wonderful and inimitable bent; and
among other names that occur to me, like a mixed handful of jewels drawn
from a bag, are George Street, Morley Roberts, George Gissing, Ella
d'Arcy, Murray Gilchrist, E. Nesbit, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Edwin
Pugh, Jerome K. Jerome, Kenneth Graham, Arthur Morrison, Marriott
Watson, George Moore, Grant Allen, George Egerton, Henry Harland, Pett
Ridge, W. W. Jacobs (who alone seems inexhaustible). I dare say I could
recall as many more names with a little effort. I may be succumbing to the
infirmities of middle age, but I do not think the present decade can produce
any parallel to this list, or what is more remarkable, that the later

achievements in this field of any of the survivors from that time, with the
sole exception of Joseph Conrad, can compare with the work they did
before 1900. It seems to me this outburst of short stories came not only as a
phase in literary development, but also as a phase in the development of the
individual writers concerned.
It is now quite unusual to see any adequate criticism of short stories in
English. I do not know how far the decline in short-story writing may not be
due to that. Every sort of artist demands human responses, and few men can
contrive to write merely for a publisher's cheque and silence, however
reassuring that cheque may be. A mad millionaire who commissioned
masterpieces to burn would find it impossible to buy them. Scarcely any
artist will hesitate in the choice between money and attention; and it was
primarily for that last and better sort of pay that the short stories of the
'nineties were written. People talked about them tremendously, compared
them, and ranked them. That was the thing that mattered.
It was not, of course, all good talk, and we suffered then, as now, from
the ` priori critic. Just as nowadays he goes about declaring that the work of
such-and-such a dramatist is all very amusing and delightful, but "it isn't a
Play," so we' had a great deal of talk about the short story, and found
ourselves measured by all kinds of arbitrary standards. There was a
tendency to treat the short story as though it was as definable a form as the
sonnet, instead of being just exactly what any one of courage and
imagination can get told in twenty minutes' reading or so. It was either Mr.
Edward Garnett or Mr. George Moore in a violently anti-Kipling mood who
invented the distinction between the short story and the anecdote. The short
story was Maupassant; the anecdote was damnable. It was a quite infernal
comment in its way, because it permitted no defence. Fools caught it up and
used it freely. Nothing is so destructive in a field of artistic effort as a stock
term of abuse. Anyone could say of any short story, "A mere anecdote," just
as anyone can say "Incoherent!" of any novel or of any sonata that isn't
studiously monotonous. The recession of enthusiasm for this compact,
amusing form is closely associated in my mind with that discouraging
imputation. One felt hopelessly open to a paralysing and unanswerable
charge, and one's ease and happiness in the garden of one's fancies was
more and more marred by the dread of it. It crept into one's mind, a distress
as vague and inexpugnable as a sea fog on a spring morning, and presently

one shivered and wanted to go indoors...It is the absurd fate of the
imaginative writer that he should be thus sensitive to atmospheric
conditions.
But after one has died as a maker one may still live as a critic, and I will
confess I am all for laxness and variety in this as in every field of art.
Insistence upon rigid forms and austere unities seems to me the instinctive
reaction of the sterile against the fecund. It is the tired man with a headache
who values a work of art for what it does not contain. I suppose it is the lot
of every critic nowadays to suffer from indigestion and a fatigued
appreciation, and to develop a self-protective tendency towards rules that
will reject, as it were, automatically the more abundant and irregular forms.
But this world is not for the weary, and in the long-run it is the new and
variant that matter. I refuse altogether to recognise any hard and fast type
for the Short Story, any more than I admit any limitation upon the liberties
of the Small Picture. The short story is a fiction that may be read in
something under an hour, and so that it is moving and delightful, it does not
matter whether it is as "trivial" as a Japanese print of insects seen closely
between grass stems, or as spacious as the prospect of the plain of Italy
from Monte Mottarone. It does not matter whether it is human or inhuman,
or whether it leaves you thinking deeply or radiantly but superficially
pleased. Some things are more easily done as short stories than others and
more abundantly done, but one of the many pleasures of short-story writing
is to achieve the impossible.
At any rate, that is the present writer's conception of the art of the short
story, as the jolly art of making something very bright and moving; it may
be horrible or pathetic or funny or beautiful or profoundly illuminating,
having only this essential, that it should take from fifteen to fifty minutes to
read aloud. All the rest is just whatever invention and imagination and the
mood can give—a vision of buttered slides on a busy day or of
unprecedented worlds. In that spirit of miscellaneous expectation these
stories should be received. Each is intended to be a thing by itself; and if it
is not too ungrateful to kindly and enterprising publishers, I would confess I
would much prefer to see each printed expensively alone, and left in a little
brown-paper cover to lie about a room against the needs of a quite casual
curiosity. And I would rather this volume were found in the bedrooms of
convalescents and in dentists' parlours and railway trains than in

gentlemen's studies. I would rather have it dipped in and dipped in again
than read severely through. Essentially it is a miscellany of inventions,
many of which were very pleasant to write; and its end is more than
attained if some of them are refreshing and agreeable to read. I have now
re-read them all, and I am glad to think I wrote them. I like them, but I
cannot tell how much the associations of old happinesses gives them a
flavour for me. I make no claims for them and no apology; they will be read
as long as people read them. Things written either live or die; unless it be
for a place of judgment upon Academic impostors, there is no apologetic
intermediate state.
I may add that I have tried to set a date to most of these stories, but that
they are not arranged in strictly chronological order.

H. G. WELLS.

I. — THE JILTING OF JANE.
As I sit writing in my study, I can hear our Jane bumping her way
downstairs with a brush and dust-pan. She used in the old days to sing
hymn tunes, or the British national song for the time being, to these
instruments, but latterly she has been silent and even careful over her work.
Time was when I prayed with fervour for such silence, and my wife with
sighs for such care, but now they have come we are not so glad as we might
have anticipated we should be. Indeed, I would rejoice secretly, though it
may be unmanly weakness to admit it, even to hear Jane sing "Daisy," or,
by the fracture of any plate but one of Euphemia's best green ones, to learn
that the period of brooding has come to an end.
Yet how we longed to hear the last of Jane's young man before we heard
the last of him! Jane was always very free with her conversation to my wife,
and discoursed admirably in the kitchen on a variety of topics—so well,
indeed, that I sometimes left my study door open—our house is a small one
—to partake of it. But after William came, it was always William, nothing
but William; William this and William that; and when we thought William
was worked out and exhausted altogether, then William all over again. The
engagement lasted altogether three years; yet how she got introduced to
William, and so became thus saturated with him, was always a secret. For
my part, I believe it was at the street corner where the Rev. Barnabas Baux
used to hold an open-air service after evensong on Sundays. Young Cupids
were wont to flit like moths round the paraffin flare of that centre of High
Church hymn-singing. I fancy she stood singing hymns there, out of
memory and her imagination, instead of coming home to get supper, and
William came up beside her and said, "Hello!" "Hello yourself!" she said;
and etiquette being satisfied, they proceeded to talk together.
As Euphemia has a reprehensible way of letting her servants talk to her,
she soon heard of him. "He is such a respectable young man, ma'am," said
Jane, "you don't know." Ignoring the slur cast on her acquaintance, my wife
inquired further about this William.

"He is second porter at Maynard's, the draper's," said Jane, "and gets
eighteen shillings—nearly a pound—a week, m'm; and when the head
porter leaves he will be head porter. His relatives are quite superior people,
m'm. Not labouring people at all. His father was a greengrosher, m'm, and
had a churnor, and he was bankrup' twice. And one of his sisters is in a
Home for the Dying. It will be a very good match for me, m'm," said Jane,
"me being an orphan girl."
"Then you are engaged to him?" asked my wife.
"Not engaged, ma'am; but he is saving money to buy a ring—
hammyfist."
"Well, Jane, when you are properly engaged to him you may ask him
round here on Sunday afternoons, and have tea with him in the kitchen;" for
my Euphemia has a motherly conception of her duty towards her maid-
servants. And presently the amethystine ring was being worn about the
house, even with ostentation, and Jane developed a new way of bringing in
the joint so that this gage was evident. The elder Miss Maitland was
aggrieved by it, and told my wife that servants ought not to wear rings. But
my wife looked it up in Enquire Within and Mrs. Motherly's Book of
Household Management, and found no prohibition. So Jane remained with
this happiness added to her love.
The treasure of Jane's heart appeared to me to be what respectable people
call a very deserving young man. "William, ma'am," said Jane one day
suddenly, with ill-concealed complacency, as she counted out the beer
bottles, "William, ma'am, is a teetotaller. Yes, m'm; and he don't smoke.
Smoking, ma'am," said Jane, as one who reads the heart, "do make such a
dust about. Beside the waste of money. And the smell. However, I suppose
they got to do it—some of them..."
William was at first a rather shabby young man of the ready-made black
coat school of costume. He had watery gray eyes, and a complexion
appropriate to the brother of one in a Home for the Dying. Euphemia did
not fancy him very much, even at the beginning. His eminent respectability
was vouched for by an alpaca umbrella, from which he never allowed
himself to be parted.

"He goes to chapel," said Jane. "His papa, ma'am——"
"His what, Jane?"
"His papa, ma'am, was Church: but Mr. Maynard is a Plymouth Brother,
and William thinks it Policy, ma'am, to go there too. Mr. Maynard comes
and talks to him quite friendly when they ain't busy, about using up all the
ends of string, and about his soul. He takes a lot of notice, do Mr. Maynard,
of William, and the way he saves his soul, ma'am."
Presently we heard that the head porter at Maynard's had left, and that
William was head porter at twenty-three shillings a week. "He is really kind
of over the man who drives the van," said Jane, "and him married, with
three children." And she promised in the pride of her heart to make interest
for us with William to favour us so that we might get our parcels of drapery
from Maynard's with exceptional promptitude.
After this promotion a rapidly-increasing prosperity came upon Jane's
young man. One day we learned that Mr. Maynard had given William a
book. "'Smiles' 'Elp Yourself,' it's called," said Jane; "but it ain't comic. It
tells you how to get on in the world, and some what William read to me was
lovely, ma'am."
Euphemia told me of this, laughing, and then she became suddenly grave.
"Do you know, dear," she said, "Jane said one thing I did not like. She had
been quiet for a minute, and then she suddenly remarked, 'William is a lot
above me, ma'am, ain't he?'"
"I don't see anything in that," I said, though later my eyes were to be
opened.
One Sunday afternoon about that time I was sitting at my writing-desk—
possibly I was reading a good book—when a something went by the
window. I heard a startled exclamation behind me, and saw Euphemia with
her hands clasped together and her eyes dilated. "George," she said in an
awe-stricken whisper, "did you see?"
Then we both spoke to one another at the same moment, slowly and
solemnly: "A silk hat! Yellow gloves! A new umbrella!"

"It may be my fancy, dear," said Euphemia; "but his tie was very like
yours. I believe Jane keeps him in ties. She told me a little while ago, in a
way that implied volumes about the rest of your costume, 'The master do
wear pretty ties, ma'am.' And he echoes all your novelties."
The young couple passed our window again on their way to their
customary walk. They were arm in arm. Jane looked exquisitely proud,
happy, and uncomfortable, with new white cotton gloves, and William, in
the silk hat, singularly genteel!
That was the culmination of Jane's happiness. When she returned, "Mr.
Maynard has been talking to William, ma'am," she said, "and he is to serve
customers, just like the young shop gentlemen, during the next sale. And if
he gets on, he is to be made an assistant, ma'am, at the first opportunity. He
has got to be as gentlemanly as he can, ma'am; and if he ain't, ma'am, he
says it won't be for want of trying. Mr. Maynard has took a great fancy to
him."
"He is getting on, Jane," said my wife.
"Yes, ma'am," said Jane thoughtfully; "he is getting on."
And she sighed.
That next Sunday as I drank my tea I interrogated my wife. "How is this
Sunday different from all other Sundays, little woman? What has
happened? Have you altered the curtains, or re-arranged the furniture, or
where is the indefinable difference of it? Are you wearing your hair in a
new way without warning me? I perceive a change clearly, and I cannot for
the life of me say what it is."
Then my wife answered in her most tragic voice, "George," she said,
"that William has not come near the place to-day! And Jane is crying her
heart out upstairs."
There followed a period of silence. Jane, as I have said, stopped singing
about the house, and began to care for our brittle possessions, which struck
my wife as being a very sad sign indeed. The next Sunday, and the next,
Jane asked to go out, "to walk with William," and my wife, who never
attempts to extort confidences, gave her permission, and asked no

questions. On each occasion Jane came back looking flushed and very
determined. At last one day she became communicative.
"William is being led away," she remarked abruptly, with a catching of
the breath, apropos of tablecloths. "Yes, m'm. She is a milliner, and she can
play on the piano."
"I thought," said my wife, "that you went out with him on Sunday."
"Not out with him, m'm—after him. I walked along by the side of them,
and told her he was engaged to me."
"Dear me, Jane, did you? What did they do?"
"Took no more notice of me than if I was dirt. So I told her she should
suffer for it."
"It could not have been a very agreeable walk, Jane."
"Not for no parties, ma'am."
"I wish," said Jane, "I could play the piano, ma'am. But anyhow, I don't
mean to let her get him away from me. She's older than him, and her hair
ain't gold to the roots, ma'am."
It was on the August Bank Holiday that the crisis came. We do not clearly
know the details of the fray, but only such fragments as poor Jane let fall.
She came home dusty, excited, and with her heart hot within her.
The milliner's mother, the milliner, and William had made a party to the
Art Museum at South Kensington, I think. Anyhow, Jane had calmly but
firmly accosted them somewhere in the streets, and asserted her right to
what, in spite of the consensus of literature, she held to be her inalienable
property. She did, I think, go so far as to lay hands on him. They dealt with
her in a crushingly superior way. They "called a cab." There was a "scene,"
William being pulled away into the four-wheeler by his future wife and
mother-in-law from the reluctant hands of our discarded Jane. There were
threats of giving her "in charge."
"My poor Jane!" said my wife, mincing veal as though she was mincing
William. "It's a shame of them. I would think no more of him. He is not

worthy of you."
"No, m'm," said Jane. "He is weak.
"But it's that woman has done it," said Jane. She was never known to
bring herself to pronounce "that woman's" name or to admit her girlishness.
"I can't think what minds some women must have—to try and get a girl's
young man away from her. But there, it only hurts to talk about it," said
Jane.
Thereafter our house rested from William. But there was something in
the manner of Jane's scrubbing the front doorstep or sweeping out the
rooms, a certain viciousness, that persuaded me that the story had not yet
ended.
"Please, m'm, may I go and see a wedding tomorrow?" said Jane one day.
My wife knew by instinct whose wedding. "Do you think it is wise,
Jane?" she said.
"I would like to see the last of him," said Jane.
"My dear," said my wife, fluttering into my room about twenty minutes
after Jane had started, "Jane has been to the boot-hole and taken all the left-
off boots and shoes, and gone off to the wedding with them in a bag. Surely
she cannot mean—"
"Jane," I said, "is developing character. Let us hope for the best."
Jane came back with a pale, hard face. All the boots seemed to be still in
her bag, at which my wife heaved a premature sigh of relief. We heard her
go upstairs and replace the boots with considerable emphasis.
"Quite a crowd at the wedding, ma'am," she said presently, in a purely
conversational style, sitting in our little kitchen, and scrubbing the potatoes;
"and such a lovely day for them." She proceeded to numerous other details,
clearly avoiding some cardinal incident.
"It was all extremely respectable and nice, ma'am; but her father didn't
wear a black coat, and looked quite out of place, ma'am. Mr. Piddingquirk
—"

"Who?"
"Mr. Piddingquirk—William that was, ma'am—had white gloves, and a
coat like a clergyman, and a lovely chrysanthemum. He looked so nice,
ma'am. And there was red carpet down, just like for gentlefolks. And they
say he gave the clerk four shillings, ma'am. It was a real kerridge they had
—not a fly. When they came out of church there was rice-throwing, and her
two little sisters dropping dead flowers. And someone threw a slipper, and
then I threw a boot—"
"Threw a boot, Jane!"
"Yes, ma'am. Aimed at her. But it hit him. Yes, ma'am, hard. Gev him a
black eye, I should think. I only threw that one. I hadn't the heart to try
again. All the little boys cheered when it hit him."
After an interval—"I am sorry the boot hit him."
Another pause. The potatoes were being scrubbed violently. "He always
was a bit above me, you know, ma'am. And he was led away."
The potatoes were more than finished. Jane rose sharply with a sigh, and
rapped the basin down on the table.
"I don't care," she said. "I don't care a rap. He will find out his mistake
yet. It serves me right. I was stuck up about him. I ought not to have looked
so high. And I am glad things are as things are."
My wife was in the kitchen, seeing to the higher cookery. After the
confession of the boot-throwing, she must have watched poor Jane fuming
with a certain dismay in those brown eyes of hers. But I imagine they
softened again very quickly, and then Jane's must have met them.
"Oh, ma'am," said Jane, with an astonishing change of note, "think of all
that might have been! Oh, ma'am, I could have been so happy! I ought to
have known, but I didn't know...You're very kind to let me talk to you,
ma'am...for it's hard on me, ma'am...it's har-r-r-r-d—"
And I gather that Euphemia so far forgot herself as to let Jane sob out
some of the fullness of her heart on a sympathetic shoulder. My Euphemia,
thank Heaven, has never properly grasped the importance of "keeping up

her position." And since that fit of weeping, much of the accent of bitterness
has gone out of Jane's scrubbing and brush work.
Indeed, something passed the other day with the butcher-boy—but that
scarcely belongs to this story. However, Jane is young still, and time and
change are at work with her. We all have our sorrows, but I do not believe
very much in the existence of sorrows that never heal.

II. — THE CONE.
The night was hot and overcast, the sky red-rimmed with the lingering
sunset of midsummer. They sat at the open window, trying to fancy the air
was fresher there. The trees and shrubs of the garden stood stiff and dark;
beyond in the roadway a gas-lamp burnt, bright orange against the hazy
blue of the evening. Farther were the three lights of the railway signal
against the lowering sky. The man and woman spoke to one another in low
tones.
"He does not suspect?" said the man, a little nervously.
"Not he," she said peevishly, as though that too irritated her. "He thinks
of nothing but the works and the prices of fuel. He has no imagination, no
poetry."
"None of these men of iron have," he said sententiously. "They have no
hearts."
"He has not," she said. She turned her discontented face towards the
window. The distant sound of a roaring and rushing drew nearer and grew
in volume; the house quivered; one heard the metallic rattle of the tender.
As the train passed, there was a glare of light above the cutting and a
driving tumult of smoke; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight black
oblongs—eight trucks—passed across the dim grey of the embankment, and
were suddenly extinguished one by one in the throat of the tunnel, which,
with the last, seemed to swallow down train, smoke, and sound in one
abrupt gulp.
"This country was all fresh and beautiful once," he said; "and now—it is
Gehenna. Down that way—nothing but pot-banks and chimneys belching
fire and dust into the face of heaven...But what does it matter? An end
comes, an end to all this cruelty...To-morrow." He spoke the last word in a
whisper.

"To-morrow," she said, speaking in a whisper too, and still staring out of
the window.
"Dear!" he said, putting his hand on hers.
She turned with a start, and their eyes searched one another's. Hers
softened to his gaze. "My dear one!" she said, and then: "It seems so strange
—that you should have come into my life like this—to open—" She paused.
"To open?" he said.
"All this wonderful world"—she hesitated, and spoke still more softly—
"this world of love to me."
Then suddenly the door clicked and closed. They turned their heads, and
he started violently back. In the shadow of the room stood a great shadowy
figure-silent. They saw the face dimly in the half-light, with unexpressive
dark patches under the pent-house brows. Every muscle in Raut's body
suddenly became tense. When could the door have opened? What had he
heard? Had he heard all? What had he seen? A tumult of questions.
The new-comer's voice came at last, after a pause that seemed
interminable. "Well?" he said.
"I was afraid I had missed you, Horrocks," said the man at the window,
gripping the window-ledge with his hand. His voice was unsteady.
The clumsy figure of Horrocks came forward out of the shadow. He
made no answer to Raut's remark. For a moment he stood above them.
The woman's heart was cold within her. "I told Mr. Raut it was just
possible you might come back," she said in a voice that never quivered.
Horrocks, still silent, sat down abruptly in the chair by her little work-
table. His big hands were clenched; one saw now the fire of his eyes under
the shadow of his brows. He was trying to get his breath. His eyes went
from the woman he had trusted to the friend he had trusted, and then back
to the woman.
By this time and for the moment all three half understood one another.
Yet none dared say a word to ease the pent-up things that choked them.

It was the husband's voice that broke the silence at last.
"You wanted to see me?" he said to Raut.
Raut started as he spoke. "I came to see you," he said, resolved to lie to
the last.
"Yes," said Horrocks.
"You promised," said Raut, "to show me some fine effects of moonlight
and smoke."
"I promised to show you some fine effects of moonlight and smoke,"
repeated Horrocks in a colourless voice.
"And I thought I might catch you to-night before you went down to the
works," proceeded Raut, "and come with you."
There was another pause. Did the man mean to take the thing coolly? Did
he, after all, know? How long had he been in the room? Yet even at the
moment when they heard the door, their attitudes ... Horrocks glanced at the
profile of the woman, shadowy pallid in the half-light. Then he glanced at
Raut, and seemed to recover himself suddenly. "Of course," he said, "I
promised to show you the works under their proper dramatic conditions. It's
odd how I could have forgotten."
"If I am troubling you—" began Raut.
Horrocks started again. A new light had suddenly come into the sultry
gloom of his eyes. "Not in the least." he said.
"Have you been telling Mr. Raut of all these contrasts of flame and
shadow you think so splendid?" said the woman, turning now to her
husband for the first time, her confidence creeping back again, her voice
just one half-note too high—"that dreadful theory of yours that machinery
is beautiful, and everything else in the world ugly. I thought he would not
spare you, Mr. Raut. It's his great theory, his one discovery in art."
"I am slow to make discoveries," said Horrocks grimly, damping her
suddenly. "But what I discover ..." He stopped.

"Well?" she said.
"Nothing;" and suddenly he rose to his feet.
"I promised to show you the works," he said to Raut, and put his big,
clumsy hand on his friend's shoulder. "And you are ready to go?"
"Quite," said Raut, and stood up also.
There was another pause. Each of them peered through the indistinctness
of the dusk at the other two.
Horrocks' hand still rested on Raut's shoulder. Raut half fancied still that
the incident was trivial after all. But Mrs. Horrocks knew her husband
better, knew that grim quiet in his voice, and the confusion in her mind took
a vague shape of physical evil. "Very well," said Horrocks, and, dropping
his hand, turned towards the door.
"My hat?" Raut looked round in the half-light.
"That's my work-basket," said Mrs. Horrocks with a gust of hysterical
laughter. Their hands came together on the back of the chair. "Here it is!" he
said. She had an impulse to warn him in an undertone, but she could not
frame a word. "Don't go!" and "Beware of him!" struggled in her mind, and
the swift moment passed.
"Got it?" said Horrocks, standing with the door half open.
Raut stepped towards him. "Better say goodbye to Mrs. Horrocks," said
the ironmaster, even more grimly quiet in his tone than before.
Raut started and turned. "Good-evening, Mrs. Horrocks," he said, and
their hands touched.
Horrocks held the door open with a ceremonial politeness unusual in him
towards men. Raut went out, and then, after a wordless look at her, her
husband followed. She stood motionless while Raut's light footfall and her
husband's heavy tread, like bass and treble, passed down the passage
together. The front door slammed heavily. She went to the window, moving
slowly, and stood watching, leaning forward. The two men appeared for a
moment at the gateway in the road, passed under the street lamp, and were

hidden by the black masses of the shrubbery. The lamplight fell for a
moment on their faces, showing only unmeaning pale patches, telling
nothing of what she still feared, and doubted, and craved vainly to know.
Then she sank down into a crouching attitude in the big arm-chair, her eyes-
wide open and staring out at the red lights from the furnaces that flickered
in the sky. An hour after she was still there, her attitude scarcely changed.
The oppressive stillness of the evening weighed heavily upon Raut. They
went side by side down the road in silence, and in silence turned into the
cinder-made byway that presently opened out the prospect of the valley.
A blue haze, half dust, half mist, touched the long valley with mystery.
Beyond were Hanley and Etruria, grey and dark masses, outlined thinly by
the rare golden dots of the street lamps, and here and there a gas-lit window,
or the yellow glare of some late-working factory or crowded public-house.
Out of the masses, clear and slender against the evening sky, rose a
multitude of tall chimneys, many of them reeking, a few smokeless during a
season of "play." Here and there a pallid patch and ghostly stunted beehive
shapes showed the position of a pot-bank or a wheel, black and sharp
against the hot lower sky, marked some colliery where they raise the
iridescent coal of the place. Nearer at hand was the broad stretch of railway,
and half-invisible trains shunted—a steady puffing and rumbling, with
every run a ringing concussion and a rhymthic series of impacts, and a
passage of intermittent puffs of white steam across the further view. And to
the left, between the railway and the dark mass of the low hill beyond,
dominating the whole view, colossal, inky-black, and crowned with smoke
and fitful flames, stood the great cylinders of the Jeddah Company Blast
Furnaces, the central edifices of the big ironworks of which Horrocks was
the manager. They stood heavy and threatening, full of an incessant turmoil
of flames and seething molten iron, and about the feet of them rattled the
rolling-mills, and the steam-hammer beat heavily and splashed the white
iron sparks hither and thither. Even as they looked, a truckful of fuel was
shot into one of the giants, and the red flames gleamed out, and a confusion
of smoke and black dust came boiling upwards towards the sky.
"Certainly you get some colour with your furnaces," said Raut, breaking
a silence that had become apprehensive.

Horrocks grunted. He stood with his hands in his pockets, frowning down
at the dim steaming railway and the busy ironworks beyond, frowning as if
he were thinking out some knotty problem.
Raut glanced at him and away again. "At present your moonlight effect is
hardly ripe," he continued, looking upward; "the moon is still smothered by
the vestiges of daylight."
Horrocks stared at him with the expression of a man who has suddenly
awakened. "Vestiges of daylight? ... Of course, of course." He too looked up
at the moon, pale still in the midsummer sky. "Come along," he said
suddenly, and gripping Raut's arm in his hand, made a move towards the
path that dropped from them to the railway.
Raut hung back. Their eyes met and saw a thousand things in a moment
that their lips came near to say. Horrocks's hand tightened and then relaxed.
He let go, and before Raut was aware of it, they were arm in arm, and
walking, one unwillingly enough, down the path.
"You see the fine effect of the railway signals towards Burslem," said
Horrocks, suddenly breaking into loquacity, striding fast and tightening the
grip of his elbow the while—"little green lights and red and white lights, all
against the haze. You have an eye for effect, Raut. It's fine. And look at
those furnaces of mine, how they rise upon us as we come down the hill.
That to the right is my pet—seventy feet of him. I packed him myself, and
he's boiled away cheerfully with iron in his guts for five long years. I've a
particular fancy for him. That line of red there—a lovely bit of warm orange
you'd call it, Raut—that's the puddlers' furnaces, and there, in the hot light,
three black figures—did you see the white splash of the steam-hammer
then?—that's the rolling mills. Come along! Clang, clatter, how it goes
rattling across the floor! Sheet tin, Raut,—amazing stuff. Glass mirrors are
not in it when that stuff comes from the mill. And, squelch! there goes the
hammer again. Come along!"
He had to stop talking to catch at his breath. His arm twisted into Raut's
with benumbing tightness. He had come striding down the black path
towards the railway as though he was possessed. Raut had not spoken a
word, had simply hung back against Horrocks's pull with all his strength.

"I say," he said now, laughing nervously, but with an undertone of snarl
in his voice, "why on earth are you nipping my arm off, Horrocks, and
dragging me along like this?"
At length Horrocks released him. His manner changed again. "Nipping
your arm off?" he said. "Sorry. But it's you taught me the trick of walking in
that friendly way."
"You haven't learnt the refinements of it yet then," said Raut, laughing
artificially again. "By Jove! I'm black and blue." Horrocks offered no
apology. They stood now near the bottom of the hill, close to the fence that
bordered the railway. The ironworks had grown larger and spread out with
their approach. They looked up to the blast furnaces now instead of down;
the further view of Etruria and Hanley had dropped out of sight with their
descent. Before them, by the stile, rose a notice-board, bearing, still dimly
visible, the words, "BEWARE OF THE TRAINS," half hidden by splashes
of coaly mud.
"Fine effects," said Horrocks, waving his arm. "Here comes a train. The
puffs of smoke, the orange glare, the round eye of light in front of it, the
melodious rattle. Fine effects! But these furnaces of mine used to be finer,
before we shoved cones in their throats, and saved the gas."
"How?" said Raut. "Cones?"
"Cones, my man, cones. I'll show you one nearer. The flames used to
flare out of the open throats, great—what is it?—pillars of cloud by day, red
and black smoke, and pillars of fire by night. Now we run it off—in pipes,
and burn it to heat the blast, and the top is shut by a cone. You'll be
interested in that cone."
"But every now and then," said Raut, "you get a burst of fire and smoke
up there."
"The cone's not fixed, it's hung by a chain from a lever, and balanced by
an equipoise. You shall see it nearer. Else, of course, there'd be no way of
getting fuel into the thing. Every now and then the cone dips, and out comes
the flare."

"I see," said Raut. He looked over his shoulder. "The moon gets brighter,"
he said.
"Come along," said Horrocks abruptly, gripping his shoulder again, and
moving him suddenly towards the railway crossing. And then came one of
those swift incidents, vivid, but so rapid that they leave one doubtful and
reeling. Half-way across, Horrocks's hand suddenly clenched upon him like
a vice, and swung him backward and through a half-turn, so that he looked
up the line. And there a chain of lamp-lit carriage windows telescoped
swiftly as it came towards them, and the red and yellow lights of an engine
grew larger and larger, rushing down upon them. As he grasped what this
meant, he turned his face to Horrocks, and pushed with all his strength
against the arm that held him back between the rails. The struggle did not
last a moment. Just as certain as it was that Horrocks held him there, so
certain was it that he had been violently lugged out of danger.
"Out of the way," said Horrocks with a gasp, as the train came rattling by,
and they stood panting by the gate into the ironworks.
"I did not see it coming," said Raut, still, even in spite of his own
apprehensions, trying to keep up an appearance of ordinary intercourse.
Horrocks answered with a grunt. "The cone," he said, and then, as one
who recovers himself, "I thought you did not hear."
"I didn't," said Raut.
"I wouldn't have had you run over then for the world," said Horrocks.
"For a moment I lost my nerve," said Raut.
Horrocks stood for half a minute, then turned abruptly towards the
ironworks again. "See how fine these great mounds of mine, these clinker-
heaps, look in the night! That truck yonder, up above there! Up it goes, and
out-tilts the slag. See the palpitating red stuff go sliding down the slope. As
we get nearer, the heap rises up and cuts the blast furnaces. See the quiver
up above the big one. Not that way! This way, between the heaps. That goes
to the puddling furnaces, but I want to show you the canal first." He came
and took Raut by the elbow, and so they went along side by side. Raut
answered Horrocks vaguely. What, he asked himself, had really happened

on the line? Was he deluding himself with his own fancies, or had Horrocks
actually held him back in the way of the train? Had he just been within an
ace of being murdered?
Suppose this slouching, scowling monster did know anything? For a
minute or two then Raut was really afraid for his life, but the mood passed
as he reasoned with himself. After all, Horrocks might have heard nothing.
At any rate, he had pulled him out of the way in time. His odd manner
might be due to the mere vague jealousy he had shown once before. He was
talking now of the ash-heaps and the canal. "Eigh?" said Horrocks.
"What?" said Raut. "Rather! The haze in the moonlight. Fine!"
"Our canal," said Horrocks, stopping suddenly. "Our canal by moonlight
and firelight is immense. You've never seen it? Fancy that! You've spent too
many of your evenings philandering up in Newcastle there. I tell you, for
real florid quality——But you shall see. Boiling water ..."
As they came out of the labyrinth of clinker-heaps and mounds of coal
and ore, the noises of the rolling-mill sprang upon them suddenly, loud,
near, and distinct. Three shadowy workmen went by and touched their caps
to Horrocks. Their faces were vague in the darkness. Raut felt a futile
impulse to address them, and before he could frame his words they passed
into the shadows. Horrocks pointed to the canal close before them now: a
weird-looking place it seemed, in the blood-red reflections of the furnaces.
The hot water that cooled the tuyhres came into it, some fifty yards up—a
tumultuous, almost boiling affluent, and the steam rose up from the water in
silent white wisps and streaks, wrapping damply about them, an incessant
succession of ghosts coming up from the black and red eddies, a white
uprising that made the head swim. The shining black tower of the larger
blast-furnace rose overhead out of the mist, and its tumultuous riot filled
their ears. Raut kept away from the edge of the water, and watched
Horrocks.
"Here it is red," said Horrocks, "blood-red vapour as red and hot as sin;
but yonder there, where the moonlight falls on it, and it drives across the
clinker-heaps, it is as white as death."

Raut turned his head for a moment, and then came back hastily to his
watch on Horrocks. "Come along to the rolling-mills," said Horrocks. The
threatening hold was not so evident that time, and Raut felt a little
reassured. But all the same, what on earth did Horrocks mean about "white
as death" and "red as sin"? Coincidence, perhaps?
They went and stood behind the puddlers for a little while, and then
through the rolling-mills, where amidst an incessant din the deliberate
steam-hammer beat the juice out of the succulent iron, and black, half-
naked Titans rushed the plastic bars, like hot sealing-wax, between the
wheels, "Come on," said Horrocks in Raut's ear; and they went and peeped
through the little glass hole behind the tuyhres, and saw the tumbled fire
writhing in the pit of the blast-furnace. It left one eye blinded for a while.
Then, with green and blue patches dancing across the dark, they went to the
lift by which the trucks of ore and fuel and lime were raised to the top of the
big cylinder.
And out upon the narrow rail that overhung the furnace Raut's doubts
came upon him again. Was it wise to be here? If Horrocks did know—
everything! Do what he would, he could not resist a violent trembling.
Right under foot was a sheer depth of seventy feet. It was a dangerous
place. They pushed by a truck of fuel to get to the railing that crowned the
thing. The reek of the furnace, a sulphurous vapour streaked with pungent
bitterness, seemed to make the distant hillside of Hanley quiver. The moon
was riding out now from among a drift of clouds, half-way up the sky above
the undulating wooded outlines of Newcastle. The steaming canal ran away
from below them under an indistinct bridge, and vanished into the dim haze
of the flat fields towards Burslem.
"That's the cone I've been telling you of," shouted Horrocks; "and, below
that, sixty feet of fire and molten metal, with the air of the blast frothing
through it like gas in soda-water."
Raut gripped the hand-rail tightly, and stared down at the cone. The heat
was intense. The boiling of the iron and the tumult of the blast made a
thunderous accompaniment to Horrocks's voice. But the thing had to be
gone through now. Perhaps, after all...

"In the middle," bawled Horrocks, "temperature near a thousand degrees.
If you were dropped into it ... flash into flame like a pinch of gunpowder in
a candle. Put your hand out and feel the heat of his breath. Why, even up
here I've seen the rain-water boiling off the trucks. And that cone there. It's
a damned sight too hot for roasting cakes. The top side of it's three hundred
degrees."
"Three hundred degrees!" said Raut.
"Three hundred centigrade, mind!" said Horrocks. "It will boil the blood
out of you in no time."
"Eigh?" said Raut, and turned.
"Boil the blood out of you in ... No, you don't!"
"Let me go!" screamed Raut. "Let go my arm!"
With one hand he clutched at the hand-rail, then with both. For a moment
the two men stood swaying. Then suddenly, with a violent jerk, Horrocks
had twisted him from his hold. He clutched at Horrocks and missed, his foot
went back into empty air; in mid-air he twisted himself, and then cheek and
shoulder and knee struck the hot cone together.
He clutched the chain by which the cone hung, and the thing sank an
infinitesimal amount as he struck it. A circle of glowing red appeared about
him, and a tongue of flame, released from the chaos within, flickered up
towards him. An intense pain assailed him at the knees, and he could smell
the singeing of his hands. He raised himself to his feet, and tried to climb up
the chain, and then something struck his head. Black and shining with the
moonlight, the throat of the furnace rose about him.
Horrocks, he saw, stood above him by one of the trucks of fuel on the
rail. The gesticulating figure was bright and white in the moonlight, and
shouting, "Fizzle, you fool! Fizzle, you hunter of women! You hot-blooded
hound! Boil! boil! boil!"
Suddenly he caught up a handful of coal out of the truck, and flung it
deliberately, lump after lump, at Raut.
"Horrocks!" cried Raut. "Horrocks!"

He clung, crying, to the chain, pulling himself up from the burning of the
cone. Each missile Horrocks flung hit him. His clothes charred and glowed,
and as he struggled the cone dropped, and a rush of hot, suffocating gas
whooped out and burned round him in a swift breath of flame.
His human likeness departed from him. When the momentary red had
passed, Horrocks saw a charred, blackened figure, its head streaked with
blood, still clutching and fumbling with the chain, and writhing in agony—a
cindery animal, an inhuman, monstrous creature that began a sobbing,
intermittent shriek.
Abruptly at the sight the ironmaster's anger passed. A deadly sickness
came upon him. The heavy odour of burning flesh came drifting up to his
nostrils. His sanity returned to him.
"God have mercy upon me!" he cried. "O God! what have I done?"
He knew the thing below him, save that it still moved and felt, was
already a dead man—that the blood of the poor wretch must be boiling in
his veins. An intense realisation of that agony came to his mind, and
overcame every other feeling. For a moment he stood irresolute, and then,
turning to the truck, he hastily tilted its contents upon the struggling thing
that had once been a man. The mass fell with a thud, and went radiating
over the cone. With the thud the shriek ended, and a boiling confusion of
smoke, dust, and flame came rushing up towards him. As it passed, he saw
the cone clear again.
Then he staggered back, and stood trembling, clinging to the rail with
both hands. His lips moved, but no words came to them.
Down below was the sound of voices and running steps. The clangour of
rolling in the shed ceased abruptly.

III. — THE STOLEN BACILLUS.
"This again," said the Bacteriologist, slipping a glass slide under the
microscope, "is well,—a preparation of the Bacillus of cholera—the cholera
germ."
The pale-faced man peered down the microscope. He was evidently not
accustomed to that kind of thing, and held a limp white hand over his
disengaged eye. "I see very little," he said.
"Touch this screw," said the Bacteriologist; "perhaps the microscope is
out of focus for you. Eyes vary so much. Just the fraction of a turn this way
or that."
"Ah! now I see," said the visitor. "Not so very much to see after all. Little
streaks and shreds of pink. And yet those little particles, those mere
atomies, might multiply and devastate a city! Wonderful!"
He stood up, and releasing the glass slip from the microscope, held it in
his hand towards the window. "Scarcely visible," he said, scrutinising the
preparation. He hesitated. "Are these—alive? Are they dangerous now?"
"Those have been stained and killed," said the Bacteriologist. "I wish, for
my own part, we could kill and stain every one of them in the universe."
"I suppose," the pale man said, with a slight smile, 'that you scarcely care
to have such things about you in the living—in the active state?"
"On the contrary, we are obliged to," said the Bacteriologist. "Here, for
instance—" He walked across the room and took up one of several sealed
tubes. "Here is the living thing. This is a cultivation of the actual living
disease bacteria." He hesitated. "Bottled cholera, so to speak."
A slight gleam of satisfaction appeared momentarily in the face of the
pale man. "It's a deadly thing to have in your possession," he said,
devouring the little tube with his eyes. The Bacteriologist watched the
morbid pleasure in his visitor's expression. This man, who had visited him

that afternoon with a note of introduction from an old friend, interested him
from the very contrast of their dispositions. The lank black hair and deep
grey eyes, the haggard expression and nervous manner, the fitful yet keen
interest of his visitor were a novel change from the phlegmatic deliberations
of the ordinary scientific worker with whom the Bacteriologist chiefly
associated. It was perhaps natural, with a hearer evidently so
impressionable to the lethal nature of; his topic, to take the most effective
aspect of the matter.
He held the tube in his hand thoughtfully. "Yes, here is the pestilence
imprisoned. Only break such a little tube as this into a supply of drinking-
water, say to these minute particles of life that one must needs stain and
examine with the highest powers of the microscope even to see, and that
one can neither smell nor taste—say to them, 'Go forth, increase and
multiply, and replenish the cisterns,' and death—mysterious, untraceable
death, death swift and terrible, death full of pain and indignity—would be
released upon this city, and go hither and thither seeking his victims. Here
he would take the husband from the wife, here the child from its mother,
here the statesman from his duty, and here the toiler from his trouble. He
would follow the water-mains, creeping along streets, picking out and
punishing a house here and a house there where they did not boil their
drinking-water, creeping into the wells of the mineral water makers, getting
washed into salad, and lying dormant in ices. He would wait ready to be
drunk in the horse-troughs, and by unwary children in the public fountains.
He would soak into the soil, to reappear in springs and wells at a thousand
unexpected places. Once start him at the water supply, and before we could
ring him in, and catch him again, he would have decimated the metropolis."
He stopped abruptly. He had been told rhetoric was his weakness.
"But he is quite safe here, you know—quite safe."
The pale-faced man nodded. His eyes shone. He cleared his throat.
"These Anarchist—rascals," said he, "are fools, blind fools—to use bombs
when this kind of thing is attainable. I think——"
A gentle rap, a mere light touch of the finger-nails, was heard at the door.
The Bacteriologist opened it. "Just a minute, dear," whispered his wife.

When he re-entered the laboratory his visitor was looking at his watch. "I
had no idea I had wasted an hour of your time," he said. "Twelve minutes to
four. I ought to have left here by half-past three. But your things were really
too interesting. No, positively I cannot stop a moment longer. I have an
engagement at four."
He passed out of the room reiterating his thanks, and the Bacteriologist
accompanied him to the door, and then returned thoughtfully along the
passage to his laboratory. He was musing on the ethnology of his visitor.
Certainly the man was not a Teutonic type nor a common Latin one. "A
morbid product, anyhow, I am afraid," said the Bacteriologist to himself.
"How he gloated over those cultivations of disease germs!" A disturbing
thought struck him. He turned to the bench by the vapour bath, and then
very quickly to his writing-table. Then he felt hastily in his pockets and then
rushed to the door. "I may have put it down on the hall table," he said.
"Minnie!" he shouted hoarsely in the hall.
"Yes, dear," came a remote voice.
"Had I anything in my hand when I spoke to you, dear, just now?"
Pause.
"Nothing, dear, because I remember——"
"Blue ruin!" cried the Bacteriologist, and incontinently ran to the front
door and down the steps of his house to the street.
Minnie, hearing the door slam violently, ran in alarm to the window.
Down the street a slender man was getting into a cab. The Bacteriologist,
hatless, and in his carpet slippers, was running and gesticulating wildly
towards this group. One slipper came off, but he did not wait for it. "He has
gone mad!" said Minnie; "it's that horrid science of his"; and, opening the
window, would have called after him. The slender man, suddenly glancing
round, seemed struck with the same idea of mental disorder. He pointed
hastily to the Bacteriologist, said something to the cabman, the apron of the
cab slammed, the whip swished, the horse's feet clattered, and in a moment
cab and Bacteriologist hotly in pursuit, had receded up the vista of the
roadway and disappeared round the corner.

Minnie remained straining out of the window for a minute. Then she
drew her head back into the room again. She was dumbfounded. "Of course
he is eccentric," she meditated. "But running about London—in the height
of the season, too—in his socks!" A happy thought struck her. She hastily
put her bonnet on, seized his shoes, went into the hall, took down his hat
and light overcoat from the pegs, emerged upon the doorstep, and hailed a
cab that opportunely crawled by. "Drive me up the road and round
Havelock Crescent, and see if we can find a gentleman running about in a
velveteen coat and no hat."
"Velveteen coat, ma'am, and no 'at. Very good, ma'am." And the cabman
whipped up at once in the most matter-of-fact way, as if he drove to this
address every day in his life.
Some few minutes later the little group of cabmen and loafers that
collects round the cabman's shelter at Haverstock Hill were startled by the
passing of a cab with a ginger-coloured screw of a horse, driven furiously.
They were silent as it went by, and then as it receded—"That's 'Arry
'Icks. Wot's he got?" said the stout gentleman known as Old Tootles.
"He's a-using his whip, he is, to rights," said the ostler boy.
"Hullo!" said poor old Tommy Byles; "here's another bloomin' loonatic.
Blowed if there ain't."
"It's old George," said Old Tootles, "and he's drivin' a loonatic, as you
say. Ain't he a-clawin' out of the keb? Wonder if he's after 'Arry 'Icks?"
The group round the cabman's shelter became animated. Chorus: "Go it,
George!" "It's a race." "You'll ketch 'em!" "Whip up!"
"She's a goer, she is!" said the ostler boy.
"Strike me giddy!" cried Old Tootles. "Here! I'm a-goin' to begin in a
minute. Here's another comin'. If all the cabs in Hampstead ain't gone mad
this morning!"
"It's a fieldmale this time," said the ostler boy.
"She's a-followin' him," said Old Tootles. "Usually the other way about."

"What's she got in her 'and?"
"Looks like a 'igh 'at."
"What a bloomin' lark it is! Three to one on old George," said the ostler
boy. "Nexst!"
Minnie went by in a perfect roar of applause. She did not like it, but she
felt that she was doing her duty, and whirled on down Haverstock Hill and
Camden Town High Street with her eyes ever intent on the animated back
view of old George, who was driving her vagrant husband so
incomprehensibly away from her.
The man in the foremost cab sat crouched in the corner, his arms tightly
folded, and the little tube that contained such vast possibilities of
destruction gripped in his hand. His mood was a singular mixture of fear
and exultation. Chiefly he was afraid of being caught before he could
accomplish his purpose, but behind this was a vaguer but larger fear of the
awfulness of his crime. But his exultation far exceeded his fear. No
Anarchist before him had ever approached this conception of his. Ravachol,
Vaillant, all those distinguished persons whose fame he had envied
dwindled into insignificance beside him. He had only to make sure of the
water supply, and break the little tube into a reservoir. How brilliantly he
had planned it, forged the letter of introduction and got into the laboratory,
and how brilliantly he had seized his opportunity! The world should hear of
him at last. All those people who had sneered at him, neglected him,
preferred other people to him, found his company undesirable, should
consider him at last. Death, death, death! They had always treated him as a
man of no importance. All the world had been in a conspiracy to keep him
under. He would teach them yet what it is to isolate a man. What was this
familiar street? Great Saint Andrew's Street, of course! How fared the
chase? He craned out of the cab. The Bacteriologist was scarcely fifty yards
behind. That was bad. He would be caught and stopped yet. He felt in his
pocket for money, and found half a sovereign. This he thrust up through the
trap in the top of the cab into the man's face. "More," he shouted, "if only
we get away."
The money was snatched out of his hand. "Right you are," said the
cabman, and the trap slammed, and the lash lay along the glistening side of

the horse. The cab swayed, and the Anarchist, half-standing under the trap,
put the hand containing the little glass tube upon the apron to preserve his
balance. He felt the brittle thing crack, and the broken half of it rang upon
the floor of the cab. He fell back into the seat with a curse, and stared
dismally at the two or three drops of moisture on the apron.
He shuddered.
"Well, I suppose I shall be the first. Phew! Anyhow, I shall be a Martyr.
That's something. But it is a filthy death, nevertheless. I wonder if it hurts
as much as they say."
Presently a thought occurred to him—he groped between his feet. A little
drop was still in the broken end of the tube, and he drank that to make sure.
It was better to make sure. At any rate, he would not fail.
Then it dawned upon him that there was no further need to escape the
Bacteriologist. In Wellington Street he told the cabman to stop, and got out.
He slipped on the step, and his head felt queer. It was rapid stuff, this
cholera poison. He waved his cabman out of existence, so to speak, and
stood on the pavement with his arms folded upon his breast awaiting the
arrival of the Bacteriologist. There was something tragic in his pose. The
sense of imminent death gave him a certain dignity. He greeted his pursuer
with a defiant laugh.
"Vive l'Anarchie! You are too late, my friend, I have drunk it. The cholera
is abroad!"
The Bacteriologist from his cab beamed curiously at him through his
spectacles. "You have drunk it! An Anarchist! I see now." He was about to
say something more, and then checked himself. A smile hung in the corner
of his mouth. He opened the apron of his cab as if to descend, at which the
Anarchist waved him a dramatic farewell and strode off towards Waterloo
Bridge, carefully jostling his infected body against as many people as
possible. The Bacteriologist was so preoccupied with the vision of him that
he scarcely manifested the slightest surprise at the appearance of Minnie
upon the pavement with his hat and shoes and overcoat. "Very good of you
to bring my things," he said, and remained lost in contemplation of the
receding figure of the Anarchist.

"You had better get in," he said, still staring. Minnie felt absolutely
convinced now that he was mad, and directed the cabman home on her own
responsibility. "Put on my shoes? Certainly, dear," said he, as the cab began
to turn, and hid the strutting black figure, now small in the distance, from
his eyes. Then suddenly something grotesque struck him, and he laughed.
Then he remarked, "It is really very serious, though.
"You see, that man came to my house to see me, and he is an Anarchist.
No—don't faint, or I cannot possibly tell you the rest. And I wanted to
astonish him, not knowing he was an Anarchist, and took up a cultivation of
that new species of Bacterium I was telling you of that infest, and I think
cause, the blue patches upon various monkeys; and, like a fool, I said it was
Asiatic cholera. And he ran away with it to poison the water of London, and
he certainly might have made things look blue for this civilised city. And
now he has swallowed it. Of course, I cannot say what will happen, but you
know it turned that kitten blue, and the three puppies—in patches, and the
sparrow—bright blue. But the bother is, I shall have all the trouble and
expense of preparing some more.
"Put on my coat on this hot day! Why? Because we might meet Mrs.
Jabber. My dear, Mrs. Jabber is not a draught. But why should I wear a coat
on a hot day because of Mrs.——-. Oh! very well."

IV. — THE FLOWERING OF THE STRANGE
ORCHID.
The buying of orchids always has in it a certain speculative flavour. You
have before you the brown shrivelled lump of tissue, and for the rest you
must trust your judgment, or the auctioneer, or your good luck, as your taste
may incline. The plant may be moribund or dead, or it may be just a
respectable purchase, fair value for your money, or perhaps—for the thing
has happened again and again—there slowly unfolds before the delighted
eyes of the happy purchaser, day after day, some new variety, some novel
richness, a strange twist of the labellum, or some subtler colouration or
unexpected mimicry. Pride, beauty, and profit blossom together on one
delicate green spike, and, it may be, even immortality. For the new miracle
of nature may stand in need of a new specific name, and what so convenient
as that of its discoverer? "John-smithia"! There have been worse names.
It was perhaps the hope of some such happy discovery that made Winter
Wedderburn such a frequent attendant at these sales—that hope, and also,
maybe, the fact that he had nothing else of the slightest interest to do in the
world. He was a shy, lonely, rather ineffectual man, provided with just
enough income to keep off the spur of necessity, and not enough nervous
energy to make him seek any exacting employments. He might have
collected stamps or coins, or translated Horace, or bound books, or invented
new species of diatoms. But, as it happened, he grew orchids, and had one
ambitious little hothouse.
"I have a fancy," he said over his coffee, "that something is going to
happen to me to-day." He spoke—as he moved and thought—slowly.
"Oh, don't say that!" said his housekeeper—who was also his remote
cousin. For "something happening" was a euphemism that meant only one
thing to her.
"You misunderstand me. I mean nothing unpleasant...though what I do
mean I scarcely know.

"To-day," he continued, after a pause, "Peters' are going to sell a batch of
plants from the Andamans and the Indies. I shall go up and see what they
have. It may be I shall buy something good unawares. That may be it."
He passed his cup for his second cupful of coffee.
"Are these the things collected by that poor young fellow you told me of
the other day?" asked his cousin, as she filled his cup.
"Yes," he said, and became meditative over a piece of toast.
"Nothing ever does happen to me," he remarked presently, beginning to
think aloud. "I wonder why? Things enough happen to other people. There
is Harvey. Only the other week; on Monday he picked up sixpence, on
Wednesday his chicks all had the staggers, on Friday his cousin came home
from Australia, and on Saturday he broke his ankle. What a whirl of
excitement!—compared to me."
"I think I would rather be without so much excitement," said his
housekeeper. "It can't be good for you."
"I suppose it's troublesome. Still ... you see, nothing ever happens to me.
When I was a little boy I never had accidents. I never fell in love as I grew
up. Never married... I wonder how it feels to have something happen to
you, something really remarkable.
"That orchid-collector was only thirty-six—twenty years younger than
myself—when he died. And he had been married twice and divorced once;
he had had malarial fever four times, and once he broke his thigh. He killed
a Malay once, and once he was wounded by a poisoned dart. And in the end
he was killed by jungle-leeches. It must have all been very troublesome, but
then it must have been very interesting, you know—except, perhaps, the
leeches."
"I am sure it was not good for him," said the lady with conviction.
"Perhaps not." And then Wedderburn looked at his watch. "Twenty-three
minutes past eight. I am going up by the quarter to twelve train, so that
there is plenty of time. I think I shall wear my alpaca jacket—it is quite
warm enough—and my grey felt hat and brown shoes. I suppose—"

He glanced out of the window at the serene sky and sunlit garden, and
then nervously at his cousin's face.
"I think you had better take an umbrella if you are going to London," she
said in a voice that admitted of no denial. "There's all between here and the
station coming back."
When he returned he was in a state of mild excitement. He had made a
purchase. It was rare that he could make up his mind quickly enough to buy,
but this time he had done so.
"There are Vandas," he said, "and a Dendrobe and some Palaeonophis."
He surveyed his purchases lovingly as he consumed his soup. They were
laid out on the spotless tablecloth before him, and he was telling his cousin
all about them as he slowly meandered through his dinner. It was his
custom to live all his visits to London over again in the evening for her and
his own entertainment.
"I knew something would happen to-day. And I have bought all these.
Some of them—some of them—I feel sure, do you know, that some of them
will be remarkable. I don't know how it is, but I feel just as sure as if some
one had told me that some of these will turn out remarkable.
"That one "—he pointed to a shrivelled rhizome—"was not identified. It
may be a Palaeonophis—or it may not. It may be a new species, or even a
new genus. And it was the last that poor Batten ever collected."
"I don't like the look of it," said his housekeeper. "It's such an ugly
shape."
"To me it scarcely seems to have a shape."
"I don't like those things that stick out," said his housekeeper.
"It shall be put away in a pot to-morrow."
"It looks," said the housekeeper, "like a spider shamming dead."
Wedderburn smiled and surveyed the root with his head on one side. "It
is certainly not a pretty lump of stuff. But you can never judge of these
things from their dry appearance. It may turn out to be a very beautiful

orchid indeed. How busy I shall be to-morrow! I must see to-night just
exactly what to do with these things, and to-morrow I shall set to work."
"They found poor Batten lying dead, or dying, in a mangrove swamp—I
forget which," he began again presently, "with one of these very orchids
crushed up under his body. He had been unwell for some days with some
kind of native fever, and I suppose he fainted. These mangrove swamps are
very unwholesome. Every drop of blood, they say, was taken out of him by
the jungle-leeches. It may be that very plant that cost him his life to obtain."
"I think none the better of it for that."
"Men must work though women may weep," said Wedderburn with
profound gravity.
"Fancy dying away from every comfort in a nasty swamp! Fancy being
ill of fever with nothing to take but chlorodyne and quinine—if men were
left to themselves they would live on chlorodyne and quinine—and no one
round you but horrible natives! They say the Andaman islanders are most
disgusting wretches—and, anyhow, they can scarcely make good nurses,
not having the necessary training. And just for people in England to have
orchids!"
"I don't suppose it was comfortable, but some men seem to enjoy that
kind of thing," said Wedderburn. "Anyhow, the natives of his party were
sufficiently civilised to take care of all his collection until his colleague,
who was an ornithologist, came back again from the interior; though they
could not tell the species of the orchid, and had let it wither. And it makes
these things more interesting."
"It makes them disgusting. I should be afraid of some of the malaria
clinging to them. And just think, there has been a dead body lying across
that ugly thing! I never thought of that before. There! I declare I cannot eat
another mouthful of dinner."
"I will take them off the table if you like, and put them in the window-
seat. I can see them just as well there."
The next few days he was indeed singularly busy in his steamy little
hothouse, fussing about with charcoal, lumps of teak, moss, and all the

other mysteries of the orchid cultivator. He considered he was having a
wonderfully eventful time. In the evening he would talk about these new
orchids to his friends, and over and over again he reverted to his
expectation of something strange.
Several of the Vandas and the Dendrobium died under his care, but
presently the strange orchid began to show signs of life. He was delighted,
and took his housekeeper right away from jam-making to see it at once,
directly he made the discovery.
"That is a bud," he said, "and presently there will be a lot of leaves there,
and those little things coming out here are aerial rootlets."
"They look to me like little white fingers poking out of the brown," said
his housekeeper. "I don't like them."
"Why not?"
"I don't know. They look like fingers trying to get at you. I can't help my
likes and dislikes."
"I don't know for certain, but I don't think there are any orchids I know
that have aerial rootlets quite like that. It may be my fancy, of course. You
see they are a little flattened at the ends."
"I don't like 'em," said his housekeeper, suddenly shivering and turning
away. "I know it's very silly of me—and I'm very sorry, particularly as you
like the thing so much. But I can't help thinking of that corpse."
"But it may not be that particular plant. That was merely a guess of
mine."
His housekeeper shrugged her shoulders. "Anyhow I don't like it," she
said.
Wedderburn felt a little hurt at her dislike to the plant. But that did not
prevent his talking to her about orchids generally, and this orchid in
particular, whenever he felt inclined.
"There are such queer things about orchids," he said one day; "such
possibilities of surprises. You know, Darwin studied their fertilisation, and

showed that the whole structure of an ordinary orchid flower was contrived
in order that moths might carry the pollen from plant to plant. Well, it seems
that there are lots of orchids known the flower of which cannot possibly be
used for fertilisation in that way. Some of the Cypripediums, for instance;
there are no insects known that can possibly fertilise them, and some of
them have never been found with seed."
"But how do they form new plants?"
"By runners and tubers, and that kind of outgrowth. That is easily
explained. The puzzle is, what are the flowers for?
"Very likely," he added, "my orchid may be something extraordinary in
that way. If so I shall study it. I have often thought of making researches as
Darwin did. But hitherto I have not found the time, or something else has
happened to prevent it. The leaves are beginning to unfold now. I do wish
you would come and see them!"
But she said that the orchid-house was so hot it gave her the headache.
She had seen the plant once again, and the aerial rootlets, which were now
some of them more than a foot long, had unfortunately reminded her of
tentacles reaching out after something; and they got into her dreams,
growing after her with incredible rapidity. So that she had settled to her
entire satisfaction that she would not see that plant again, and Wedderburn
had to admire its leaves alone. They were of the ordinary broad form, and a
deep glossy green, with splashes and dots of deep red towards the base He
knew of no other leaves quite like them. The plant was placed on a low
bench near the thermometer, and close by was a simple arrangement by
which a tap dripped on the hot-water pipes and kept the air steamy. And he
spent his afternoons now with some regularity meditating on the
approaching flowering of this strange plant.
And at last the great thing happened. Directly he entered the little glass
house he knew that the spike had burst out, although his great Paloeonophis
Lowii hid the corner where his new darling stood. There was a new odour in
the air, a rich, intensely sweet scent, that overpowered every other in that
crowded, steaming little greenhouse.

Directly he noticed this he hurried down to the strange orchid. And,
behold! the trailing green spikes bore now three great splashes of blossom,
from which this overpowering sweetness proceeded. He stopped before
them in an ecstasy of admiration.
The flowers were white, with streaks of golden orange upon the petals;
the heavy labellum was coiled into an intricate projection, and a wonderful
bluish purple mingled there with the gold. He could see at once that the
genus was altogether a new one. And the insufferable scent! How hot the
place was! The blossoms swam before his eyes.
He would see if the temperature was right. He made a step towards the
thermometer. Suddenly everything appeared unsteady. The bricks on the
floor were dancing up and down. Then the white blossoms, the green leaves
behind them, the whole greenhouse, seemed to sweep sideways, and then in
a curve upward.

At half-past four his cousin made the tea, according to their invariable
custom. But Wedderburn did not come in for his tea.
"He is worshipping that horrid orchid," she told herself, and waited ten
minutes. "His watch must have stopped. I will go and call him."
She went straight to the hothouse, and, opening the door, called his name.
There was no reply. She noticed that the air was very close, and loaded with
an intense perfume. Then she saw something lying on the bricks between
the hot-water pipes.
For a minute, perhaps, she stood motionless.
He was lying, face upward, at the foot of the strange orchid. The tentacle-
like aerial rootlets no longer swayed freely in the air, but were crowded
together, a tangle of grey ropes, and stretched tight, with their ends closely
applied to his chin and neck and hands.
She did not understand. Then she saw from under one of the exultant
tentacles upon his cheek there trickled a little thread of blood.

With an inarticulate cry she ran towards him, and tried to pull him away
from the leech-like suckers. She snapped two of these tentacles, and their
sap dripped red.
Then the overpowering scent of the blossom began to make her head reel.
How they clung to him! She tore at the tough ropes, and he and the white
inflorescence swam about her. She felt she was fainting, knew she must not.
She left him and hastily opened the nearest door, and, after she had panted
for a moment in the fresh air, she had a brilliant inspiration. She caught up a
flower-pot and smashed in the windows at the end of the greenhouse. Then
she re-entered. She tugged now with renewed strength at Wedderburn's
motionless body, and brought the strange orchid crashing to the floor. It still
clung with the grimmest tenacity to its victim. In a frenzy, she lugged it and
him into the open air.
Then she thought of tearing through the sucker rootlets one by one, and
in another minute she had released him and was dragging him away from
the horror.
He was white and bleeding from a dozen circular patches.
The odd-job man was coming up the garden, amazed at the smashing of
glass, and saw her emerge, hauling the inanimate body with red-stained
hands. For a moment he thought impossible things.
"Bring some water!" she cried, and her voice dispelled his fancies. When,
with unnatural alacrity, he returned with the water, he found her weeping
with excitement, and with Wedderburn's head upon her knee, wiping the
blood from his face.
"What's the matter?" said Wedderburn, opening his eyes feebly, and
closing them again at once.
"Go and tell Annie to come out here to me, and then go for Dr. Haddon at
once," she said to the odd-job man so soon as he brought the water; and
added, seeing he hesitated, "I will tell you all about it when you come
back."
Presently Wedderburn opened his eyes again, and, seeing that he was
troubled by the puzzle of his position, she explained to him, "You fainted in

the hothouse."
"And the orchid?"
"I will see to that," she said.
Wedderburn had lost a good deal of blood, but beyond that he had
suffered no very great injury. They gave him brandy mixed with some pink
extract of meat, and carried him upstairs to bed. His housekeeper told her
incredible story in fragments to Dr. Haddon. "Come to the orchid-house and
see," she said.
The cold outer air was blowing in through the open door, and the sickly
perfume was almost dispelled. Most of the torn aerial rootlets lay already
withered amidst a number of dark stains upon the bricks. The stem of the
inflorescence was broken by the fall of the plant, and the flowers were
growing limp and brown at the edges of the petals. The doctor stooped
towards it, then saw that one of the aerial rootlets still stirred feebly, and
hesitated.
The next morning the strange orchid still lay there, black now and
putrescent. The door banged intermittently in the morning breeze, and all
the array of Wedderburn's orchids was shrivelled and prostrate. But
Wedderburn himself was bright and garrulous upstairs in the glory of his
strange adventure.

V. — IN THE AVU OBSERVATORY.
The observatory at Avu, in Borneo, stands on the spur of the mountain.
To the north rises the old crater, black at night against the unfathomable
blue of the sky. From the little circular building, with its mushroom dome,
the slopes plunge steeply downward into the black mysteries of the tropical
forest beneath. The little house in which the observer and his assistant live
is about fifty yards from the observatory, and beyond this are the huts of
their native attendants.
Thaddy, the chief observer, was down with a slight fever. His assistant,
Woodhouse, paused for a moment in silent contemplation of the tropical
night before commencing his solitary vigil. The night was very still. Now
and then voices and laughter came from the native huts, or the cry of some
strange animal was heard from the midst of the mystery of the forest.
Nocturnal insects appeared in ghostly fashion out of the darkness, and
fluttered round his light. He thought, perhaps, of all the possibilities of
discovery that still lay in the black tangle beneath him; for to the naturalist
the virgin forests of Borneo are still a wonderland full of strange questions
and half-suspected discoveries. Woodhouse carried a small lantern in his
hand, and its yellow glow contrasted vividly with the infinite series of tints
between lavender-blue and black in which the landscape was painted. His
hands and face were smeared with ointment against the attacks of the
mosquitoes.
Even in these days of celestial photography, work done in a purely
temporary erection, and with only the most primitive appliances in addition
to the telescope, still involves a very large amount of cramped and
motionless watching. He sighed as he thought of the physical fatigues
before him, stretched himself, and entered the observatory.
The reader is probably familiar with the structure of an ordinary
astronomical observatory. The building is usually cylindrical in shape, with
a very light hemispherical roof capable of being turned round from the
interior. The telescope is supported upon a stone pillar in the centre, and a

clockwork arrangement compensates for the earth's rotation, and allows a
star once found to be continuously observed. Besides this, there is a
compact tracery of wheels and screws about its point of support, by which
the astronomer adjusts it. There is, of course, a slit in the movable roof
which follows the eye of the telescope in its survey of the heavens. The
observer sits or lies on a sloping wooden arrangement, which he can wheel
to any part of the observatory as the position of the telescope may require.
Within it is advisable to have things as dark as possible, in order to enhance
the brilliance of the stars observed.
The lantern flared as Woodhouse entered his circular den, and the general
darkness fled into black shadows behind the big machine, from which it
presently seemed to creep back over the whole place again as the light
waned. The slit was a profound transparent blue, in which six stars shone
with tropical brilliance, and their light lay, a pallid gleam, along the black
tube of the instrument. Woodhouse shifted the roof, and then proceeding to
the telescope, turned first one wheel and then another, the great cylinder
slowly swinging into a new position. Then he glanced through the finder,
the little companion telescope, moved the roof a little more, made some
further adjustments, and set the clockwork in motion. He took off his jacket,
for the night was very hot, and pushed into position the uncomfortable seat
to which he was condemned for the next four hours. Then with a sigh he
resigned himself to his watch upon the mysteries of space.
There was no sound now in the observatory, and the lantern waned
steadily. Outside there was the occasional cry of some animal in alarm or
pain, or calling to its mate, and the intermittent sounds of the Malay and
Dyak servants. Presently one of the men began a queer chanting song, in
which the others joined at intervals. After this it would seem that they
turned in for the night, for no further sound came from their direction, and
the whispering stillness became more and more profound.
The clockwork ticked steadily. The shrill hum of a mosquito explored the
place and grew shriller in indignation at Woodhouse's ointment. Then the
lantern went out and all the observatory was black.
Woodhouse shifted his position presently, when the slow movement of
the telescope had carried it beyond the limits of his comfort.

He was watching a little group of stars in the Milky Way, in one of which
his chief had seen or fancied a remarkable colour variability. It was not a
part of the regular work for which the establishment existed, and for that
reason perhaps Woodhouse was deeply interested. He must have forgotten
things terrestrial. All his attention was concentrated upon the great blue
circle of the telescope field—a circle powdered, so it seemed, with an
innumerable multitude of stars, and all luminous against the blackness of its
setting. As he watched he seemed to himself to become incorporeal, as if he
too were floating in the ether of space. Infinitely remote was the faint red
spot he was observing.
Suddenly the stars were blotted out. A flash of blackness passed, and they
were visible again.
"Queer," said Woodhouse. "Must have been a bird."
The thing happened again, and immediately after the great tube shivered
as though it had been struck. Then the dome of the observatory resounded
with a series of thundering blows. The stars seemed to sweep aside as the
telescope—which had been unclamped—swung round and away from the
slit in the roof.
"Great Scott!" cried Woodhouse. "What's this?"
Some huge vague black shape, with a flapping something like a wing,
seemed to be struggling in the aperture of the roof. In another moment the
slit was clear again, and the luminous haze of the Milky Way shone warm
and bright.
The interior of the roof was perfectly black, and only a scraping sound
marked the whereabouts of the unknown creature.
Woodhouse had scrambled from the seat to his feet. He was trembling
violently and in a perspiration with the suddenness of the occurrence. Was
the thing, whatever it was, inside or out? It was big, whatever else it might
be. Something shot across the skylight, and the telescope swayed. He
started violently and put his arm up. It was in the observatory, then, with
him. It was clinging to the roof apparently. What the devil was it? Could it
see him?

He stood for perhaps a minute in a state of stupefaction. The beast,
whatever it was, clawed at the interior of the dome, and then something
flapped almost into his face, and he saw the momentary gleam of starlight
on a skin like oiled leather. His water-bottle was knocked off his little table
with a smash.
The sense of some strange bird-creature hovering a few yards from his
face in the darkness was indescribably unpleasant to Woodhouse. As his
thought returned he concluded that it must be some night-bird or large bat.
At any risk he would see what it was, and pulling a match from his pocket,
he tried to strike it on the telescope seat. There was a smoking streak of
phosphorescent light, the match flared for a moment, and he saw a vast
wing sweeping towards him, a gleam of grey-brown fur, and then he was
struck in the face and the match knocked out of his hand. The blow was
aimed at his temple, and a claw tore sideways down to his cheek. He reeled
and fell, and he heard the extinguished lantern smash. Another blow
followed as he fell. He was partly stunned, he felt his own warm blood
stream out upon his face. Instinctively he felt his eyes had been struck at,
and, turning over on his face to save them, tried to crawl under the
protection of the telescope.
He was struck again upon the back, and he heard his jacket rip, and then
the thing hit the roof of the observatory. He edged as far as he could
between the wooden seat and the eyepiece of the instrument, and turned his
body round so that it was chiefly his feet that were exposed. With these he
could at least kick. He was still in a mystified state. The strange beast
banged about in the darkness, and presently clung to the telescope, making
it sway and the gear rattle. Once it flapped near him, and he kicked out
madly and felt a soft body with his feet. He was horribly scared now. It
must be a big thing to swing the telescope like that. He saw for a moment
the outline of a head black against the starlight, with sharply-pointed
upstanding ears and a crest between them. It seemed to him to be as big as a
mastiff's. Then he began to bawl out as loudly as he could for help.
At that the thing came down upon him again. As it did so his hand
touched something beside him on the floor. He kicked out, and the next
moment his ankle was gripped and held by a row of keen teeth. He yelled
again, and tried to free his leg by kicking with the other. Then he realised he

had the broken water-bottle at his hand, and, snatching it, he struggled into
a sitting posture, and feeling in the darkness towards his foot, gripped a
velvety ear, like the ear of a big cat. He had seized the water-bottle by its
neck and brought it down with a shivering crash upon the head of the
strange beast. He repeated the blow, and then stabbed and jabbed with the
jagged end of it, in the darkness, where he judged the face might be.
The small teeth relaxed their hold, and at once Woodhouse pulled his leg
free and kicked hard. He felt the sickening feel of fur and bone giving under
his boot. There was a tearing bite at his arm, and he struck over it at the
face, as he judged, and hit damp fur.
There was a pause; then he heard the sound of claws; and the dragging of
a heavy body away from him over the observatory floor. Then there was
silence, broken only by his own sobbing breathing, and a sound like licking.
Everything was black except the parallelogram of the blue skylight with the
luminous dust of stars, against which the end of the telescope now appeared
in silhouette. He waited, as it seemed, an interminable time.
Was the thing coming on again? He felt in his trouser-pocket for some
matches, and found one remaining. He tried to strike this, but the floor was
wet, and it spat and went out. He cursed. He could not see where the door
was situated. In his struggle he had quite lost his bearings. The strange
beast, disturbed by the splutter of the match, began to move again. "Time!"
called Woodhouse, with a sudden gleam of mirth, but the thing was not
coming at him again. He must have hurt it, he thought, with the broken
bottle. He felt a dull pain in his ankle. Probably he was bleeding there. He
wondered if it would support him if he tried to stand up. The night outside
was very still. There was no sound of any one moving. The sleepy fools had
not heard those wings battering upon the dome, nor his shouts. It was no
good wasting strength in shouting. The monster flapped its wings and
startled him into a defensive attitude. He hit his elbow against the seat, and
it fell over with a crash. He cursed this, and then he cursed the darkness.
Suddenly the oblong patch of starlight seemed to sway to and fro. Was he
going to faint? It would never do to faint. He clenched his fists and set his
teeth to hold himself together. Where had the door got to? It occurred to
him he could get his bearings by the stars visible through the skylight. The

patch of stars he saw was in Sagittarius and south-eastward; the door was
north—or was it north by west? He tried to think. If he could get the door
open he might retreat. It might be the thing was wounded. The suspense
was beastly. "Look here!" he said, "if you don't come on, I shall come at
you."
Then the thing began clambering up the side of the observatory, and he
saw its black outline gradually blot out the skylight. Was it in retreat? He
forgot about the door, and watched as the dome shifted and creaked.
Somehow he did not feel very frightened or excited now. He felt a curious
sinking sensation inside him. The sharply-defined patch of light, with the
black form moving across it, seemed to be growing smaller and smaller.
That was curious. He began to feel very thirsty, and yet he did not feel
inclined to get anything to drink. He seemed to be sliding down a long
funnel.
He felt a burning sensation in his throat, and then he perceived it was
broad daylight, and that one of the Dyak servants was looking at him with a
curious expression. Then there was the top of Thaddy's face upside down.
Funny fellow, Thaddy, to go about like that! Then he grasped the situation
better, and perceived that his head was on Thaddy's knee, and Thaddy was
giving him brandy. And then he saw the eyepiece of the telescope with a lot
of red smears on it. He began to remember.
"You've made this observatory in a pretty mess," said Thaddy.
The Dyak boy was beating up an egg in brandy. Woodhouse took this and
sat up. He felt a sharp twinge of pain. His ankle was tied up, so were his
arm and the side of his face. The smashed glass, red-stained, lay about the
floor, the telescope seat was overturned, and by the opposite wall was a
dark pool. The door was open, and he saw the grey summit of the mountain
against a brilliant background of blue sky.
"Pah!" said Woodhouse. "Who's been killing calves here? Take me out of
it."
Then he remembered the Thing, and the fight he had had with it.
"What was it?" he said to Thaddy—"the Thing I fought with?".

"You know that best," said Thaddy. "But, anyhow, don't worry yourself
now about it. Have some more to drink."
Thaddy, however, was curious enough, and it was a hard struggle
between duty and inclination to keep Woodhouse quiet until he was
decently put away in bed, and had slept upon the copious dose of meat
extract Thaddy considered advisable. They then talked it over together.
"It was," said Woodhouse, "more like a big bat than anything else in the
world. It had sharp, short ears, and soft fur, and its wings were leathery. Its
teeth were little but devilish sharp, and its jaw could not have been very
strong or else it would have bitten through my ankle."
"It has pretty nearly," said Thaddy.
"It seemed to me to hit out with its claws pretty freely. That is about as
much as I know about the beast. Our conversation was intimate, so to
speak, and yet not confidential."
"The Dyak chaps talk about a Big Colugo, a Klang-utang—whatever that
may be. It does not often attack man, but I suppose you made it nervous.
They say there is a Big Colugo and a Little Colugo, and a something else
that sounds like gobble. They all fly about at night. For my own part, I
know there are flying foxes and flying lemurs about here, but they are none
of them very big beasts."
"There are more things in heaven and earth," said Woodhouse—and
Thaddy groaned at the quotation—"and more particularly in the forests of
Borneo, than are dreamt of in our philosophies. On the whole, if the Borneo
fauna is going to disgorge any more of its novelties upon me, I should
prefer that it did so when I was not occupied in the observatory at night and
alone."

VI. — AEPYORNIS ISLAND.
The man with the scarred face leant over the table and looked at my
bundle.
"Orchids?" he asked.
"A few," I said.
"Cypripediums," he said.
"Chiefly," said I. — "Anything new? I thought not. I did these islands
twenty-five— twenty-seven years ago. If you find anything new here—
well, it's brand new. I didn't leave much."
"I'm not a collector," said I. — "I was young then," he went on. "Lord!
how I used to fly round." He seemed to take my measure. "I was in the East
Indies two years, and in Brazil seven. Then I went to Madagascar."
"I know a few explorers by name," I said, anticipating a yarn. "Whom did
you collect for?"
"Dawson's. I wonder if you've heard the name of Butcher ever?"
"Butcher—Butcher?" The name seemed vaguely present in my memory;
then I recalled Butcher v. Dawson. "Why!" said I, "you are the man who
sued them for four years' salary—got cast away on a desert island..."
"Your servant," said the man with the scar, bowing. "Funny case, wasn't
it? Here was me, making a little fortune on that island, doing nothing for it
neither, and them quite unable to give me notice. It often used to amuse me
thinking over it while I was there. I did calculations of it—big—all over the
blessed atoll in ornamental figuring."
"How did it happen?" said I. "I don't rightly remember the case."
"Well... You've heard of the AEpyornis?"

"Rather. Andrews was telling me of a new species he was working on
only a month or so ago. Just before I sailed. They've got a thigh bone, it
seems, nearly a yard long. Monster the thing must have been!"
"I believe you," said the man with the scar. "It was a monster. Sindbad's
roc was just a legend of 'em. But when did they find these bones?"
"Three or four years ago—'91, I fancy. Why?"
"Why? Because I found them—Lord!—it's nearly twenty years ago. If
Dawson's hadn't been silly about that salary they might have made a perfect
ring in 'em... I couldn't help the infernal boat going adrift."
He paused. "I suppose it's the same place. A kind of swamp about ninety
miles north of Antananarivo. Do you happen to know? You have to go to it
along the coast by boats. You don't happen to remember, perhaps?"
"I don't. I fancy Andrews said something about a swamp."
"It must be the same. It's on the east coast. And somehow there's
something in the water that keeps things from decaying. Like creosote it
smells. It reminded me of Trinidad. Did they get any more eggs? Some of
the eggs I found were a foot-and-a-half long. The swamp goes circling
round, you know, and cuts off this bit. It's mostly salt, too. Well... What a
time I had of it! I found the things quite by accident. We went for eggs, me
and two native chaps, in one of those rum canoes all tied together, and
found the bones at the same time. We had a tent and provisions for four
days, and we pitched on one of the firmer places. To think of it brings that
odd tarry smell back even now. It's funny work. You go probing into the
mud with iron rods, you know. Usually the egg gets smashed. I wonder how
long it is since these AEpyornises really lived. The missionaries say the
natives have legends about when they were alive, but I never heard any
such stories myself.[*] But certainly those eggs we got were as fresh as if
they had been new laid. Fresh! Carrying them down to the boat one of my
nigger chaps dropped one on a rock and it smashed. How I lammed into the
beggar! But sweet it was, as if it was new laid, not even smelly, and its
mother dead these four hundred years, perhaps. Said a centipede had bit
him. However, I'm getting off the straight with the story. It had taken us all
day to dig into the slush and get these eggs out unbroken, and we were all

covered with beastly black mud, and naturally I was cross. So far as I knew
they were the only eggs that have ever been got out not even cracked. I
went afterwards to see the ones they have at the Natural History Museum in
London; all of them were cracked and just stuck together like a mosaic, and
bits missing. Mine were perfect, and I meant to blow them when I got back.
Naturally I was annoyed at the silly duffer dropping three hours' work just
on account of a centipede. I hit him about rather."
[ No European is known to have seen a live AEpyornis, with the doubtful
exception of MacAndrew, who visited Madagascar in 1745.—H.G.W.]
The man with the scar took out a clay pipe. I placed my pouch before
him. He filled up absent-mindedly.
"How about the others? Did you get those home? I don't remember—"
"That's the queer part of the story. I had three others. Perfectly fresh eggs.
Well, we put 'em in the boat, and then I went up to the tent to make some
coffee, leaving my two heathens down by the beach—the one fooling about
with his sting and the other helping him. It never occurred to me that the
beggars would take advantage of the peculiar position I was in to pick a
quarrel. But I suppose the centipede poison and the kicking I had given him
had upset the one—he was always a cantankerous sort—and he persuaded
the other.
"I remember I was sitting and smoking and boiling up the water over a
spirit-lamp business I used to take on these expeditions. Incidentally I was
admiring the swamp under the sunset. All black and blood-red it was, in
streaks—a beautiful sight. And up beyond the land rose grey and hazy to
the hills, and the sky behind them red, like a furnace mouth. And fifty yards
behind the back of me was these blessed heathen—quite regardless of the
tranquil air of things—plotting to cut off with the boat and leave me all
alone with three days' provisions and a canvas tent, and nothing to drink
whatsoever beyond a little keg of water. I heard a kind of yelp behind me,
and there they were in this canoe affair—it wasn't properly a boat—and,
perhaps, twenty yards from land. I realised what was up in a moment. My
gun was in the tent, and, besides, I had no bullets—only duck shot. They
knew that. But I had a little revolver in my pocket, and I pulled that out as I
ran down to the beach.

"'Come back!' says I, flourishing it.
"They jabbered something at me, and the man that broke the egg jeered. I
aimed at the other—because he was unwounded and had the paddle, and I
missed. They laughed. However, I wasn't beat. I knew I had to keep cool,
and I tried him again and made him jump with the whang of it. He didn't
laugh that time. The third time I got his head, and over he went, and the
paddle with him. It was a precious lucky shot for a revolver. I reckon it was
fifty yards. He went right under. I don't know if he was shot, or simply
stunned and drowned. Then I began to shout to the other chap to come back,
but he huddled up in the canoe and refused to answer. So I fired out my
revolver at him and never got near him.
"I felt a precious fool, I can tell you. There I was on this rotten, black
beach, flat swamp all behind me, and the flat sea, cold after the sun set, and
just this black canoe drifting steadily out to sea. I tell you I damned
Dawson's and Jamrach's and Museums and all the rest of it just to rights. I
bawled to this nigger to come back, until my voice went up into a scream.
"There was nothing for it but to swim after him and take my luck with
the sharks. So I opened my clasp-knife and put it in my mouth, and took off
my clothes and waded in. As soon as I was in the water I lost sight of the
canoe, but I aimed, as I judged, to head it off. I hoped the man in it was too
bad to navigate it, and that it would keep on drifting in the same direction.
Presently it came up over the horizon again to the south-westward about.
The afterglow of sunset was well over now and the dim of night creeping
up. The stars were coming through the blue. I swum like a champion,
though my legs and arms were soon aching.
"However, I came up to him by the time the stars were fairly out. As it
got darker I began to see all manner of glowing things in the water—
phosphorescence, you know. At times it made me giddy. I hardly knew
which was stars and which was phosphorescence, and whether I was
swimming on my head or my heels. The canoe was as black as sin, and the
ripple under the bows like liquid fire. I was naturally chary of clambering
up into it. I was anxious to see what he was up to first. He seemed to be
lying cuddled up in a lump in the bows, and the stern was all out of water.
The thing kept turning round slowly as it drifted—-kind of waltzing, don't

you know. I went to the stern and pulled it down, expecting him to wake up.
Then I began to clamber in with my knife in my hand, and ready for a rush.
But he never stirred. So there I sat in the stern of the little canoe, drifting
away over the calm phosphorescent sea, and with all the host of the stars
above me, waiting for something to happen.
"After a long time I called him by name, but he never answered. I was
too tired to take any risks by going along to him. So we sat there. I fancy I
dozed once or twice. When the dawn came I saw he was as dead as a
doornail and all puffed up and purple. My three eggs and the bones were
lying in the middle of the canoe, and the keg of water and some coffee and
biscuits wrapped in a Cape Argus by his feet, and a tin of methylated spirit
underneath him. There was no paddle, nor, in fact, anything except the
spirit-tin that I could use as one, so I settled to drift until I was picked up. I
held an inquest on him, brought in a verdict against some snake, scorpion,
or centipede unknown, and sent him overboard.
"After that I had a drink of water and a few biscuits, and took a look
round. I suppose a man low down as I was don't see very far; leastways,
Madagascar was clean out of sight, and any trace of land at all. I saw a sail
going south-westward—looked like a schooner but her hull never came up.
Presently the sun got high in the sky and began to beat down upon me.
Lord! it pretty near made my brains boil. I tried dipping my head in the sea,
but after a while my eye fell on the Cape Argus, and I lay down flat in the
canoe and spread this over me. Wonderful things these newspapers! I never
read one through thoroughly before, but it's odd what you get up to when
you're alone, as I was. I suppose I read that blessed old Cape Argus twenty
times. The pitch in the canoe simply reeked with the heat and rose up into
big blisters.
"I drifted ten days," said the man with the scar. "It's a little thing in the
telling, isn't it? Every day was like the last. Except in the morning and the
evening I never kept a look-out even—the blaze was so infernal. I didn't see
a sail after the first three days, and those I saw took no notice of me. About
the sixth night a ship went by scarcely half a mile away from me, with all
its lights ablaze and its ports open, looking like a big firefly. There was
music aboard. I stood up and shouted and screamed at it. The second day I
broached one of the AEpyornis eggs, scraped the shell away at the end bit

by bit, and tried it, and I was glad to find it was good enough to eat. A bit
flavoury—not bad, I mean—but with something of the taste of a duck's egg.
There was a kind of circular patch, about six inches across, on one side of
the yoke, and with streaks of blood and a white mark like a ladder in it that
I thought queer, but I did not understand what this meant at the time, and I
wasn't inclined to be particular. The egg lasted me three days, with biscuits
and a drink of water. I chewed coffee berries too—invigorating stuff. The
second egg I opened about the eighth day, and it scared me."
The man with the scar paused. "Yes," he said, "developing."
"I daresay you find it hard to believe. I did, with the thing before me.
There the egg had been, sunk in that cold black mud, perhaps three hundred
years. But there was no mistaking it. There was the—what is it?—embryo,
with its big head and curved back, and its heart beating under its throat, and
the yolk shrivelled up and great membranes spreading inside of the shell
and all over the yolk. Here was I hatching out the eggs of the biggest of all
extinct birds, in a little canoe in the midst of the Indian Ocean. If old
Dawson had known that! It was worth four years' salary. What do you
think?
"However, I had to eat that precious thing up, every bit of it, before I
sighted the reef, and some of the mouthfuls were beastly unpleasant. I left
the third one alone. I held it up to the light, but the shell was too thick for
me to get any notion of what might be happening inside; and though I
fancied I heard blood pulsing, it might have been the rustle in my own ears,
like what you listen to in a seashell.
"Then came the atoll. Came out of the sunrise, as it were, suddenly, close
up to me. I drifted straight towards it until I was about half a mile from
shore, not more, and then the current took a turn, and I had to paddle as
hard as I could with my hands and bits of the AEpyornis shell to make the
place. However, I got there. It was just a common atoll about four miles
round, with a few trees growing and a spring in one place, and the lagoon
full of parrot-fish. I took the egg ashore and put it in a good place, well
above the tide lines and in the sun, to give it all the chance I could, and
pulled the canoe up safe, and loafed about prospecting. It's rum how dull an
atoll is. As soon as I had found a spring all the interest seemed to vanish.

When I was a kid I thought nothing could be finer or more adventurous than
the Robinson Crusoe business, but that place was as monotonous as a book
of sermons. I went round finding eatable things and generally thinking; but
I tell you I was bored to death before the first day was out. It shows my luck
—the very day I landed the weather changed. A thunderstorm went by to
the north and flicked its wing over the island, and in the night there came a
drencher and a howling wind slap over us. It wouldn't have taken much, you
know, to upset that canoe.
"I was sleeping under the canoe, and the egg was luckily among the sand
higher up the beach, and the first thing I remember was a sound like a
hundred pebbles hitting the boat at once, and a rush of water over my body.
I'd been dreaming of Antananarivo, and I sat up and holloaed to Intoshi to
ask her what the devil was up, and clawed out at the chair where the
matches used to be. Then I remembered where I was. There were
phosphorescent waves rolling up as if they meant to eat me, and all the rest
of the night as black as pitch. The air was simply yelling. The clouds
seemed down on your head almost, and the rain fell as if heaven was
sinking and they were baling out the waters above the firmament. One great
roller came writhing at me, like a fiery serpent, and I bolted. Then I thought
of the canoe, and ran down to it as the water went hissing back again; but
the thing had gone. I wondered about the egg then, and felt my way to it. It
was all right and well out of reach of the maddest waves, so I sat down
beside it and cuddled it for company. Lord! what a night that was!
"The storm was over before the morning. There wasn't a rag of cloud left
in the sky when the dawn came, and all along the beach there were bits of
plank scattered—which was the disarticulated skeleton, so to speak, of my
canoe. However, that gave me something to do, for, taking advantage of two
of the trees being together, I rigged up a kind of storm-shelter with these
vestiges. And that day the egg hatched.
"Hatched, sir, when my head was pillowed on it and I was asleep. I heard
a whack and felt a jar and sat up, and there was the end of the egg pecked
out and a rum little brown head looking out at me. 'Lord!' I said, 'you're
welcome'; and with a little difficulty he came out.

"He was a nice friendly little chap at first, about the size of a small hen—
very much like most other young birds, only bigger. His plumage was a
dirty brown to begin with, with a sort of grey scab that fell off it very soon,
and scarcely feathers—a kind of downy hair. I can hardly express how
pleased I was to see him. I tell you, Robinson Crusoe don't make near
enough of his loneliness. But here was interesting company. He looked at
me and winked his eye from the front backwards, like a hen, and gave a
chirp and began to peck about at once, as though being hatched three
hundred years too late was just nothing. 'Glad to see you, Man Friday!' says
I, for I had naturally settled he was to be called Man Friday if ever he was
hatched, as soon as ever I found the egg in the canoe had developed. I was a
bit anxious about his feed, so I gave him a lump of raw parrot-fish at once.
He took it, and opened his beak for more. I was glad of that for, under the
circumstances, if he'd been at all fanciful, I should have had to eat him after
all.
"You'd be surprised what an interesting bird that AEpyornis chick was.
He followed me about from the very beginning. He used to stand by me and
watch while I fished in the lagoon, and go shares in anything I caught. And
he was sensible, too. There were nasty green warty things, like pickled
gherkins, used to lie about on the beach, and he tried one of these and it
upset him. He never even looked at any of them again.
"And he grew. You could almost see him grow. And as I was never much
of a society man, his quiet, friendly ways suited me to a T. For nearly two
years we were as happy as we could be on that island. I had no business
worries, for I knew my salary was mounting up at Dawsons'. We would see
a sail now and then, but nothing ever came near us. I amused myself, too,
by decorating the island with designs worked in sea-urchins and fancy
shells of various kinds. I put AEPYORNIS ISLAND all round the place
very nearly, in big letters, like what you see done with coloured stones at
railway stations in the old country, and mathematical calculations and
drawings of various sorts. And I used to lie watching the blessed bird
stalking round and growing, growing; and think how I could make a living
out of him by showing him about if I ever got taken off. After his first moult
he began to get handsome, with a crest and a blue wattle, and a lot of green
feathers at the behind of him. And then I used to puzzle whether Dawsons'
had any right to claim him or not. Stormy weather and in the rainy season

we lay snug under the shelter I had made out of the old canoe, and I used to
tell him lies about my friends at home. And after a storm we would go
round the island together to see if there was any drift. It was a kind of idyll,
you might say. If only I had had some tobacco it would have been simply
just like heaven.
"It was about the end of the second year our little paradise went wrong.
Friday was then about fourteen feet high to the bill of him, with a big, broad
head like the end of a pickaxe, and two huge brown eyes with yellow rims,
set together like a man's—not out of sight of each other like a hen's. His
plumage was fine—none of the half-mourning style of your ostrich—more
like a cassowary as far as colour and texture go. And then it was he began to
cock his comb at me and give himself airs, and show signs of a nasty
temper ...
"At last came a time when my fishing had been rather unlucky, and he
began to hang about me in a queer, meditative way. I thought he might have
been eating sea-cucumbers or something, but it was really just discontent on
his part. I was hungry too, and when at last I landed a fish I wanted it for
myself. Tempers were short that morning on both sides. He pecked at it and
grabbed it, and I gave him a whack on the head to make him leave go. And
at that he went for me. Lord! ...
"He gave me this in the face." The man indicated his scar. "Then he
kicked me. It was like a carthorse. I got up, and seeing he hadn't finished, I
started off full tilt with my arms doubled up over my face. But he ran on
those gawky legs of his faster than a racehorse, and kept landing out at me
with sledgehammer kicks, and bringing his pickaxe down on the back of my
head. I made for the lagoon, and went in up to my neck. He stopped at the
water, for he hated getting his feet wet, and began to make a shindy,
something like a peacock's, only hoarser. He started strutting up and down
the beach. I'll admit I felt small to see this blessed fossil lording it there.
And my head and face were all bleeding, and—well, my body just one jelly
of bruises.
"I decided to swim across the lagoon and leave him alone for a bit, until
the affair blew over. I shinned up the tallest palm-tree, and sat there
thinking of it all. I don't suppose I ever felt so hurt by anything before or

since. It was the brutal ingratitude of the creature. I'd been more than a
brother to him. I'd hatched him, educated him. A great gawky, out-of-date
bird! And me a human being—heir of the ages and all that.
"I thought after a time he'd begin to see things in that light himself, and
feel a little sorry for his behaviour. I thought if I was to catch some nice
little bits of fish, perhaps, and go to him presently in a casual kind of way,
and offer them to him, he might do the sensible thing. It took me some time
to learn how unforgiving and cantankerous an extinct bird can be. Malice!
"I won't tell you all the little devices I tried to get that bird round again, I
simply can't. It makes my cheek burn with shame even now to think of the
snubs and buffets I had from this infernal curiosity. I tried violence. I
chucked lumps of coral at him from a safe distance, but he only swallowed
them. I shied my open knife at him and almost lost it, though it was too big
for him to swallow. I tried starving him out and struck fishing, but he took
to picking along the beach at low water after worms, and rubbed along on
that. Half my time I spent up to my neck in the lagoon, and the rest up the
palm-trees. One of them was scarcely high enough, and when he caught me
up it he had a regular Bank Holiday with the calves of my legs. It got
unbearable. I don't know if you have ever tried sleeping up a palm-tree. It
gave me the most horrible nightmares. Think of the shame of it, too! Here
was this extinct animal mooning about my island like a sulky duke, and me
not allowed to rest the sole of my foot on the place. I used to cry with
weariness and vexation. I told him straight that I didn't mean to be chased
about a desert island by any damned anachronisms. I told him to go and
peck a navigator of his own age. But he only snapped his beak at me. Great
ugly bird, all legs and neck!
"I shouldn't like to say how long that went on altogether. I'd have killed
him sooner if I'd known how. However, I hit on a way of settling him at
last. It is a South American dodge. I joined all my fishing-lines together
with stems of seaweed and things, and made a stoutish string, perhaps
twelve yards in length or more, and I fastened two lumps of coral rock to
the ends of this. It took me some time to do, because every now and then I
had to go into the lagoon or up a tree as the fancy took me. This I whirled
rapidly round my head, and then let it go at him. The first time I missed, but
the next time the string caught his legs beautifully, and wrapped round them

again and again. Over he went. I threw it standing waist-deep in the lagoon,
and as soon as he went down I was out of the water and sawing at his neck
with my knife ...
"I don't like to think of that even now. I felt like a murderer while I did it,
though my anger was hot against him. When I stood over him and saw him
bleeding on the white sand, and his beautiful great legs and neck writhing in
his last agony ... Pah!
"With that tragedy loneliness came upon me like a curse. Good Lord! you
can't imagine how I missed that bird. I sat by his corpse and sorrowed over
him, and shivered as I looked round the desolate, silent reef. I thought of
what a jolly little bird he had been when he was hatched, and of a thousand
pleasant tricks he had played before he went wrong. I thought if I'd only
wounded him I might have nursed him round into a better understanding. If
I'd had any means of digging into the coral rock I'd have buried him. I felt
exactly as if he was human. As it was, I couldn't think of eating him, so I
put him in the lagoon, and the little fishes picked him clean. I didn't even
save the feathers. Then one day a chap cruising about in a yacht had a fancy
to see if my atoll still existed.
"He didn't come a moment too soon, for I was about sick enough of the
desolation of it, and only hesitating whether I should walk out into the sea
and finish up the business that way, or fall back on the green things...
"I sold the bones to a man named Winslow—a dealer near the British
Museum, and he says he sold them to old Havers. It seems Havers didn't
understand they were extra large, and it was only after his death they
attracted attention. They called 'em AEpyornis—what was it?"
"AEpyornis vastus," said I. "It's funny, the very thing was mentioned to
me by a friend of mine. When they found an AEpyornis, with a thigh a yard
long, they thought they had reached the top of the scale, and called him
AEpyornis maximus. Then some one turned up another thigh-bone four feet
six or more, and that they called AEpyornis Titan. Then your vastus was
found after old Havers died, in his collection, and then a vastissimus turned
up."

"Winslow was telling me as much," said the man with the scar. "If they
get any more AEpyornises, he reckons some scientific swell will go and
burst a blood-vessel. But it was a queer thing to happen to a man; wasn't it
— altogether?"

VII. — THE REMARKABLE CASE OF
DAVIDSON'S EYES.
I. — The transitory mental aberration of Sidney Davidson, remarkable
enough in itself, is still more remarkable if Wade's explanation is to be
credited. It sets one dreaming of the oddest possibilities of
intercommunication in the future, of spending an intercalary five minutes
on the other side of the world, or being watched in our most secret
operations by unsuspected eyes. It happened that I was the immediate
witness of Davidson's seizure, and so it falls naturally to me to put the story
upon paper.
When I say that I was the immediate witness of his seizure, I mean that I
was the first on the scene. The thing happened at the Harlow Technical
College, just beyond the Highgate Archway. He was alone in the larger
laboratory when the thing happened. I was in a smaller room, where the
balances are, writing up some notes. The thunderstorm had completely
upset my work, of course. It was just after one of the louder peals that I
thought I heard some glass smash in the other room. I stopped writing, and
turned round to listen. For a moment I heard nothing; the hail was playing
the devil's tattoo on the corrugated zinc of the roof. Then came another
sound, a smash—no doubt of it this time. Something heavy had been
knocked off the bench. I jumped up at once and went and opened the door
leading into the big laboratory.
I was surprised to hear a queer sort of laugh, and saw Davidson standing
unsteadily in the middle of the room, with a dazzled look on his face. My
first impression was that he was drunk. He did not notice me. He was
clawing out at something invisible a yard in front of his face. He put out his
hand, slowly, rather hesitatingly, and then clutched nothing. "What's come
to it?" he said. He held up his hands to his face, fingers spread out. "Great
Scott!" he said. The thing happened three or four years ago, when every one
swore by that personage. Then he began raising his feet clumsily, as though
he had expected to find them glued to the floor.

"Davidson!" cried I. "What's the matter with you?" He turned round in
my direction and looked about for me. He looked over me and at me and on
either side of me, without the slightest sign of seeing me. "Waves," he said;
"and a remarkably neat schooner. I'd swear that was Bellow's voice. Hullo!"
He shouted suddenly at the top of his voice.
I thought he was up to some foolery. Then I saw littered about his feet the
shattered remains of the best of our electrometers. "What's up, man?" said I.
"You've smashed the electrometer!"
"Bellows again!" said he. "Friends left, if my hands are gone. Something
about electrometers. Which way are you, Bellows?" He suddenly came
staggering towards me. "The damned stuff cuts like butter," he said. He
walked straight into the bench and recoiled. "None so buttery that!" he said,
and stood swaying.
I felt scared. "Davidson," said I, "what on earth's come over you?"
He looked round him in every direction. "I could swear that was Bellows.
Why don't you show yourself like a man, Bellows?"
It occurred to me that he must be suddenly struck blind. I walked round
the table and laid my hand upon his arm. I never saw a man more startled in
my life. He jumped away from me, and came round into an attitude of self-
defence, his face fairly distorted with terror. "Good God!" he cried. "What
was that?"
"It's I—Bellows. Confound it, Davidson!"
He jumped when I answered him and stared—how can I express it?—
right through me. He began talking, not to me, but to himself. "Here in
broad daylight on a clear beach. Not a place to hide in." He looked about
him wildly. "Here! I'm off." He suddenly turned and ran headlong into the
big electro-magnet—so violently that, as we found afterwards, he bruised
his shoulder and jawbone cruelly. At that he stepped back a pace, and cried
out with almost a whimper, "What, in Heaven's name, has come over me?"
He stood, blanched with terror and trembling violently, with his right arm
clutching his left, where that had collided with the magnet.

By that time I was excited and fairly scared. "Davidson," said I, "don't be
afraid."
He was startled at my voice, but not so excessively as before. I repeated
my words in as clear and as firm a tone as I could assume. "Bellows," he
said, "is that you?"
"Can't you see it's me?"
He laughed. "I can't even see it's myself. Where the devil are we?"
"Here," said I, "in the laboratory."
"The laboratory!" he answered in a puzzled tone, and put his hand to his
forehead. "I was in the laboratory—till that flash came, but I'm hanged if
I'm there now. What ship is that?"
"There's no ship," said I. "Do be sensible, old chap."
"No ship!" he repeated, and seemed to forget my denial forthwith. "I
suppose," said he slowly, "we're both dead. But the rummy part is I feel just
as though I still had a body. Don't get used to it all at once, I suppose. The
old shop was struck by lightning, I suppose. Jolly quick thing, Bellows—
eigh?"
"Don't talk nonsense. You're very much alive. You are in the laboratory,
blundering about. You've just smashed a new electrometer. I don't envy you
when Boyce arrives."
He stared away from me towards the diagrams of cryohydrates. "I must
be deaf," said he. "They've fired a gun, for there goes the puff of smoke,
and I never heard a sound."
I put my hand on his arm again, and this time he was less alarmed. "We
seem to have a sort of invisible bodies," said he. "By Jove! there's a boat
coming round the headland. It's very much like the old life after all—in a
different climate."
I shook his arm. "Davidson," I cried, "wake up!"

II. — It was just then that Boyce came in. So soon as he spoke Davidson
exclaimed: "Old Boyce! Dead too! What a lark!" I hastened to explain that
Davidson was in a kind of somnambulistic trance. Boyce was interested at
once. We both did all we could to rouse the fellow out of his extraordinary
state. He answered our questions, and asked us some of his own, but his
attention seemed distracted by his hallucination about a beach and a ship.
He kept interpolating observations concerning some boat and the davits,
and sails filling with the wind. It made one feel queer, in the dusky
laboratory, to hear him saying such things.
He was blind and helpless. We had to walk him down the passage, one at
each elbow, to Boyce's private room, and while Boyce talked to him there,
and humoured him about this ship idea, I went along the corridor and asked
old Wade to come and look at him. The voice of our Dean sobered him a
little, but not very much. He asked where his hands were, and why he had
to walk about up to his waist in the ground. Wade thought over him a long
time—you know how he knits his brows—and then made him feel the
couch, guiding his hands to it. "That's a couch," said Wade. "The couch in
the private room of Professor Boyce. Horse-hair stuffing."
Davidson felt about, and puzzled over it, and answered presently that he
could feel it all right, but he couldn't see it.
"What do you see?" asked Wade. Davidson said he could see nothing but
a lot of sand and broken-up shells. Wade gave him some other things to
feel, telling him what they were, and watching him keenly.
"The ship is almost hull down," said Davidson presently, apropos of
nothing.
"Never mind the ship," said Wade. "Listen to me, Davidson. Do you
know what hallucination means?"
"Rather," said Davidson.
"Well, everything you see is hallucinatory."
"Bishop Berkeley," said Davidson.

"Don't mistake me," said Wade. "You are alive and in this room of
Boyce's. But something has happened to your eyes. You cannot see; you can
feel and hear, but not see. Do you follow me?"
"It seems to me that I see too much." Davidson rubbed his knuckles into
his eyes. "Well?" he said.
"That's all. Don't let it perplex you. Bellows here and I will take you
home in a cab."
"Wait a bit." Davidson thought. "Help me to sit down," said he presently;
"and now—I'm sorry to trouble you—but will you tell me all that over
again?"
Wade repeated it very patiently. Davidson shut his eyes, and pressed his
hands upon his forehead. "Yes," said he. "It's quite right. Now my eyes are
shut I know you're right. That's you, Bellows, sitting by me on the couch.
I'm in England again. And we're in the dark."
Then he opened his eyes. "And there," said he, "is the sun just rising, and
the yards of the ship, and a tumbled sea, and a couple of birds flying. I
never saw anything so real. And I'm sitting up to my neck in a bank of
sand."
He bent forward and covered his face with his hands. Then he opened his
eyes again. "Dark sea and sunrise! And yet I'm sitting on a sofa in old
Boyce's room!... God help me!"
III. — That was the beginning. For three weeks this strange affection of
Davidson's eyes continued unabated. It was far worse than being blind. He
was absolutely helpless, and had to be fed like a newly-hatched bird, and
led about and undressed. If he attempted to move, he fell over things or
struck himself against walls or doors. After a day or so he got used to
hearing our voices without seeing us, and willingly admitted he was at
home, and that Wade was right in what he told him. My sister, to whom he
was engaged, insisted on coming to see him, and would sit for hours every
day while he talked about this beach of his. Holding her hand seemed to
comfort him immensely. He explained that when we left the College and
drove home—he lived in Hampstead village—it appeared to him as if we
drove right through a sandhill—it was perfectly black until he emerged

again—and through rocks and trees and solid obstacles, and when he was
taken to his own room it made him giddy and almost frantic with the fear of
falling, because going upstairs seemed to lift him thirty or forty feet above
the rocks of his imaginary island. He kept saying he should smash all the
eggs. The end was that he had to be taken down into his father's consulting
room and laid upon a couch that stood there.
He described the island as being a bleak kind of place on the whole, with
very little vegetation, except some peaty stuff, and a lot of bare rock. There
were multitudes of penguins, and they made the rocks white and
disagreeable to see. The sea was often rough, and once there was a
thunderstorm, and he lay and shouted at the silent flashes. Once or twice
seals pulled up on the beach, but only on the first two or three days. He said
it was very funny the way in which the penguins used to waddle right
through him, and how he seemed to lie among them without disturbing
them.
I remember one odd thing, and that was when he wanted very badly to
smoke. We put a pipe in his hands—he almost poked his eye out with it—
and lit it. But he couldn't taste anything. I've since found it's the same with
me—I don't know if it's the usual case—that I cannot enjoy tobacco at all
unless I can see the smoke.
But the queerest part of his vision came when Wade sent him out in a
Bath-chair to get fresh air. The Davidsons hired a chair, and got that deaf
and obstinate dependant of theirs, Widgery, to attend to it. Widgery's ideas
of healthy expeditions were peculiar. My sister, who had been to the Dogs'
Home, met them in Camden Town, towards King's Cross, Widgery trotting
along complacently, and Davidson, evidently most distressed, trying in his
feeble, blind way to attract Widgery's attention.
He positively wept when my sister spoke to him. "Oh, get me out of this
horrible darkness!" he said, feeling for her hand. "I must get out of it, or I
shall die." He was quite incapable of explaining what was the matter, but
my sister decided he must go home, and presently, as they went uphill
towards Hampstead, the horror seemed to drop from him. He said it was
good to see the stars again, though it was then about noon and a blazing
day.

"It seemed," he told me afterwards, "as if I was being carried irresistibly
towards the water. I was not very much alarmed at first. Of course it was
night there—a lovely night."
"Of course?" I asked, for that struck me as odd.
"Of course," said he. "It's always night there when it is day here... Well,
we went right into the water, which was calm and shining under the
moonlight—just a broad swell that seemed to grow broader and flatter as I
came down into it. The surface glistened just like a skin—it might have
been empty space underneath for all I could tell to the contrary. Very
slowly, for I rode slanting into it, the water crept up to my eyes. Then I went
under and the skin seemed to break and heal again about my eyes. The
moon gave a jump up in the sky and grew green and dim, and fish, faintly
glowing, came darting round me—and things that seemed made of
luminous glass; and I passed through a tangle of seaweeds that shone with
an oily lustre. And so I drove down into the sea, and the stars went out one
by one, and the moon grew greener and darker, and the seaweed became a
luminous purple-red. It was all very faint and mysterious, and everything
seemed to quiver. And all the while I could hear the wheels of the Bath-
chair creaking, and the footsteps of people going by, and a man in the
distance selling the special Pall Mall.
"I kept sinking down deeper and deeper into the water. It became inky
black about me, not a ray from above came down into that darkness, and the
phosphorescent things grew brighter and brighter. The snaky branches of
the deeper weeds flickered like the flames of spirit-lamps; but, after a time,
there were no more weeds. The fishes came staring and gaping towards me,
and into me and through me. I never imagined such fishes before. They had
lines of fire along the sides of them as though they had been outlined with a
luminous pencil. And there was a ghastly thing swimming backwards with a
lot of twining arms. And then I saw, coming very slowly towards me
through the gloom, a hazy mass of light that resolved itself as it drew nearer
into multitudes of fishes, struggling and darting round something that
drifted. I drove on straight towards it, and presently I saw in the midst of the
tumult, and by the light of the fish, a bit of splintered spar looming over me,
and a dark hull tilting over, and some glowing phosphorescent forms that
were shaken and writhed as the fish bit at them. Then it was I began to try

to attract Widgery's attention. A horror came upon me. Ugh! I should have
driven right into those half-eaten—things. If your sister had not come! They
had great holes in them, Bellows, and ... Never mind. But it was ghastly!"
IV. — For three weeks Davidson remained in this singular state, seeing
what at the time we imagined was an altogether phantasmal world, and
stone blind to the world around him. Then, one Tuesday, when I called I
met old Davidson in the passage. "He can see his thumb!" the old
gentleman said, in a perfect transport. He was struggling into his overcoat.
"He can see his thumb, Bellows!" he said, with the tears in his eyes. "The
lad will be all right yet."
I rushed in to Davidson. He was holding up a little book before his face,
and looking at it and laughing in a weak kind of way.
"It's amazing," said he. "There's a kind of patch come there." He pointed
with his finger. "I'm on the rocks as usual, and the penguins are staggering
and flapping about as usual, and there's been a whale showing every now
and then, but it's got too dark now to make him out. But put something
there, and I see it—I do see it. It's very dim and broken in places, but I see it
all the same, like a faint spectre of itself. I found it out this morning while
they were dressing me. It's like a hole in this infernal phantom world. Just
put your hand by mine. No—not there. Ah! Yes! I see it. The base of your
thumb and a bit of cuff! It looks like the ghost of a bit of your hand sticking
out of the darkling sky. Just by it there's a group of stars like a cross coming
out."
From that time Davidson began to mend. His account of the change, like
his account of the vision, was oddly convincing. Over patches of his field of
vision, the phantom world grew fainter, grew transparent, as it were, and
through these translucent gaps he began to see dimly the real world about
him. The patches grew in size and number, ran together and spread until
only here and there were blind spots left upon his eyes. He was able to get
up and steer himself about, feed himself once more, read, smoke, and
behave like an ordinary citizen again. At first it was very confusing to him
to have these two pictures overlapping each other like the changing views
of a lantern, but in a little while he began to distinguish the real from the
illusory.

At first he was unfeignedly glad, and seemed only too anxious to
complete his cure by taking exercise and tonics. But as that odd island of
his began to fade away from him, he became queerly interested in it. He
wanted particularly to go down into the deep sea again, and would spend
half his time wandering about the low-lying parts of London, trying to find
the water-logged wreck he had seen drifting. The glare of real daylight very
soon impressed him so vividly as to blot out everything of his shadowy
world, but of a night-time, in a darkened room, he could still see the white-
splashed rocks of the island, and the clumsy penguins staggering to and fro.
But even these grew fainter and fainter, and, at last, soon after he married
my sister, he saw them for the last time.
V. — And now to tell of the queerest thing of all. About two years after
his cure I dined with the Davidsons, and after dinner a man named Atkins
called in. He is a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and a pleasant, talkative
man. He was on friendly terms with my brother-in-law, and was soon on
friendly terms with me. It came out that he was engaged to Davidson's
cousin, and incidentally he took out a kind of pocket photograph case to
show us a new rendering of his fiancie. "And, by-the-by," said he, "here's
the old Fulmar."
Davidson looked at it casually. Then suddenly his face lit up. "Good
heavens!" said he. "I could almost swear——"
"What?" said Atkins.
"That I had seen that ship before."
"Don't see how you can have. She hasn't been out of the South Seas for
six years, and before then——"
"But," began Davidson, and then, "Yes—that's the ship I dreamt of; I'm
sure that's the ship I dreamt of. She was standing off an island that swarmed
with penguins, and she fired a gun."
"Good Lord!" said Atkins, who had now heard the particulars of the
seizure. "How the deuce could you dream that?"
And then, bit by bit, it came out that on the very day Davidson was
seized, H.M.S. Fulmar had actually been off a little rock to the south of

Antipodes Island. A boat had landed overnight to get penguins' eggs, had
been delayed, and a thunderstorm drifting up, the boat's crew had waited
until the morning before rejoining the ship. Atkins had been one of them,
and he corroborated, word for word, the descriptions Davidson had given of
the island and the boat. There is not the slightest doubt in any of our minds
that Davidson has really seen the place. In some unaccountable way, while
he moved hither and thither in London, his sight moved hither and thither in
a manner that corresponded, about this distant island. How is absolutely a
mystery.
That completes the remarkable story of Davidson's eyes. It's perhaps the
best authenticated case in existence of real vision at a distance. Explanation
there is none forthcoming, except what Professor Wade has thrown out. But
his explanation invokes the Fourth Dimension, and a dissertation on
theoretical kinds of space. To talk of there being "a kink in space" seems
mere nonsense to me; it may be because I am no mathematician. When I
said that nothing would alter the fact that the place is eight thousand miles
away, he answered that two points might be a yard away on a sheet of
paper, and yet be brought together by bending the paper round. The reader
may grasp his argument, but I certainly do not. His idea seems to be that
Davidson, stooping between the poles of the big electro-magnet, had some
extraordinary twist given to his retinal elements through the sudden change
in the field of force due to the lightning.
He thinks, as a consequence of this, that it may be possible to live
visually in one part of the world, while one lives bodily in another. He has
even made some experiments in support of his views; but, so far, he has
simply succeeded in blinding a few dogs. I believe that is the net result of
his work, though I have not seen him for some weeks. Latterly I have been
so busy with my work in connection with the Saint Pancras installation that
I have had little opportunity of calling to see him. But the whole of his
theory seems fantastic to me. The facts concerning Davidson stand on an
altogether different footing, and I can testify personally to the accuracy of
every detail I have given.

VIII. — THE LORD OF THE DYNAMOS.
The chief attendant of the three dynamos that buzzed and rattled at
Camberwell, and kept the electric railway going, came out of Yorkshire, and
his name was James Holroyd. He was a practical electrician, but fond of
whisky, a heavy, red-haired brute with irregular teeth. He doubted the
existence of the Deity, but accepted Carnot's cycle, and he had read
Shakespeare and found him weak in chemistry. His helper came out of the
mysterious East, and his name was Azuma-zi. But Holroyd called him
Pooh-bah. Holroyd liked a nigger help because he would stand kicking—a
habit with Holroyd—and did not pry into the machinery and try to learn the
ways of it. Certain odd possibilities of the negro mind brought into abrupt
contact with the crown of our civilisation Holroyd never fully realised,
though just at the end he got some inkling of them.
To define Azuma-zi was beyond ethnology. He was, perhaps, more
negroid than anything else, though his hair was curly rather than frizzy, and
his nose had a bridge. Moreover, his skin was brown rather than black, and
the whites of his eyes were yellow. His broad cheekbones and narrow chin
gave his face something of the viperine V. His head, too, was broad behind,
and low and narrow at the forehead, as if his brain had been twisted round
in the reverse way to a European's. He was short of stature and still shorter
of English. In conversation he made numerous odd noises of no known
marketable value, and his infrequent words were carved and wrought into
heraldic grotesqueness. Holroyd tried to elucidate his religious beliefs, and
—especially after whisky—lectured to him against superstition and
missionaries. Azuma-zi, however, shirked the discussion of his gods, even
though he was kicked for it.
Azuma-zi had come, clad in white but insufficient raiment, out of the
stoke-hole of the Lord Clive, from the Straits Settlements and beyond, into
London. He had heard even in his youth of the greatness and riches of
London, where all the women are white and fair, and even the beggars in
the streets are white, and he had arrived, with newly-earned gold coins in
his pocket, to worship at the shrine of civilisation. The day of his landing

was a dismal one; the sky was dun, and a wind-worried drizzle filtered
down to the greasy streets, but he plunged boldly into the delights of
Shadwell, and was presently cast up, shattered in health, civilised in
costume, penniless, and, except in matters of the direst necessity, practically
a dumb animal, to toil for James Holroyd, and to be bullied by him in the
dynamo shed at Camberwell. And to James Holroyd bullying was a labour
of love.
There were three dynamos with their engines at Camberwell. The two
that have been there since the beginning are small machines; the larger one
was new. The smaller machines made a reasonable noise; their straps
hummed over the drums, every now and then the brushes buzzed and
fizzled, and the air churned steadily, whoo! whoo! whoo! between their
poles. One was loose in its foundations and kept the shed vibrating. But the
big dynamo drowned these little noises altogether with the sustained drone
of its iron core, which somehow set part of the ironwork humming. The
place made the visitor's head reel with the throb, throb, throb of the engines,
the rotation of the big wheels, the spinning ball-valves, the occasional
spittings of the steam, and over all the deep, unceasing, surging note of the
big dynamo. This last noise was from an engineering point of view a defect,
but Azuma-zi accounted it unto the monster for mightiness and pride.
If it were possible we would have the noises of that shed always about
the reader as he reads, we would tell all our story to such an
accompaniment. It was a steady stream of din, from which the ear picked
out first one thread and then another; there was the intermittent snorting,
panting, and seething of the steam engines, the suck and thud of their
pistons, the dull beat on the air as the spokes of the great driving wheels
came round, a note the leather straps made as they ran tighter and looser,
and a fretful tumult from the dynamos; and, over all, sometimes inaudible,
as the ear tired of it, and then creeping back upon the senses again, was this
trombone note of the big machine. The floor never felt steady and quiet
beneath one's feet, but quivered and jarred. It was a confusing, unsteady
place, and enough to send anyone's thoughts jerking into odd zigzags. And
for three months, while the big strike of the engineers was in progress,
Holroyd, who was a blackleg, and Azuma-zi, who was a mere black, were
never out of the stir and eddy of it, but slept and fed in the little wooden
shanty between the shed and the gates.

Holroyd delivered a theological lecture on the text of his big machine
soon after Azuma-zi came. He had to shout to be heard in the din. "Look at
that," said Holroyd; "where's your 'eathen idol to match 'im?" And Azuma-
zi looked. For a moment Holroyd was inaudible, and then Azuma-zi heard:
"Kill a hundred men. Twelve per cent, on the ordinary shares," said
Holroyd, "and that's something like a Gord."
Holroyd was proud of his big dynamo, and expatiated upon its size and
power to Azuma-zi until heaven knows what odd currents of thought that
and the incessant whirling and shindy set up within the curly black cranium.
He would explain in the most graphic manner the dozen or so ways in
which a man might be killed by it, and once he gave Azuma-zi a shock as a
sample of its quality. After that, in the breathing-times of his labour—it was
heavy labour, being not only his own, but most of Holroyd's—Azuma-zi
would sit and watch the big machine. Now and then the brushes would
sparkle and spit blue flashes, at which Holroyd would swear, but all the rest
was as smooth and rhythmic as breathing. The band ran shouting over the
shaft, and ever behind one as one watched was the complacent thud of the
piston. So it lived all day in this big airy shed, with him and Holroyd to wait
upon it; not prisoned up and slaving to drive a ship as the other engines he
knew—mere captive devils of the British Solomon—had been, but a
machine enthroned. Those two smaller dynamos Azuma-zi by force of
contrast despised; the large one he privately christened the Lord of the
Dynamos. They were fretful and irregular, but the big dynamo was steady.
How great it was! How serene and easy in its working! Greater and calmer
even than the Buddhas he had seen at Rangoon, and yet not motionless, but
living! The great black coils spun, spun, spun, the rings ran round under the
brushes, and the deep note of its coil steadied the whole. It affected Azuma-
zi queerly.
Azuma-zi was not fond of labour. He would sit about and watch the Lord
of the Dynamos while Holroyd went away to persuade the yard porter to get
whisky, although his proper place was not in the dynamo shed but behind
the engines, and, moreover, if Holroyd caught him skulking he got hit for it
with a rod of stout copper wire. He would go and stand close to the
colossus, and look up at the great leather band running overhead. There was
a black patch on the band that came round, and it pleased him somehow
among all the clatter to watch this return again and again. Odd thoughts

spun with the whirl of it. Scientific people tell us that savages give souls to
rocks and trees,—and a machine is a thousand times more alive than a rock
or a tree. And Azuma-zi was practically a savage still; the veneer of
civilisation lay no deeper than his slop suit, his bruises, and the coal grime
on his face and hands. His father before him had worshipped a meteoric
stone, kindred blood, it may be, had splashed the broad wheels of
Juggernaut.
He took every opportunity Holroyd gave him of touching and handling
the great dynamo that was fascinating him. He polished and cleaned it until
the metal parts were blinding in the sun. He felt a mysterious sense of
service in doing this. He would go up to it and touch its spinning coils
gently. The gods he had worshipped were all far away. The people in
London hid their gods.
At last his dim feelings grew more distinct, and took shape in thoughts,
and at last in acts. When he came into the roaring shed one morning he
salaamed to the Lord of the Dynamos, and then, when Holroyd was away,
he went and whispered to the thundering machine that he was its servant,
and prayed it to have pity on him and save him from Holroyd. As he did so
a rare gleam of light came in through the open archway of the throbbing
machine-shed, and the Lord of the Dynamos, as he whirled and roared, was
radiant with pale gold. Then Azuma-zi knew that his service was acceptable
to his Lord. After that he did not feel so lonely as he had done, and he had
indeed been very much alone in London. And even when his work-time was
over, which was rare, he loitered about the shed.
Then, the next time Holroyd maltreated him, Azuma-zi went presently to
the Lord of the Dynamos and whispered, "Thou seest, O my Lord!" and the
angry whirr of the machinery seemed to answer him. Thereafter it appeared
to him that whenever Holroyd came into the shed a different note came into
the sounds of the dynamo. "My Lord bides his time," said Azuma-zi to
himself. "The iniquity of the fool is not yet ripe." And he waited and
watched for the day of reckoning. One day there was evidence of short
circuiting, and Holroyd, making an unwary examination—it was in the
afternoon—got a rather severe shock. Azuma-zi from behind the engine saw
him jump off and curse at the peccant coil.

"He is warned," said Azuma-zi to himself. "Surely my Lord is very
patient."
Holroyd had at first initiated his "nigger" into such elementary
conceptions of the dynamo's working as would enable him to take
temporary charge of the shed in his absence. But when he noticed the
manner in which Azuma-zi hung about the monster he became suspicious.
He dimly perceived his assistant was "up to something," and connecting
him with the anointing of the coils with oil that had rotted the varnish in one
place, he issued an edict, shouted above the confusion of the machinery,
"Don't 'ee go nigh that big dynamo any more, Pooh-bah, or a'll take thy skin
off!" Besides, if it pleased Azuma-zi to be near the big machine, it was plain
sense and decency to keep him away from it.
Azuma-zi obeyed at the time, but later he was caught bowing before the
Lord of the Dynamos. At which Holroyd twisted his arm and kicked him as
he turned to go away. As Azuma-zi presently stood behind the engine and
glared at the back of the hated Holroyd, the noises of the machinery took a
new rhythm, and sounded like four words in his native tongue.
It is hard to say exactly what madness is. I fancy Azuma-zi was mad. The
incessant din and whirl of the dynamo shed may have churned up his little
store of knowledge and big store of superstitious fancy, at last, into
something akin to frenzy. At any rate, when the idea of making Holroyd a
sacrifice to the Dynamo Fetich was thus suggested to him, it filled him with
a strange tumult of exultant emotion.
That night the two men and their black shadows were alone in the shed
together. The shed was lit with one big arc light that winked and flickered
purple. The shadows lay black behind the dynamos, the ball governors of
the engines whirled from light to darkness, and their pistons beat loud and
steady. The world outside seen through the open end of the shed seemed
incredibly dim and remote. It seemed absolutely silent, too, since the riot of
the machinery drowned every external sound. Far away was the black fence
of the yard with grey shadowy houses behind, and above was the deep blue
sky and the pale little stars. Azuma-zi suddenly walked across the centre of
the shed above which the leather bands were running, and went into the

shadow by the big dynamo. Holroyd heard a click, and the spin of the
armature changed.
"What are you dewin' with that switch?" he bawled in surprise. "Han't I
told you——"
Then he saw the set expression of Azuma-zi's eyes as the Asiatic came
out of the shadow towards him.
In another moment the two men were grappling fiercely in front of the
great dynamo.
"You coffee-headed fool!" gasped Holroyd, with a brown hand at his
throat. "Keep off those contact rings." In another moment he was tripped
and reeling back upon the Lord of the Dynamos. He instinctively loosened
his grip upon his antagonist to save himself from the machine.
The messenger, sent in furious haste from the station to find out what had
happened in the dynamo shed, met Azuma-zi at the porter's lodge by the
gate. Azuma-zi tried to explain something, but the messenger could make
nothing of the black's incoherent English, and hurried on to the shed. The
machines were all noisily at work, and nothing seemed to be disarranged.
There was, however, a queer smell of singed hair. Then he saw an odd-
looking crumpled mass clinging to the front of the big dynamo, and,
approaching, recognised the distorted remains of Holroyd.
The man stared and hesitated a moment. Then he saw the face, and shut
his eyes convulsively. He turned on his heel before he opened them, so that
he should not see Holroyd again, and went out of the shed to get advice and
help.
When Azuma-zi saw Holroyd die in the grip of the Great Dynamo he had
been a little scared about the consequences of his act. Yet he felt strangely
elated, and knew that the favour of the Lord Dynamo was upon him. His
plan was already settled when he met the man coming from the station, and
the scientific manager who speedily arrived on the scene jumped at the
obvious conclusion of suicide. This expert scarcely noticed Azuma-zi,
except to ask a few questions. Did he see Holroyd kill himself? Azuma-zi
explained he had been out of sight at the engine furnace until he heard a

difference in the noise from the dynamo. It was not a difficult examination,
being untinctured by suspicion.
The distorted remains of Holroyd, which the electrician removed from
the machine, were hastily covered by the porter with a coffee-stained table-
cloth. Somebody, by a happy inspiration, fetched a medical man. The expert
was chiefly anxious to get the machine at work again, for seven or eight
trains had stopped midway in the stuffy tunnels of the electric railway.
Azuma-zi, answering or misunderstanding the questions of the people who
had by authority or impudence come into the shed, was presently sent back
to the stoke-hole by the scientific manager. Of course a crowd collected
outside the gates of the yard—a crowd, for no known reason, always hovers
for a day or two near the scene of a sudden death in London—two or three
reporters percolated somehow into the engine-shed, and one even got to
Azuma-zi; but the scientific expert cleared them out again, being himself an
amateur journalist.
Presently the body was carried away, and public interest departed with it.
Azuma-zi remained very quietly at his furnace, seeing over and over again
in the coals a figure that wriggled violently and became still. An hour after
the murder, to any one coming into the shed it would have looked exactly as
if nothing remarkable had ever happened there. Peeping presently from his
engine-room the black saw the Lord Dynamo spin and whirl beside his little
brothers, and the driving wheels were beating round, and the steam in the
pistons went thud, thud, exactly as it had been earlier in the evening. After
all, from the mechanical point of view, it had been a most insignificant
incident—the mere temporary deflection of a current. But now the slender
form and slender shadow of the scientific manager replaced the sturdy
outline of Holroyd travelling up and down the lane of light upon the
vibrating floor under the straps between the engines and the dynamos.
"Have I not served my Lord?" said Azuma-zi inaudibly, from his shadow,
and the note of the great dynamo rang out full and clear. As he looked at the
big whirling mechanism the strange fascination of it that had been a little in
abeyance since Holroyd's death resumed its sway.
Never had Azuma-zi seen a man killed so swiftly and pitilessly. The big
humming machine had slain its victim without wavering for a second from

its steady beating. It was indeed a mighty god.
The unconscious scientific manager stood with his back to him,
scribbling on a piece of paper. His shadow lay at the foot of the monster.
Was the Lord Dynamo still hungry? His servant was ready.
Azuma-zi made a stealthy step forward; then stopped. The scientific
manager suddenly ceased his writing, walked down the shed to the endmost
of the dynamos, and began to examine the brushes.
Azuma-zi hesitated, and then slipped across noiselessly into the shadow
by the switch. There he waited. Presently the manager's footsteps could be
heard returning. He stopped in his old position, unconscious of the stoker
crouching ten feet away from him. Then the big dynamo suddenly fizzled,
and in another moment Azuma-zi had sprung out of the darkness upon him.
First, the scientific manager was gripped round the body and swung
towards the big dynamo, then, kicking with his knee and forcing his
antagonist's head down with his hands, he loosened the grip on his waist
and swung round away from the machine. Then the black grasped him
again, putting a curly head against his chest, and they swayed and panted as
it seemed for an age or so. Then the scientific manager was impelled to
catch a black ear in his teeth and bite furiously. The black yelled hideously.
They rolled over on the floor, and the black, who had apparently slipped
from the vice of the teeth or parted with some ear—the scientific manager
wondered which at the time—tried to throttle him. The scientific manager
was making some ineffectual efforts to claw something with his hands and
to kick, when the welcome sound of quick footsteps sounded on the floor.
The next moment Azuma-zi had left him and darted towards the big
dynamo. There was a splutter amid the roar.
The officer of the company who had entered stood staring as Azuma-zi
caught the naked terminals in his hands, gave one horrible convulsion, and
then hung motionless from the machine, his face violently distorted.
"I'm jolly glad you came in when you did," said the scientific manager,
still sitting on the floor.

He looked at the still quivering figure. "It is not a nice death to die,
apparently—but it is quick."
The official was still staring at the body. He was a man of slow
apprehension.
There was a pause.
The scientific manager got up on his feet rather awkwardly. He ran his
fingers along his collar thoughtfully, and moved his head to and fro several
times.
"Poor Holroyd! I see now." Then almost mechanically he went towards
the switch in the shadow and turned the current into the railway circuit
again. As he did so the singed body loosened its grip upon the machine and
fell forward on its face. The core of the dynamo roared out loud and clear,
and the armature beat the air.
So ended prematurely the worship of the Dynamo Deity, perhaps the
most short-lived of all religions. Yet withal it could at least boast a
Martyrdom and a Human Sacrifice.

IX. — THE MOTH.
Probably you have heard of Hapley—not W. T. Hapley, the son, but the
celebrated Hapley, the Hapley of Periplaneta Hapliia, Hapley the
entomologist.
If so you know at least of the great feud between Hapley and Professor
Pawkins, though certain of its consequences may be new to you. For those
who have not, a word or two of explanation is necessary, which the idle
reader may go over with a glancing eye, if his indolence so incline him.
It is amazing how very widely diffused is the ignorance of such really
important matters as this Hapley-Pawkins feud. Those epoch-making
controversies, again, that have convulsed the Geological Society are, I
verily believe, almost entirely unknown outside the fellowship of that body.
I have heard men of fair general education even refer to the great scenes at
these meetings as vestry-meeting squabbles. Yet the great hate of the
English and Scotch geologists has lasted now half a century, and has "left
deep and abundant marks upon the body of the science." And this Hapley-
Pawkins business, though perhaps a more personal affair, stirred passions as
profound, if not profounder. Your common man has no conception of the
zeal that animates a scientific investigator, the fury of contradiction you can
arouse in him. It is the odium theologicum in a new form. There are men,
for instance, who would gladly burn Professor Ray Lankester at Smithfield
for his treatment of the Mollusca in the Encyclopaedia. That fantastic
extension of the Cephalopods to cover the Pteropods ... But I wander from
Hapley and Pawkins.
It began years and years ago, with a revision of the Microlepidoptera
(whatever these may be) by Pawkins, in which he extinguished a new
species created by Hapley. Hapley, who was always quarrelsome, replied by
a stinging impeachment of the entire classification of Pawkins.[A] Pawkins
in his "Rejoinder"[B] suggested that Hapley's microscope was as defective
as his power of observation, and called him an "irresponsible meddler"—
Hapley was not a professor at that time. Hapley in his retort,[C] spoke of

"blundering collectors," and described, as if inadvertently, Pawkins' revision
as a "miracle of ineptitude." It was war to the knife. However, it would
scarcely interest the reader to detail how these two great men quarrelled,
and how the split between them widened until from the Microlepidoptera
they were at war upon every open question in entomology. There were
memorable occasions. At times the Royal Entomological Society meetings
resembled nothing so much as the Chamber of Deputies. On the whole, I
fancy Pawkins was nearer the truth than Hapley. But Hapley was skilful
with his rhetoric, had a turn for ridicule rare in a scientific man, was
endowed with vast energy, and had a fine sense of injury in the matter of the
extinguished species; while Pawkins was a man of dull presence, prosy of
speech, in shape not unlike a water-barrel, over conscientious with
testimonials, and suspected of jobbing museum appointments. So the young
men gathered round Hapley and applauded him. It was a long struggle,
vicious from the beginning and growing at last to pitiless antagonism. The
successive turns of fortune, now an advantage to one side and now to
another—now Hapley tormented by some success of Pawkins, and now
Pawkins outshone by Hapley, belong rather to the history of entomology
than to this story.
[A "Remarks on a Recent Revision of Microlepidoptera." Quart. Journ.
Entomological Soc., 1863.]
[B "Rejoinder to certain Remarks," etc. Ibid. 1864.]
[C "Further Remarks," etc. Ibid.]
But in 1891 Pawkins, whose health had been bad for some time,
published some work upon the "mesoblast" of the Death's Head Moth. What
the mesoblast of the Death's Head Moth may be does not matter a rap in this
story. But the work was far below his usual standard, and gave Hapley an
opening he had coveted for years. He must have worked night and day to
make the most of his advantage.
In an elaborate critique he rent Pawkins to tatters—one can fancy the
man's disordered black hair, and his queer dark eyes flashing as he went for
his antagonist—and Pawkins made a reply, halting, ineffectual, with painful
gaps of silence, and yet malignant. There was no mistaking his will to

wound Hapley, nor his incapacity to do it. But few of those who heard him
—I was absent from that meeting—realised how ill the man was.
Hapley got his opponent down, and meant to finish him. He followed
with a simply brutal attack upon Pawkins, in the form of a paper upon the
development of moths in general, a paper showing evidence of a most
extraordinary amount of mental labour, and yet couched in a violently
controversial tone. Violent as it was, an editorial note witnesses that it was
modified. It must have covered Pawkins with shame and confusion of face.
It left no loophole; it was murderous in argument, and utterly contemptuous
in tone; an awful thing for the declining years of a man's career.
The world of entomologists waited breathlessly for the rejoinder from
Pawkins. He would try one, for Pawkins had always been game. But when
it came it surprised them. For the rejoinder of Pawkins was to catch
influenza, proceed to pneumonia, and die.
It was perhaps as effectual a reply as he could make under the
circumstances, and largely turned the current of feeling against Hapley. The
very people who had most gleefully cheered on those gladiators became
serious at the consequence. There could be no reasonable doubt the fret of
the defeat had contributed to the death of Pawkins. There was a limit even
to scientific controversy, said serious people. Another crushing attack was
already in the press and appeared on the day before the funeral. I don't think
Hapley exerted himself to stop it. People remembered how Hapley had
hounded down his rival, and forgot that rival's defects. Scathing satire reads
ill over fresh mould. The thing provoked comment in the daily papers. This
it was that made me think that you had probably heard of Hapley and this
controversy. But, as I have already remarked, scientific workers live very
much in a world of their own; half the people, I dare say, who go along
Piccadilly to the Academy every year, could not tell you where the learned
societies abide. Many even think that research is a kind of happy-family
cage in which all kinds of men lie down together in peace.
In his private thoughts Hapley could not forgive Pawkins for dying. In
the first place, it was a mean dodge to escape the absolute pulverisation
Hapley had in hand for him, and in the second, it left Hapley's mind with a
queer gap in it. For twenty years he had worked hard, sometimes far into

the night, and seven days a week, with microscope, scalpel, collecting-net,
and pen, and almost entirely with reference to Pawkins. The European
reputation he had won had come as an incident in that great antipathy. He
had gradually worked up to a climax in this last controversy. It had killed
Pawkins, but it had also thrown Hapley out of gear, so to speak, and his
doctor advised him to give up work for a time, and rest. So Hapley went
down into a quiet village in Kent, and thought day and night of Pawkins,
and good things it was now impossible to say about him.
At last Hapley began to realise in what direction the pre-occupation
tended. He determined to make a fight for it, and started by trying to read
novels. But he could not get his mind off Pawkins, white in the face and
making his last speech—every sentence a beautiful opening for Hapley. He
turned to fiction—and found it had no grip on him. He read the "Island
Nights' Entertainments" until his "sense of causation" was shocked beyond
endurance by the Bottle Imp. Then he went to Kipling, and found he
"proved nothing," besides being irreverent and vulgar. These scientific
people have their limitations. Then unhappily, he tried Besant's "Inner
House," and the opening chapter set his mind upon learned societies and
Pawkins at once.
So Hapley turned to chess, and found it a little more soothing. He soon
mastered the moves and the chief gambits and commoner closing positions,
and began to beat the Vicar. But then the cylindrical contours of the
opposite king began to resemble Pawkins standing up and gasping
ineffectually against check-mate, and Hapley decided to give up chess.
Perhaps the study of some new branch of science would after all be better
diversion. The best rest is change of occupation. Hapley determined to
plunge at diatoms, and had one of his smaller microscopes and Halibut's
monograph sent down from London. He thought that perhaps if he could get
up a vigorous quarrel with Halibut, he might be able to begin life afresh and
forget Pawkins. And very soon he was hard at work in his habitual
strenuous fashion, at these microscopic denizens of the way-side pool.
It was on the third day of the diatoms that Hapley became aware of a
novel addition to the local fauna. He was working late at the microscope,
and the only light in the room was the brilliant little lamp with the special

form of green shade. Like all experienced microscopists, he kept both eyes
open. It is the only way to avoid excessive fatigue. One eye was over the
instrument, and bright and distinct before that was the circular field of the
microscope, across which a brown diatom was slowly moving. With the
other eye Hapley saw, as it were, without seeing. He was only dimly
conscious of the brass side of the instrument, the illuminated part of the
table-cloth, a sheet of notepaper, the foot of the lamp, and the darkened
room beyond.
Suddenly his attention drifted from one eye to the other. The table-cloth
was of the material called tapestry by shopmen, and rather brightly
coloured. The pattern was in gold, with a small amount of crimson and pale
blue upon a greyish ground. At one point the pattern seemed displaced, and
there was a vibrating movement of the colours at this point.
Hapley suddenly moved his head back and looked with both eyes. His
mouth fell open with astonishment.
It was a large moth or butterfly; its wings spread in butterfly fashion!
It was strange it should be in the room at all, for the windows were
closed. Strange that it should not have attracted his attention when fluttering
to its present position. Strange that it should match the table-cloth. Stranger
far that to him, Hapley, the great entomologist, it was altogether unknown.
There was no delusion. It was crawling slowly towards the foot of the lamp.
"New Genus, by heavens! And in England!" said Hapley, staring.
Then he suddenly thought of Pawkins. Nothing would have maddened
Pawkins more...And Pawkins was dead!
Something about the head and body of the insect became singularly
suggestive of Pawkins, just as the chess king had been.
"Confound Pawkins!" said Hapley. "But I must catch this." And looking
round him for some means of capturing the moth, he rose slowly out of his
chair. Suddenly the insect rose, struck the edge of the lampshade—Hapley
heard the "ping"—and vanished into the shadow.

In a moment Hapley had whipped off the shade, so that the whole room
was illuminated. The thing had disappeared, but soon his practised eye
detected it upon the wall-paper near the door. He went towards it poising
the lamp-shade for capture. Before he was within striking distance,
however, it had risen and was fluttering round the room. After the fashion of
its kind, it flew with sudden starts and turns, seeming to vanish here and
reappear there. Once Hapley struck, and missed; then again.
The third time he hit his microscope. The instrument swayed, struck and
overturned the lamp, and fell noisily upon the floor. The lamp turned over
on the table and, very luckily, went out. Hapley was left in the dark. With a
start he felt the strange moth blunder into his face.
It was maddening. He had no lights. If he opened the door of the room
the thing would get away. In the darkness he saw Pawkins quite distinctly
laughing at him. Pawkins had ever an oily laugh. He swore furiously and
stamped his foot on the floor.
There was a timid rapping at the door.
Then it opened, perhaps a foot, and very slowly. The alarmed face of the
landlady appeared behind a pink candle flame; she wore a night-cap over
her grey hair and had some purple garment over her shoulders. "What was
that fearful smash?" she said. "Has anything——" The strange moth
appeared fluttering about the chink of the door. "Shut that door!" said
Hapley, and suddenly rushed at her.
The door slammed hastily. Hapley was left alone in the dark. Then in the
pause he heard his landlady scuttle upstairs, lock her door, and drag
something heavy across the room and put against it.
It became evident to Hapley that his conduct and appearance had been
strange and alarming. Confound the moth! and Pawkins! However, it was a
pity to lose the moth now. He felt his way into the hall and found the
matches, after sending his hat down upon the floor with a noise like a drum.
With the lighted candle he returned to the sitting-room. No moth was to be
seen. Yet once for a moment it seemed that the thing was fluttering round
his head. Hapley very suddenly decided to give up the moth and go to bed.
But he was excited. All night long his sleep was broken by dreams of the

moth, Pawkins, and his landlady. Twice in the night he turned out and
soused his head in cold water.
One thing was very clear to him. His landlady could not possibly
understand about the strange moth, especially as he had failed to catch it.
No one but an entomologist would understand quite how he felt. She was
probably frightened at his behaviour, and yet he failed to see how he could
explain it. He decided to say nothing further about the events of last night.
After breakfast he saw her in her garden, and decided to go out and talk to
reassure her. He talked to her about beans and potatoes, bees, caterpillars,
and the price of fruit. She replied in her usual manner, but she looked at him
a little suspiciously, and kept walking as he walked, so that there was
always a bed of flowers, or a row of beans, or something of the sort,
between them. After a while he began to feel singularly irritated at this, and
to conceal his vexation went indoors and presently went out for a walk.
The moth, or butterfly, trailing an odd flavour of Pawkins with it, kept
coming into that walk, though he did his best to keep his mind off it. Once
he saw it quite distinctly, with its wings flattened out, upon the old stone
wall that runs along the west edge of the park, but going up to it he found it
was only two lumps of grey and yellow lichen. "This," said Hapley, "is the
reverse of mimicry. Instead of a butterfly looking like a stone, here is a
stone looking like a butterfly!" Once something hovered and fluttered round
his head, but by an effort of will he drove that impression out of his mind
again.
In the afternoon Hapley called upon the Vicar, and argued with him upon
theological questions. They sat in the little arbour covered with briar, and
smoked as they wrangled. "Look at that moth!" said Hapley, suddenly,
pointing to the edge of the wooden table.
"Where?" said the Vicar.
"You don't see a moth on the edge of the table there?" said Hapley.
"Certainly not," said the Vicar.
Hapley was thunderstruck. He gasped. The Vicar was staring at him.
Clearly the man saw nothing. "The eye of faith is no better than the eye of
science," said Hapley awkwardly.

"I don't see your point," said the Vicar, thinking it was part of the
argument.
That night Hapley found the moth crawling over his counterpane. He sat
on the edge of the bed in his shirt sleeves and reasoned with himself. Was it
pure hallucination? He knew he was slipping, and he battled for his sanity
with the same silent energy he had formerly displayed against Pawkins. So
persistent is mental habit, that he felt as if it were still a struggle with
Pawkins. He was well versed in psychology. He knew that such visual
illusions do come as a result of mental strain. But the point was, he did not
only see the moth, he had heard it when it touched the edge of the
lampshade, and afterwards when it hit against the wall, and he had felt it
strike his face in the dark.
He looked at it. It was not at all dreamlike, but perfectly clear and solid-
looking in the candle-light. He saw the hairy body, and the short feathery
antennae, the jointed legs, even a place where the down was rubbed from
the wing. He suddenly felt angry with himself for being afraid of a little
insect.
His landlady had got the servant to sleep with her that night, because she
was afraid to be alone. In addition she had locked the door, and put the
chest of drawers against it. They listened and talked in whispers after they
had gone to bed, but nothing occurred to alarm them. About eleven they had
ventured to put the candle out, and had both dozed off to sleep. They woke
up with a start, and sat up in bed, listening in the darkness.
Then they heard slippered feet going to and fro in Hapley's room. A chair
was overturned, and there was a violent dab at the wall. Then a china
mantel ornament smashed upon the fender. Suddenly the door of the room
opened, and they heard him upon the landing. They clung to one another,
listening. He seemed to be dancing upon the staircase. Now he would go
down three or four steps quickly, then up again, then hurry down into the
hall. They heard the umbrella stand go over, and the fanlight break. Then
the bolt shot and the chain rattled. He was opening the door.
They hurried to the window. It was a dim grey night; an almost unbroken
sheet of watery cloud was sweeping across the moon, and the hedge and
trees in front of the house were black against the pale roadway. They saw

Hapley, looking like a ghost in his shirt and white trousers, running to and
fro in the road, and beating the air. Now he would stop, now he would dart
very rapidly at something invisible, now he would move upon it with
stealthy strides. At last he went out of sight up the road towards the down.
Then, while they argued who should go down and lock the door, he
returned. He was walking very fast, and he came straight into the house,
closed the door carefully, and went quietly up to his bedroom. Then
everything was silent.
"Mrs. Colville," said Hapley, calling down the staircase next morning, "I
hope I did not alarm you last night."
"You may well ask that!" said Mrs. Colville.
"The fact is, I am a sleep-walker, and the last two nights I have been
without my sleeping mixture. There is nothing to be alarmed about, really. I
am sorry I made such an ass of myself. I will go over the down to
Shoreham, and get some stuff to make me sleep soundly. I ought to have
done that yesterday."
But half-way over the down, by the chalk pits, the moth came upon
Hapley again. He went on, trying to keep his mind upon chess problems,
but it was no good. The thing fluttered into his face, and he struck at it with
his hat in self-defence. Then rage, the old rage—the rage he had so often
felt against Pawkins—came upon him again. He went on, leaping and
striking at the eddying insect. Suddenly he trod on nothing, and fell
headlong.
There was a gap in his sensations, and Hapley found himself sitting on
the heap of flints in front of the opening of the chalk-pits, with a leg twisted
back under him. The strange moth was still fluttering round his head. He
struck at it with his hand, and turning his head saw two men approaching
him. One was the village doctor. It occurred to Hapley that this was lucky.
Then it came into his mind with extraordinary vividness, that no one would
ever be able to see the strange moth except himself, and that it behoved him
to keep silent about it.
Late that night, however, after his broken leg was set, he was feverish
and forgot his self-restraint. He was lying flat on his bed, and he began to

run his eyes round the room to see if the moth was still about. He tried not
to do this, but it was no good. He soon caught sight of the thing resting
close to his hand, by the night-light, on the green table-cloth. The wings
quivered. With a sudden wave of anger he smote at it with his fist, and the
nurse woke up with a shriek. He had missed it.
"That moth!" he said; and then, "It was fancy. Nothing!"
All the time he could see quite clearly the insect going round the cornice
and darting across the room, and he could also see that the nurse saw
nothing of it and looked at him strangely. He must keep himself in hand. He
knew he was a lost man if he did not keep himself in hand. But as the night
waned the fever grew upon him, and the very dread he had of seeing the
moth made him see it. About five, just as the dawn was grey, he tried to get
out of bed and catch it, though his leg was afire with pain. The nurse had to
struggle with him.
On account of this, they tied him down to the bed. At this the moth grew
bolder, and once he felt it settle in his hair. Then, because he struck out
violently with his arms, they tied these also. At this the moth came and
crawled over his face, and Hapley wept, swore, screamed, prayed for them
to take it off him, unavailingly.
The doctor was a blockhead, a just-qualified general practitioner, and
quite ignorant of mental science. He simply said there was no moth. Had he
possessed the wit, he might still, perhaps, have saved Hapley from his fate
by entering into his delusion, and covering his face with gauze, as he prayed
might be done. But, as I say, the doctor was a blockhead, and until the leg
was healed Hapley was kept tied to his bed, and with the imaginary moth
crawling over him. It never left him while he was awake and it grew to a
monster in his dreams. While he was awake he longed for sleep, and from
sleep he awoke screaming.
So now Hapley is spending the remainder of his days in a padded room,
worried by a moth that no one else can see. The asylum doctor calls it
hallucination; but Hapley, when he is in his easier mood, and can talk, says
it is the ghost of Pawkins, and consequently a unique specimen and well
worth the trouble of catching.

X. — THE TREASURE IN THE FOREST.
The canoe was now approaching the land. The bay opened out, and a gap
in the white surf of the reef marked where the little river ran out to the sea;
the thicker and deeper green of the virgin forest showed its course down the
distant hill slope. The forest here came close to the beach. Far beyond, dim
and almost cloudlike in texture, rose the mountains, like suddenly frozen
waves. The sea was still save for an almost imperceptible swell. The sky
blazed.
The man with the carved paddle stopped. "It should be somewhere here,"
he said. He shipped the paddle and held his arms out straight before him.
The other man had been in the fore part of the canoe, closely scrutinising
the land. He had a sheet of yellow paper on his knee.
"Come and look at this, Evans," he said.
Both men spoke in low tones, and their lips were hard and dry.
The man called Evans came swaying along the canoe until he could look
over his companion's shoulder.
The paper had the appearance of a rough map. By much folding it was
creased and worn to the pitch of separation, and the second man held the
discoloured fragments together where they had parted. On it one could
dimly make out, in almost obliterated pencil, the outline of the bay.
"Here," said Evans, "is the reef, and here is the gap." He ran his thumb-
nail over the chart.
"This curved and twisting line is the river—I could do with a drink now!
—and this star is the place."
"You see this dotted line," said the man with the map; "it is a straight
line, and runs from the opening of the reef to a clump of palm-trees. The

star comes just where it cuts the river. We must mark the place as we go into
the lagoon."
"It's queer," said Evans, after a pause, "what these little marks down here
are for. It looks like the plan of a house or something; but what all these
little dashes, pointing this way and that, may mean I can't get a notion. And
what's the writing?"
"Chinese," said the man with the map.
"Of course! He was a Chinee," said Evans.
"They all were," said the man with the map.
They both sat for some minutes staring at the land, while the canoe
drifted slowly. Then Evans looked towards the paddle.
"Your turn with the paddle now, Hooker," said he.
And his companion quietly folded up his map, put it in his pocket, passed
Evans carefully, and began to paddle. His movements were languid, like
those of a man whose strength was nearly exhausted.
Evans sat with his eyes half closed, watching the frothy breakwater of the
coral creep nearer and nearer. The sky was like a furnace, for the sun was
near the zenith. Though they were so near the Treasure he did not feel the
exaltation he had anticipated. The intense excitement of the struggle for the
plan, and the long night voyage from the mainland in the unprovisioned
canoe had, to use his own expression, "taken it out of him." He tried to
arouse himself by directing his mind to the ingots the Chinamen had spoken
of, but it would not rest there; it came back headlong to the thought of
sweet water rippling in the river, and to the almost unendurable dryness of
his lips and throat. The rhythmic wash of the sea upon the reef was
becoming audible now, and it had a pleasant sound in his ears; the water
washed along the side of the canoe, and the paddle dripped between each
stroke. Presently he began to doze.
He was still dimly conscious of the island, but a queer dream texture
interwove with his sensations. Once again it was the night when he and
Hooker had hit upon the Chinamen's secret; he saw the moonlit trees, the

little fire burning, and the black figures of the three Chinamen—silvered on
one side by moonlight, and on the other glowing from the firelight—and
heard them talking together in pigeon-English—for they came from
different provinces. Hooker had caught the drift of their talk first, and had
motioned to him to listen. Fragments of the conversation were inaudible,
and fragments incomprehensible. A Spanish galleon from the Philippines
hopelessly aground, and its treasure buried against the day of return, lay in
the background of the story; a shipwrecked crew thinned by disease, a
quarrel or so, and the needs of discipline, and at last taking to their boats
never to be heard of again. Then Chang-hi, only a year since, wandering
ashore, had happened upon the ingots hidden for two hundred years, had
deserted his junk, and reburied them with infinite toil, single-handed but
very safe. He laid great stress on the safety—it was a secret of his. Now he
wanted help to return and exhume them. Presently the little map fluttered
and the voices sank. A fine story for two, stranded British wastrels to hear!
Evans' dream shifted to the moment when he had Chang-hi's pigtail in his
hand. The life of a Chinaman is scarcely sacred like a European's. The
cunning little face of Chang-hi, first keen and furious like a startled snake,
and then fearful, treacherous, and pitiful, became overwhelmingly
prominent in the dream. At the end Chang-hi had grinned, a most
incomprehensible and startling grin. Abruptly things became very
unpleasant, as they will do at times in dreams. Chang-hi gibbered and
threatened him. He saw in his dream heaps and heaps of gold, and Chang-hi
intervening and struggling to hold him back from it. He took Chang-hi by
the pig-tail—how big the yellow brute was, and how he struggled and
grinned! He kept growing bigger, too. Then the bright heaps of gold turned
to a roaring furnace, and a vast devil, surprisingly like Chang-hi, but with a
huge black tail, began to feed him with coals. They burnt his mouth
horribly. Another devil was shouting his name: "Evans, Evans, you sleepy
fool!"—or was it Hooker?
He woke up. They were in the mouth of the lagoon.
"There are the three palm-trees. It must be in a line with that clump of
bushes," said his companion. "Mark that. If we, go to those bushes and then
strike into the bush in a straight line from here, we shall come to it when we
come to the stream."

They could see now where the mouth of the stream opened out. At the
sight of it Evans revived. "Hurry up, man," he said, "or by heaven I shall
have to drink sea water!" He gnawed his hand and stared at the gleam of
silver among the rocks and green tangle.
Presently he turned almost fiercely upon Hooker. "Give me the paddle,"
he said.
So they reached the river mouth. A little way up Hooker took some water
in the hollow of his hand, tasted it, and spat it out. A little further he tried
again. "This will do," he said, and they began drinking eagerly.
"Curse this!" said Evans suddenly. "It's too slow." And, leaning
dangerously over the fore part of the canoe, he began to suck up the water
with his lips.
Presently they made an end of drinking, and, running the canoe into a
little creek, were about to land among the thick growth that overhung the
water.
"We shall have to scramble through this to the beach to find our bushes
and get the line to the place," said Evans.
"We had better paddle round," said Hooker.
So they pushed out again into the river and paddled back down it to the
sea, and along the shore to the place where the clump of bushes grew. Here
they landed, pulled the light canoe far up the beach, and then went up
towards the edge of the jungle until they could see the opening of the reef
and the bushes in a straight line. Evans had taken a native implement out of
the canoe. It was L-shaped, and the transverse piece was armed with
polished stone. Hooker carried the paddle. "It is straight now in this
direction," said he; "we must push through this till we strike the stream.
Then we must prospect."
They pushed through a close tangle of reeds, broad fronds, and young
trees, and at first it was toilsome going, but very speedily the trees became
larger and the ground beneath them opened out. The blaze of the sunlight
was replaced by insensible degrees by cool shadow. The trees became at
last vast pillars that rose up to a canopy of greenery far overhead. Dim

white flowers hung from their stems, and ropy creepers swung from tree to
tree. The shadow deepened. On the ground, blotched fungi and a red-brown
incrustation became frequent.
Evans shivered. "It seems almost cold here after the blaze outside."
"I hope we are keeping to the straight," said Hooker.
Presently they saw, far ahead, a gap in the sombre darkness where white
shafts of hot sunlight smote into the forest. There also was brilliant green
undergrowth and coloured flowers. Then they heard the rush of water.
"Here is the river. We should be close to it now," said Hooker.
The vegetation was thick by the river bank. Great plants, as yet unnamed,
grew among the roots of the big trees, and spread rosettes of huge green
fans towards the strip of sky. Many flowers and a creeper with shiny foliage
clung to the exposed stems. On the water of the broad, quiet pool which the
treasure-seekers now overlooked there floated big oval leaves and a waxen,
pinkish-white flower not unlike a water-lily. Further, as the river bent away
from them, the water suddenly frothed and became noisy in a rapid.
"Well?" said Evans.
"We have swerved a little from the straight," said Hooker. "That was to
be expected."
He turned and looked into the dim cool shadows of the silent forest
behind them. "If we beat a little way up and down the stream we should
come to something."
"You said—" began Evans.
"He said there was a heap of stones," said Hooker.
The two men looked at each other for a moment.
"Let us try a little down-stream first," said Evans.
They advanced slowly, looking curiously about them. Suddenly Evans
stopped. "What the devil's that?" he said.

Hooker followed his finger. "Something blue," he said. It had come into
view as they topped a gentle swell of the ground. Then he began to
distinguish what it was.
He advanced suddenly with hasty steps, until the body that belonged to
the limp hand and arm had become visible. His grip tightened on the
implement he carried. The thing was the figure of a Chinaman lying on his
face. The abandon of the pose was unmistakable.
The two men drew closer together, and stood staring silently at this
ominous dead body. It lay in a clear space among the trees. Near by was a
spade after the Chinese pattern, and further off lay a scattered heap of
stones, close to a freshly dug hole.
"Somebody has been here before," said Hooker, clearing his throat.
Then suddenly Evans began to swear and rave, and stamp upon the
ground.
Hooker turned white but said nothing. He advanced towards the prostrate
body. He saw the neck was puffed and purple, and the hands and ankles
swollen. "Pah!" he said, and suddenly turned away and went towards the
excavation. He gave a cry of surprise. He shouted to Evans, who was
following him slowly.
"You fool! It's all right. It's here still." Then he turned again and looked at
the dead Chinaman, and then again at the hole.
Evans hurried to the hole. Already half exposed by the ill-fated wretch
beside them lay a number of dull yellow bars. He bent down in the hole,
and, clearing off the soil with his bare hands, hastily pulled one of the heavy
masses out. As he did so a little thorn pricked his hand. He pulled the
delicate spike out with his fingers and lifted the ingot.
"Only gold or lead could weigh like this," he said exultantly.
Hooker was still looking at the dead Chinaman. He was puzzled.
"He stole a march on his friends," he said at last. "He came here alone,
and some poisonous snake has killed him... I wonder how he found the
place."

Evans stood with the ingot in his hands. What did a dead Chinaman
signify? "We shall have to take this stuff to the mainland piecemeal, and
bury it there for a while. How shall we get it to the canoe?"
He took his jacket off and spread it on the ground, and flung two or three
ingots into it. Presently he found that another little thorn had punctured his
skin.
"This is as much as we can carry," said he. Then suddenly, with a queer
rush of irritation, "What are you staring at?"
Hooker turned to him. "I can't stand him ..." He nodded towards the
corpse. "It's so like——"
"Rubbish!" said Evans. "All Chinamen are alike."
Hooker looked into his face. "I'm going to bury that, anyhow, before I
lend a hand with this stuff."
"Don't be a fool, Hooker," said Evans, "Let that mass of corruption bide."
Hooker hesitated, and then his eye went carefully over the brown soil
about them. "It scares me somehow," he said.
"The thing is," said Evans, "what to do with these ingots. Shall we re-
bury them over here, or take them across the strait in the canoe?"
Hooker thought. His puzzled gaze wandered among the tall tree-trunks,
and up into the remote sunlit greenery overhead. He shivered again as his
eye rested upon the blue figure of the Chinaman. He stared searchingly
among the grey depths between the trees.
"What's come to you, Hooker?" said Evans. "Have you lost your wits?"
"Let's get the gold out of this place, anyhow," said Hooker.
He took the ends of the collar of the coat in his hands, and Evans took the
opposite corners, and they lifted the mass. "Which way?" said Evans. "To
the canoe?"
"It's queer," said Evans, when they had advanced only a few steps, "but
my arms ache still with that paddling."

"Curse it!" he said. "But they ache! I must rest."
They let the coat down, Evans' face was white, and little drops of sweat
stood out upon his forehead. "It's stuffy, somehow, in this forest."
Then with an abrupt transition to unreasonable anger: "What is the good
of waiting here all the day? Lend a hand, I say! You have done nothing but
moon since we saw the dead Chinaman."
Hooker was looking steadfastly at his companion's face. He helped raise
the coat bearing the ingots, and they went forward perhaps a hundred yards
in silence. Evans began to breathe heavily. "Can't you speak?" he said.
"What's the matter with you?" said Hooker.
Evans stumbled, and then with a sudden curse flung the coat from him.
He stood for a moment staring at Hooker, and then with a groan clutched at
his own throat.
"Don't come near me," he said, and went and leant against a tree. Then in
a steadier voice, "I'll be better in a minute."
Presently his grip upon the trunk loosened, and he slipped slowly down
the stem of the tree until he was a crumpled heap at its foot. His hands were
clenched convulsively. His face became distorted with pain. Hooker
approached him.
"Don't touch me! Don't touch me!" said Evans in a stifled voice. "Put the
gold back on the coat."
"Can't I do anything for you?" said Hooker.
"Put the gold back on the coat."
As Hooker handled the ingots he felt a little prick on the ball of his
thumb. He looked at his hand and saw a slender thorn, perhaps two inches
in length.
Evans gave an inarticulate cry and rolled over.
Hooker's jaw dropped. He stared at the thorn for a moment with dilated
eyes. Then he looked at Evans, who was now crumpled together on the

ground, his back bending and straightening spasmodically. Then he looked
through the pillars of the trees and net-work of creeper stems, to where in
the dim grey shadow the blue-clad body of the Chinaman was still
indistinctly visible. He thought of the little dashes in the corner of the plan,
and in a moment he understood.
"God help me!" he said. For the thorns were similar to those the Dyaks
poison and use in their blowing-tubes. He understood now what Chang-hi's
assurance of the safety of his treasure meant. He understood that grin now.
"Evans!" he cried.
But Evans was silent and motionless, save for a horrible spasmodic
twitching of his limbs. A profound silence brooded over the forest.
Then Hooker began to suck furiously at the little pink spot on the ball of
his thumb—sucking for dear life. Presently he felt a strange aching pain in
his arms and shoulders, and his fingers seemed difficult to bend. Then he
knew that sucking was no good.
Abruptly he stopped, and sitting down by the pile of ingots, and resting
his chin upon his hands and his elbows upon his knees, stared at the
distorted but still quivering body of his companion. Chang-hi's grin came
into his mind again. The dull pain spread towards his throat and grew
slowly in intensity. Far above him a faint breeze stirred the greenery, and
the white petals of some unknown flower came floating down through the
gloom.

XI. — THE STORY OF THE LATE MR.
ELVESHAM.
I set this story down, not expecting it will be believed, but, if possible, to
prepare a way of escape for the next victim. He, perhaps, may profit by my
misfortune. My own case, I know, is hopeless, and I am now in some
measure prepared to meet my fate.
My name is Edward George Eden. I was born at Trentham, in
Staffordshire, my father being employed in the gardens there. I lost my
mother when I was three years old, and my father when I was five, my
uncle, George Eden, then adopting me as his own son. He was a single man,
self-educated, and well-known in Birmingham as an enterprising journalist;
he educated me generously, fired my ambition to succeed in the world, and
at his death, which happened four years ago, left me his entire fortune, a
matter of about five hundred pounds after all outgoing charges were paid. I
was then eighteen. He advised me in his will to expend the money in
completing my education. I had already chosen the profession of medicine,
and through his posthumous generosity and my good fortune in a
scholarship competition, I became a medical student at University College,
London. At the time of the beginning of my story I lodged at 11A
University Street in a little upper room, very shabbily furnished and
draughty, overlooking the back of Shoolbred's premises. I used this little
room both to live in and sleep in, because I was anxious to eke out my
means to the very last shillings-worth.
I was taking a pair of shoes to be mended at a shop in the Tottenham
Court Road when I first encountered the little old man with the yellow face,
with whom my life has now become so inextricably entangled. He was
standing on the kerb, and staring at the number on the door in a doubtful
way, as I opened it. His eyes—they were dull grey eyes, and reddish under
the rims—fell to my face, and his countenance immediately assumed an
expression of corrugated amiability.

"You come," he said, "apt to the moment. I had forgotten the number of
your house. How do you do, Mr. Eden?"
I was a little astonished at his familiar address, for I had never set eyes on
the man before. I was a little annoyed, too, at his catching me with my
boots under my arm. He noticed my lack of cordiality.
"Wonder who the deuce I am, eh? A friend, let me assure you. I have seen
you before, though you haven't seen me. Is there anywhere where I can talk
to you?"
I hesitated. The shabbiness of my room upstairs was not a matter for
every stranger. "Perhaps," said I, "we might walk down the street. I'm
unfortunately prevented—" My gesture explained the sentence before I had
spoken it.
"The very thing," he said, and faced this way, and then that. "The street?
Which way shall we go?" I slipped my boots down in the passage. "Look
here!" he said abruptly; "this business of mine is a rigmarole. Come and
lunch with me, Mr. Eden. I'm an old man, a very old man, and not good at
explanations, and what with my piping voice and the clatter of the traffic
——"
He laid a persuasive skinny hand that trembled a little upon my arm.
I was not so old that an old man might not treat me to a lunch. Yet at the
same time I was not altogether pleased by this abrupt invitation. "I had
rather——" I began. "But I had rather," he said, catching me up, "and a
certain civility is surely due to my grey hairs."
And so I consented, and went with him.
He took me to Blavitiski's; I had to walk slowly to accommodate myself
to his paces; and over such a lunch as I had never tasted before, he fended
off my leading question, and I took a better note of his appearance. His
clean-shaven face was lean and wrinkled, his shrivelled, lips fell over a set
of false teeth, and his white hair was thin and rather long; he seemed small
to me,—though indeed, most people seemed small to me,—and his
shoulders were rounded and bent. And watching him, I could not help but
observe that he too was taking note of me, running his eyes, with a curious

touch of greed in them, over me, from my broad shoulders to my suntanned
hands, and up to my freckled face again. "And now," said he, as we lit our
cigarettes, "I must tell you of the business in hand.
"I must tell you, then, that I am an old man, a very old man." He paused
momentarily. "And it happens that I have money that I must presently be
leaving, and never a child have I to leave it to." I thought of the confidence
trick, and resolved I would be on the alert for the vestiges of my five
hundred pounds. He proceeded to enlarge on his loneliness, and the trouble
he had to find a proper disposition of his money. "I have weighed this plan
and that plan, charities, institutions, and scholarships, and libraries, and I
have come to this conclusion at last,"—he fixed his eyes on my face,—"that
I will find some young fellow, ambitious, pure-minded, and poor, healthy in
body and healthy in mind, and, in short, make him my heir, give him all that
I have." He repeated, "Give him all that I have. So that he will suddenly be
lifted out of all the trouble and struggle in which his sympathies have been
educated, to freedom and influence."
I tried to seem disinterested. With a transparent hypocrisy I said, "And
you want my help, my professional services maybe, to find that person."
He smiled, and looked at me over his cigarette, and I laughed at his quiet
exposure of my modest pretence.
"What a career such a man might have!" he said. "It fills me with envy to
think how I have accumulated that another man may spend——
"But there are conditions, of course, burdens to be imposed. He must, for
instance, take my name. You cannot expect everything without some return.
And I must go into all the circumstances of his life before I can accept him.
He must be sound. I must know his heredity, how his parents and
grandparents died, have the strictest inquiries made into his private morals."
This modified my secret congratulations a little.
"And do I understand," said I, "that I——"
"Yes," he said, almost fiercely. "You. You."

I answered never a word. My imagination was dancing wildly, my innate
scepticism was useless to modify its transports. There was not a particle of
gratitude in my mind—I did not know what to say nor how to say it. "But
why me in particular?" I said at last.
He had chanced to hear of me from Professor Haslar; he said, as a
typically sound and sane young man, and he wished, as far as possible, to
leave his money where health and integrity were assured.
That was my first meeting with the little old man. He was mysterious
about himself; he would not give his name yet, he said, and after I had
answered some questions of his, he left me at the Blavitiski portal. I noticed
that he drew a handful of gold coins from his pocket when it came to paying
for the lunch. His insistence upon bodily health was curious. In accordance
with an arrangement we had made I applied that day for a life policy in the
Loyal Insurance Company for a large sum, and I was exhaustively
overhauled by the medical advisers of that company in the subsequent
week. Even that did not satisfy him, and he insisted I must be re-examined
by the great Doctor Henderson.
It was Friday in Whitsun week before he came to a decision. He called
me down, quite late in the evening,—nearly nine it was,—from cramming
chemical equations for my Preliminary Scientific examination. He was
standing in the passage under the feeble gas-lamp, and his face was a
grotesque interplay of shadows. He seemed more bowed than when I had
first seen him, and his cheeks had sunk in a little.
His voice shook with emotion. "Everything is satisfactory, Mr. Eden," he
said. "Everything is quite, quite satisfactory. And this night of all nights,
you must dine with me and celebrate your—accession." He was interrupted
by a cough. "You won't have long to wait, either," he said, wiping his
handkerchief across his lips, and gripping my hand with his long bony claw
that was disengaged. "Certainly not very long to wait."
We went into the street and called a cab. I remember every incident of
that drive vividly, the swift, easy motion, the vivid contrast of gas and oil
and electric light, the crowds of people in the streets, the place in Regent
Street to which we went, and the sumptuous dinner we were served with
there. I was disconcerted at first by the well-dressed waiter's glances at my

rough clothes, bothered by the stones of the olives, but as the champagne
warmed my blood, my confidence revived. At first the old man talked of
himself. He had already told me his name in the cab; he was Egbert
Elvesham, the great philosopher, whose name I had known since I was a lad
at school. It seemed incredible to me that this man, whose intelligence had
so early dominated mine, this great abstraction, should suddenly realise
itself as this decrepit, familiar figure. I daresay every young fellow who has
suddenly fallen among celebrities has felt something of my disappointment.
He told me now of the future that the feeble streams of his life would
presently leave dry for me, houses, copyrights, investments; I had never
suspected that philosophers were so rich. He watched me drink and eat with
a touch of envy. "What a capacity for living you have!" he said; and then
with a sigh, a sigh of relief I could have thought it, "it will not be long."
"Ay," said I, my head swimming now with champagne; "I have a future
perhaps—of a passing agreeable sort, thanks to you. I shall now have the
honour of your name. But you have a past. Such a past as is worth all my
future."
He shook his head and smiled, as I thought, with half sad appreciation of
my flattering admiration. "That future," he said, "would you in truth change
it?" The waiter came with liqueurs. "You will not perhaps mind taking my
name, taking my position, but would you indeed—willingly—take my
years?"
"With your achievements," said I gallantly.
He smiled again. "Kummel—both," he said to the waiter, and turned his
attention to a little paper packet he had taken from his pocket. "This hour,"
said he, "this after-dinner hour is the hour of small things. Here is a scrap of
my unpublished wisdom." He opened the packet with his shaking yellow
fingers, and showed a little pinkish powder on the paper. "This," said he
—"well, you must guess what it is. But Kummel—put but a dash of this
powder in it—is Himmel."
His large greyish eyes watched mine with an inscrutable expression.
It was a bit of a shock to me to find this great teacher gave his mind to
the flavour of liqueurs. However, I feigned an interest in his weakness, for I

was drunk enough for such small sycophancy.
He parted the powder between the little glasses, and, rising suddenly,
with a strange unexpected dignity, held out his hand towards me. I imitated
his action, and the glasses rang. "To a quick succession," said he, and raised
his glass towards his lips.
"Not that," I said hastily. "Not that."
He paused with the liqueur at the level of his chin, and his eyes blazing
into mine.
"To a long life," said I. — He hesitated. "To a long life," said he, with a
sudden bark of laughter, and with eyes fixed on one another we tilted the
little glasses. His eyes looked straight into mine, and as I drained the stuff
off, I felt a curiously intense sensation. The first touch of it set my brain in a
furious tumult; I seemed to feel an actual physical stirring in my skull, and a
seething humming filled my ears. I did not notice the flavour in my mouth,
the aroma that filled my throat; I saw only the grey intensity of his gaze that
burnt into mine. The draught, the mental confusion, the noise and stirring in
my head, seemed to last an interminable time. Curious vague impressions of
half-forgotten things danced and vanished on the edge of my consciousness.
At last he broke the spell. With a sudden explosive sigh he put down his
glass.
"Well?" he said.
"It's glorious," said I, though I had not tasted the stuff.
My head was spinning. I sat down. My brain was chaos. Then my
perception grew clear and minute as though I saw things in a concave
mirror. His manner seemed to have changed into something nervous and
hasty. He pulled out his watch and grimaced at it. "Eleven-seven! And to-
night I must— Seven-twenty-five. Waterloo! I must go at once." He called
for the bill, and struggled with his coat. Officious waiters came to our
assistance. In another moment I was wishing him good-bye, over the apron
of a cab, and still with an absurd feeling of minute distinctness, as though—
how can I express it?—I not only saw but felt through an inverted opera-
glass.

"That stuff," he said. He put his hand to his forehead. "I ought not to have
given it to you. It will make your head split to-morrow. Wait a minute.
Here." He handed me out a little flat thing like a seidlitz-powder. "Take that
in water as you are going to bed. The other thing was a drug. Not till you're
ready to go to bed, mind. It will clear your head. That's all. One more shake
—Futurus!"
I gripped his shrivelled claw. "Good-bye," he said, and by the droop of
his eyelids I judged he too was a little under the influence of that brain-
twisting cordial.
He recollected something else with a start, felt in his breast-pocket, and
produced another packet, this time a cylinder the size and shape of a
shaving-stick. "Here," said he. "I'd almost forgotten. Don't open this until I
come to-morrow—but take it now."
It was so heavy that I wellnigh dropped it. "All ri'!" said I, and he grinned
at me through the cab window as the cabman flicked his horse into
wakefulness. It was a white packet he had given me, with red seals at either
end and along its edge. "If this isn't money," said I, "it's platinum or lead."
I stuck it with elaborate care into my pocket, and with a whirling brain
walked home through the Regent Street loiterers and the dark back streets
beyond Portland Road. I remember the sensations of that walk very vividly,
strange as they were. I was still so far myself that I could notice my strange
mental state, and wonder whether this stuff I had had was opium—a drug
beyond my experience. It is hard now to describe the peculiarity of my
mental strangeness—mental doubling vaguely expresses it. As I was
walking up Regent Street I found in my mind a queer persuasion that it was
Waterloo Station, and had an odd impulse to get into the Polytechnic as a
man might get into a train. I put a knuckle in my eye, and it was Regent
Street. How can I express it? You see a skilful actor looking quietly at you,
he pulls a grimace, and lo!—another person. Is it too extravagant if I tell
you that it seemed to me as if Regent Street had, for the moment, done that?
Then, being persuaded it was Regent Street again, I was oddly muddled
about some fantastic reminiscences that cropped up. "Thirty years ago,"
thought I, "it was here that I quarrelled with my brother." Then I burst out
laughing, to the astonishment and encouragement of a group of night

prowlers. Thirty years ago I did not exist, and never in my life had I boasted
a brother. The stuff was surely liquid folly, for the poignant regret for that
lost brother still clung to me. Along Portland Road the madness took
another turn. I began to recall vanished shops, and to compare the street
with what it used to be. Confused, troubled thinking is comprehensible
enough after the drink I had taken, but what puzzled me were these
curiously vivid phantasm memories that had crept into my mind, and not
only the memories that had crept in, but also the memories that had slipped
out. I stopped opposite Stevens', the natural history dealer's, and cudgelled
my brains to think what he had to do with me. A 'bus went by, and sounded
exactly like the rumbling of a train. I seemed to be dipping into some dark,
remote pit for the recollection. "Of course," said I, at last, "he has promised
me three frogs to-morrow. Odd I should have forgotten."
Do they still show children dissolving views? In those I remember one
view would begin like a faint ghost, and grow and oust another. In just that
way it seemed to me that a ghostly set of new sensations was struggling
with those of my ordinary self.
I went on through Euston Road to Tottenham Court Road, puzzled, and a
little frightened, and scarcely noticed the unusual way I was taking, for
commonly I used to cut through the intervening network of back streets. I
turned into University Street, to discover that I had forgotten my number.
Only by a strong effort did I recall 11A, and even then it seemed to me that
it was a thing some forgotten person had told me. I tried to steady my mind
by recalling the incidents of the dinner, and for the life of me I could
conjure up no picture of my host's face; I saw him only as a shadowy
outline, as one might see oneself reflected in a window through which one
was looking. In his place, however, I had a curious exterior vision of
myself, sitting at a table, flushed, bright-eyed, and talkative.
"I must take this other powder," said I. "This is getting impossible."
I tried the wrong side of the hall for my candle and the matches, and had
a doubt of which landing my room might be on. "I'm drunk," I said, "that's
certain," and blundered needlessly on the staircase to sustain the
proposition.

At the first glance my room seemed unfamiliar. "What rot!" I said, and
stared about me. I seemed to bring myself back by the effort, and the odd
phantasmal quality passed into the concrete familiar. There was the old
glass still, with my notes on the albumens stuck in the corner of the frame,
my old everyday suit of clothes pitched about the floor. And yet it was not
so real after all. I felt an idiotic persuasion trying to creep into my mind, as
it were, that I was in a railway carriage in a train just stopping, that I was
peering out of the window at some unknown station. I gripped the bed-rail
firmly to reassure myself. "It's clairvoyance, perhaps," I said. "I must write
to the Psychical Research Society."
I put the rouleau on my dressing-table, sat on my bed, and began to take
off my boots. It was as if the picture of my present sensations was painted
over some other picture that was trying to show through. "Curse it!" said I;
"my wits are going, or am I in two places at once?" Half-undressed, I tossed
the powder into a glass and drank it off. It effervesced, and became a
fluorescent amber colour. Before I was in bed my mind was already
tranquillised. I felt the pillow at my cheek, and thereupon I must have fallen
asleep.

I awoke abruptly out of a dream of strange beasts, and found myself
lying on my back. Probably every one knows that dismal, emotional dream
from which one escapes, awake indeed, but strangely cowed. There was a
curious taste in my mouth, a tired feeling in my limbs, a sense of cutaneous
discomfort. I lay with my head motionless on my pillow, expecting that my
feeling of strangeness and terror would pass away, and that I should then
doze off again to sleep. But instead of that, my uncanny sensations
increased. At first I could perceive nothing wrong about me. There was a
faint light in the room, so faint that it was the very next thing to darkness,
and the furniture stood out in it as vague blots of absolute darkness. I stared
with my eyes just over the bedclothes.
It came into my mind that some one had entered the room to rob me of
my rouleau of money, but after lying for some moments, breathing regularly
to simulate sleep, I realised this was mere fancy. Nevertheless, the uneasy
assurance of something wrong kept fast hold of me. With an effort I raised
my head from the pillow, and peered about me at the dark. What it was I

could not conceive. I looked at the dim shapes around me, the greater and
lesser darknesses that indicated curtains, table, fireplace, bookshelves, and
so forth. Then I began to perceive something unfamiliar in the forms of the
darkness. Had the bed turned round? Yonder should be the bookshelves, and
something shrouded and pallid rose there, something that would not answer
to the bookshelves, however I looked at it. It was far too big to be my shirt
thrown on a chair.
Overcoming a childish terror, I threw back the bedclothes and thrust my
leg out of bed. Instead of coming out of my truckle-bed upon the floor, I
found my foot scarcely reached the edge of the mattress. I made another
step, as it were, and sat up on the edge of the bed. By the side of my bed
should be the candle, and the matches upon the broken chair. I put out my
hand and touched—nothing. I waved my hand in the darkness, and it came
against some heavy hanging, soft and thick in texture, which gave a rustling
noise at my touch. I grasped this and pulled it; it appeared to be a curtain
suspended over the head of my bed.
I was now thoroughly awake, and beginning to realise that I was in a
strange room. I was puzzled. I tried to recall the overnight circumstances,
and I found them now, curiously enough, vivid in my memory: the supper,
my reception of the little packages, my wonder whether I was intoxicated,
my slow undressing, the coolness to my flushed face of my pillow. I felt a
sudden distrust. Was that last night, or the night before? At any rate, this
room was strange to me, and I could not imagine how I had got into it. The
dim, pallid outline was growing paler, and I perceived it was a window,
with the dark shape of an oval toilet-glass against the weak intimation of the
dawn that filtered through the blind. I stood up, and was surprised by a
curious feeling of weakness and unsteadiness. With trembling hands
outstretched, I walked slowly towards the window, getting, nevertheless, a
bruise on the knee from a chair by the way. I fumbled round the glass,
which was large, with handsome brass sconces, to find the blind cord. I
could not find any. By chance I took hold of the tassel, and with the click of
a spring the blind ran up.
I found myself looking out upon a scene that was altogether strange to
me. The night was overcast, and through the flocculent grey of the heaped
clouds there filtered a faint half-light of dawn. Just at the edge of the sky

the cloud-canopy had a blood-red rim. Below, everything was dark and
indistinct, dim hills in the distance, a vague mass of buildings running up
into pinnacles, trees like spilt ink, and below the window a tracery of black
bushes and pale grey paths. It was so unfamiliar that for the moment I
thought myself still dreaming. I felt the toilet-table; it appeared to be made
of some polished wood, and was rather elaborately furnished—there were
little cut-glass bottles and a brush upon it. There was also a queer little
object, horse-shoe shape it felt, with smooth, hard projections, lying in a
saucer. I could find no matches nor candlestick.
I turned my eyes to the room again. Now the blind was up, faint spectres
of its furnishing came out of the darkness. There was a huge curtained bed,
and the fireplace at its foot had a large white mantel with something of the
shimmer of marble.
I leant against the toilet-table, shut my eyes and opened them again, and
tried to think. The whole thing was far too real for dreaming. I was inclined
to imagine there was still some hiatus in my memory, as a consequence of
my draught of that strange liqueur; that I had come into my inheritance
perhaps, and suddenly lost my recollection of everything since my good
fortune had been announced. Perhaps if I waited a little, things would be
clearer to me again. Yet my dinner with old Elvesham was now singularly
vivid and recent. The champagne, the observant waiters, the powder, and
the liqueurs—I could have staked my soul it all happened a few hours ago.
And then occurred a thing so trivial and yet so terrible to me that I shiver
now to think of that moment. I spoke aloud. I said, "How the devil did I get
here?" ... And the voice was not my own.
It was not my own, it was thin, the articulation was slurred, the resonance
of my facial bones was different. Then, to reassure myself I ran one hand
over the other, and felt loose folds of skin, the bony laxity of age. "Surely,"
I said, in that horrible voice that had somehow established itself in my
throat, "surely this thing is a dream!" Almost as quickly as if I did it
involuntarily, I thrust my fingers into my mouth. My teeth had gone. My
finger-tips ran on the flaccid surface of an even row of shrivelled gums. I
was sick with dismay and disgust.

I felt then a passionate desire to see myself, to realise at once in its full
horror the ghastly change that had come upon me. I tottered to the mantel,
and felt along it for matches. As I did so, a barking cough sprang up in my
throat, and I clutched the thick flannel nightdress I found about me. There
were no matches there, and I suddenly realised that my extremities were
cold. Sniffing and coughing, whimpering a little, perhaps, I fumbled back to
bed. "It is surely a dream," I whispered to myself as I clambered back,
"surely a dream." It was a senile repetition. I pulled the bedclothes over my
shoulders, over my ears, I thrust my withered hand under the pillow, and
determined to compose myself to sleep. Of course it was a dream. In the
morning the dream would be over, and I should wake up strong and
vigorous again to my youth and studies. I shut my eyes, breathed regularly,
and, finding myself wakeful, began to count slowly through the powers of
three.
But the thing I desired would not come. I could not get to sleep. And the
persuasion of the inexorable reality of the change that had happened to me
grew steadily. Presently I found myself with my eyes wide open, the powers
of three forgotten, and my skinny fingers upon my shrivelled gums, I was,
indeed, suddenly and abruptly, an old man. I had in some unaccountable
manner fallen through my life and come to old age, in some way I had been
cheated of all the best of my life, of love, of struggle, of strength, and hope.
I grovelled into the pillow and tried to persuade myself that such
hallucination was possible. Imperceptibly, steadily, the dawn grew clearer.
At last, despairing of further sleep, I sat up in bed and looked about me.
A chill twilight rendered the whole chamber visible. It was spacious and
well-furnished, better furnished than any room I had ever slept in before. A
candle and matches became dimly visible upon a little pedestal in a recess. I
threw back the bedclothes, and, shivering with the rawness of the early
morning, albeit it was summer-time, I got out and lit the candle. Then,
trembling horribly, so that the extinguisher rattled on its spike, I tottered to
the glass and saw—Elvesham's face! It was none the less horrible because I
had already dimly feared as much. He had already seemed physically weak
and pitiful to me, but seen now, dressed only in a coarse flannel nightdress,
that fell apart and showed the stringy neck, seen now as my own body, I
cannot describe its desolate decrepitude. The hollow cheeks, the straggling
tail of dirty grey hair, the rheumy bleared eyes, the quivering, shrivelled

lips, the lower displaying a gleam of the pink interior lining, and those
horrible dark gums showing. You who are mind and body together, at your
natural years, cannot imagine what this fiendish imprisonment meant to me.
To be young and full of the desire and energy of youth, and to be caught,
and presently to be crushed in this tottering ruin of a body...
But I wander from the course of my story. For some time I must have
been stunned at this change that had come upon me. It was daylight when I
did so far gather myself together as to think. In some inexplicable way I had
been changed, though how, short of magic, the thing had been done, I could
not say. And as I thought, the diabolical ingenuity of Elvesham came home
to me. It seemed plain to me that as I found myself in his, so he must be in
possession of my body, of my strength, that is, and my future. But how to
prove it? Then, as I thought, the thing became so incredible, even to me,
that my mind reeled, and I had to pinch myself, to feel my toothless gums,
to see myself in the glass, and touch the things about me, before I could
steady myself to face the facts again. Was all life hallucination? Was I
indeed Elvesham, and he me? Had I been dreaming of Eden overnight? Was
there any Eden? But if I was Elvesham, I should remember where I was on
the previous morning, the name of the town in which I lived, what
happened before the dream began. I struggled with my thoughts. I recalled
the queer doubleness of my memories overnight. But now my mind was
clear. Not the ghost of any memories but those proper to Eden could I raise.
"This way lies insanity!" I cried in my piping voice. I staggered to my
feet, dragged my feeble, heavy limbs to the washhand-stand, and plunged
my grey head into a basin of cold water. Then, towelling myself, I tried
again. It was no good. I felt beyond all question that I was indeed Eden, not
Elvesham. But Eden in Elvesham's body!
Had I been a man of any other age, I might have given myself up to my
fate as one enchanted. But in these sceptical days miracles do not pass
current. Here was some trick of psychology. What a drug and a steady stare
could do, a drug and a steady stare, or some similar treatment, could surely
undo. Men have lost their memories before. But to exchange memories as
one does umbrellas! I laughed. Alas! not a healthy laugh, but a wheezing,
senile titter. I could have fancied old Elvesham laughing at my plight, and a
gust of petulant anger, unusual to me, swept across my feelings. I began

dressing eagerly in the clothes I found lying about on the floor, and only
realised when I was dressed that it was an evening suit I had assumed. I
opened the wardrobe and found some more ordinary clothes, a pair of plaid
trousers, and an old-fashioned dressing-gown. I put a venerable smoking-
cap on my venerable head, and, coughing a little from my exertions,
tottered out upon the landing.
It was then, perhaps, a quarter to six, and the blinds were closely drawn
and the house quite silent. The landing was a spacious one, a broad, richly-
carpeted staircase went down into the darkness of the hall below, and before
me a door ajar showed me a writing-desk, a revolving bookcase, the back of
a study chair, and a fine array of bound books, shelf upon shelf.
"My study," I mumbled, and walked across the landing. Then at the
sound of my voice a thought struck me, and I went back to the bedroom and
put in the set of false teeth. They slipped in with the ease of old, habit.
"That's better," said I, gnashing them, and so returned to the study.
The drawers of the writing-desk were locked. Its revolving top was also
locked. I could see no indications of the keys, and there were none in the
pockets of my trousers. I shuffled back at once to the bedroom, and went
through the dress suit, and afterwards the pockets of all the garments I
could find. I was very eager, and one might have imagined that burglars had
been at work, to see my room when I had done. Not only were there no
keys to be found, but not a coin, nor a scrap of paper—save only the
receipted bill of the overnight dinner.
A curious weariness asserted itself. I sat down and stared at the garments
flung here and there, their pockets turned inside out. My first frenzy had
already flickered out. Every moment I was beginning to realise the
immense intelligence of the plans of my enemy, to see more and more
clearly the hopelessness of my position. With an effort I rose and hurried
hobbling into the study again. On the staircase was a housemaid pulling up
the blinds. She stared, I think, at the expression of my face. I shut the door
of the study behind me, and, seizing a poker, began an attack upon the desk.
That is how they found me. The cover of the desk was split, the lock
smashed, the letters torn out of the pigeon-holes, and tossed about the room.
In my senile rage I had flung about the pens and other such light stationery,

and overturned the ink. Moreover, a large vase upon the mantel had got
broken—I do not know how. I could find no cheque-book, no money, no
indications of the slightest use for the recovery of my body. I was battering
madly at the drawers, when the butler, backed by two women-servants,
intruded upon me.

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

of what may be either calculations or ciphers in symbols absolutely strange
to me. In some passages there are indications that he was also occupied
with the philosophy of mathematics. I take it he has transferred the whole of
his memories, the accumulation that makes up his personality, from this old
withered brain of his to mine, and, similarly, that he has transferred mine to
his discarded tenement. Practically, that is, he has changed bodies. But how
such a change may be possible is without the range of my philosophy. I
have been a materialist for all my thinking life, but here, suddenly, is a clear
case of man's detachability from matter.
One desperate experiment I am about to try. I sit writing here before
putting the matter to issue. This morning, with the help of a table-knife that
I had secreted at breakfast, I succeeded in breaking open a fairly obvious
secret drawer in this wrecked writing-desk. I discovered nothing save a
little green glass phial containing a white powder. Round the neck of the
phial was a label, and thereon was written this one word, "Release." This
may be—is most probably—poison. I can understand Elvesham placing
poison in my way, and I should be sure that it was his intention so to get rid
of the only living witness against him, were it not for this careful
concealment. The man has practically solved the problem of immortality.
Save for the spite of chance, he will live in my body until it has aged, and
then, again, throwing that aside, he will assume some other victim's youth
and strength. When one remembers his heartlessness, it is terrible to think
of the ever-growing experience that... How long has he been leaping from
body to body?... But I tire of writing. The powder appears to be soluble in
water. The taste is not unpleasant.

There the narrative found upon Mr. Elvesham's desk ends. His dead body
lay between the desk and the chair. The latter had been pushed back,
probably by his last convulsions. The story was written in pencil and in a
crazy hand, quite unlike his usual minute characters. There remain only two
curious facts to record. Indisputably there was some connection between
Eden and Elvesham, since the whole of Elvesham's property was
bequeathed to the young man. But he never inherited. When Elvesham
committed suicide, Eden was, strangely enough, already dead. Twenty-four
hours before, he had been knocked down by a cab and killed instantly, at
the crowded crossing at the intersection of Gower Street and Euston Road.

So that the only human being who could have thrown light upon this
fantastic narrative is beyond the reach of questions. Without further
comment I leave this extraordinary matter to the reader's individual
judgment.

XII. — UNDER THE KNIFE.
"What if I die under it?" The thought recurred again and again, as I
walked home from Haddon's. It was a purely personal question. I was
spared the deep anxieties of a married man, and I knew there were few of
my intimate friends but would find my death troublesome chiefly on
account of their duty of regret. I was surprised indeed, and perhaps a little
humiliated, as I turned the matter over, to think how few could possibly
exceed the conventional requirement. Things came before me stripped of
glamour, in a clear dry light, during that walk from Haddon's house over
Primrose Hill. There were the friends of my youth: I perceived now that our
affection was a tradition, which we foregathered rather laboriously to
maintain. There were the rivals and helpers of my later career: I suppose I
had been cold-blooded or undemonstrative—one perhaps implies the other.
It may be that even the capacity for friendship is a question of physique.
There had been a time in my own life when I had grieved bitterly enough at
the loss of a friend; but as I walked home that afternoon the emotional side
of my imagination was dormant. I could not pity myself, nor feel sorry for
my friends, nor conceive of them as grieving for me.
I was interested in this deadness of my emotional nature—no doubt a
concomitant of my stagnating physiology; and my thoughts wandered off
along the line it suggested. Once before, in my hot youth, I had suffered a
sudden loss of blood, and had been within an ace of death. I remembered
now that my affections as well as my passions had drained out of me,
leaving scarce anything but a tranquil resignation, a dreg of self-pity. It had
been weeks before the old ambitions and tendernesses and all the complex
moral interplay of a man had reasserted themselves. It occurred to me that
the real meaning of this numbness might be a gradual slipping away from
the pleasure-pain guidance of the animal man. It has been proven, I take it,
as thoroughly as anything can be proven in this world, that the higher
emotions, the moral feelings, even the subtle unselfishness of love, are
evolved from the elemental desires and fears of the simple animal: they are
the harness in which man's mental freedom goes. And it may be that as
death overshadows us, as our possibility of acting diminishes, this complex

growth of balanced impulse, propensity and aversion, whose interplay
inspires our acts, goes with it. Leaving what?
I was suddenly brought back to reality by an imminent collision with the
butcher-boy's tray. I found that I was crossing the bridge over the Regent's
Park Canal, which runs parallel with that in the Zoological Gardens. The
boy in blue had been looking over his shoulder at a black barge advancing
slowly, towed by a gaunt white horse. In the Gardens a nurse was leading
three happy little children over the bridge. The trees were bright green; the
spring hopefulness was still unstained by the dusts of summer; the sky in
the water was bright and clear, but broken by long waves, by quivering
bands of black, as the barge drove through. The breeze was stirring; but it
did not stir me as the spring breeze used to do.
Was this dulness of feeling in itself an anticipation? It was curious that I
could reason and follow out a network of suggestion as clearly as ever: so,
at least, it seemed to me. It was calmness rather than dulness that was
coming upon me. Was there any ground for the relief in the presentiment of
death? Did a man near to death begin instinctively to withdraw himself
from the meshes of matter and sense, even before the cold hand was laid
upon his? I felt strangely isolated—isolated without regret—from the life
and existence about me. The children playing in the sun and gathering
strength and experience for the business of life, the park-keeper gossiping
with a nursemaid, the nursing mother, the young couple intent upon each
other as they passed me, the trees by the wayside spreading new pleading
leaves to the sunlight, the stir in their branches—I had been part of it all, but
I had nearly done with it now.
Some way down the Broad Walk I perceived that I was tired, and that my
feet were heavy. It was hot that afternoon, and I turned aside and sat down
on one of the green chairs that line the way. In a minute I had dozed into a
dream, and the tide of my thoughts washed up a vision of the resurrection. I
was still sitting in the chair, but I thought myself actually dead, withered,
tattered, dried, one eye (I saw) pecked out by birds. "Awake!" cried a voice;
and incontinently the dust of the path and the mould under the grass became
insurgent. I had never before thought of Regent's Park as a cemetery, but
now, through the trees, stretching as far as eye could see, I beheld a flat
plain of writhing graves and heeling tombstones. There seemed to be some

trouble: the rising dead appeared to stifle as they struggled upward, they
bled in their struggles, the red flesh was torn away from the white bones.
"Awake!" cried a voice; but I determined I would not rise to such horrors.
"Awake!" They would not let me alone. "Wake up!" said an angry voice. A
cockney angel! The man who sells the tickets was shaking me, demanding
my penny.
I paid my penny, pocketed my ticket, yawned, stretched my legs, and,
feeling now rather less torpid, got up and walked on towards Langham
Place. I speedily lost myself again in a shifting maze of thoughts about
death. Going across Marylebone Road into that crescent at the end of
Langham Place, I had the narrowest escape from the shaft of a cab, and
went on my way with a palpitating heart and a bruised shoulder. It struck
me that it would have been curious if my meditations on my death on the
morrow had led to my death that day.
But I will not weary you with more of my experiences that day and the
next. I knew more and more certainly that I should die under the operation;
at times I think I was inclined to pose to myself. The doctors were coming
at eleven, and I did not get up. It seemed scarce worth while to trouble
about washing and dressing, and though I read my newspapers and the
letters that came by the first post, I did not find them very interesting. There
was a friendly note from Addison, my old school-friend, calling my
attention to two discrepancies and a printer's error in my new book, with
one from Langridge venting some vexation over Minton. The rest were
business communications. I breakfasted in bed. The glow of pain at my side
seemed more massive. I knew it was pain, and yet, if you can understand, I
did not find it very painful. I had been awake and hot and thirsty in the
night, but in the morning bed felt comfortable. In the night-time I had lain
thinking of things that were past; in the morning I dozed over the question
of immortality. Haddon came, punctual to the minute, with a neat black bag;
and Mowbray soon followed. Their arrival stirred me up a little. I began to
take a more personal interest in the proceedings. Haddon moved the little
octagonal table close to the bedside, and, with his broad back to me, began
taking things out of his bag. I heard the light click of steel upon steel. My
imagination, I found, was not altogether stagnant. "Will you hurt me
much?" I said in an off-hand tone.

"Not a bit," Haddon answered over his shoulder. "We shall chloroform
you. Your heart's as sound as a bell." And as he spoke, I had a whiff of the
pungent sweetness of the anaesthetic.
They stretched me out, with a convenient exposure of my side, and,
almost before I realised what was happening, the chloroform was being
administered. It stings the nostrils, and there is a suffocating sensation at
first. I knew I should die—that this was the end of consciousness for me.
And suddenly I felt that I was not prepared for death: I had a vague sense of
a duty overlooked—I knew not what. What was it I had not done? I could
think of nothing more to do, nothing desirable left in life; and yet I had the
strangest disinclination to death. And the physical sensation was painfully
oppressive. Of course the doctors did not know they were going to kill me.
Possibly I struggled. Then I fell motionless, and a great silence, a monstrous
silence, and an impenetrable blackness came upon me.
There must have been an interval of absolute unconsciousness, seconds
or minutes. Then with a chilly, unemotional clearness, I perceived that I was
not yet dead. I was still in my body; but all the multitudinous sensations that
come sweeping from it to make up the background of consciousness had
gone, leaving me free of it all. No, not free of it all; for as yet something
still held me to the poor stark flesh upon the bed—held me, yet not so
closely that I did not feel myself external to it, independent of it, straining
away from it. I do not think I saw, I do not think I heard; but I perceived all
that was going on, and it was as if I both heard and saw. Haddon was
bending over me, Mowbray behind me; the scalpel—it was a large scalpel
—was cutting my flesh at the side under the flying ribs. It was interesting to
see myself cut like cheese, without a pang, without even a qualm. The
interest was much of a quality with that one might feel in a game of chess
between strangers. Haddon's face was firm and his hand steady; but I was
surprised to perceive (how I know not) that he was feeling the gravest doubt
as to his own wisdom in the conduct of the operation.
Mowbray's thoughts, too, I could see. He was thinking that Haddon's
manner showed too much of the specialist. New suggestions came up like
bubbles through a stream of frothing meditation, and burst one after another
in the little bright spot of his consciousness. He could not help noticing and
admiring Haddon's swift dexterity, in spite of his envious quality and his

disposition to detract. I saw my liver exposed. I was puzzled at my own
condition. I did not feel that I was dead, but I was different in some way
from my living self. The grey depression, that had weighed on me for a year
or more and coloured all my thoughts, was gone. I perceived and thought
without any emotional tint at all. I wondered if everyone perceived things in
this way under chloroform, and forgot it again when he came out of it. It
would be inconvenient to look into some heads, and not forget.
Although I did not think that I was dead, I still perceived quite clearly
that I was soon to die. This brought me back to the consideration of
Haddon's proceedings. I looked into his mind, and saw that he was afraid of
cutting a branch of the portal vein. My attention was distracted from details
by the curious changes going on in his mind. His consciousness was like the
quivering little spot of light which is thrown by the mirror of a
galvanometer. His thoughts ran under it like a stream, some through the
focus bright and distinct, some shadowy in the half-light of the edge. Just
now the little glow was steady; but the least movement on Mowbray's part,
the slightest sound from outside, even a faint difference in the slow
movement of the living flesh he was cutting, set the light-spot shivering and
spinning. A new sense-impression came rushing up through the flow of
thoughts; and lo! the light-spot jerked away towards it, swifter than a
frightened fish. It was wonderful to think that upon that unstable, fitful
thing depended all the complex motions of the man; that for the next five
minutes, therefore, my life hung upon its movements. And he was growing
more and more nervous in his work. It was as if a little picture of a cut vein
grew brighter, and struggled to oust from his brain another picture of a cut
falling short of the mark. He was afraid: his dread of cutting too little was
battling with his dread of cutting too far.
Then, suddenly, like an escape of water from under a lock-gate, a great
uprush of horrible realisation set all his thoughts swirling, and
simultaneously I perceived that the vein was cut. He started back with a
hoarse exclamation, and I saw the brown-purple blood gather in a swift
bead, and run trickling. He was horrified. He pitched the red-stained scalpel
on to the octagonal table; and instantly both doctors flung themselves upon
me, making hasty and ill-conceived efforts to remedy the disaster. "Ice!"
said Mowbray, gasping. But I knew that I was killed, though my body still
clung to me.

I will not describe their belated endeavours to save me, though I
perceived every detail. My perceptions were sharper and swifter than they
had ever been in life; my thoughts rushed through my mind with incredible
swiftness, but with perfect definition. I can only compare their crowded
clarity to the effects of a reasonable dose of opium. In a moment it would
all be over, and I should be free. I knew I was immortal, but what would
happen I did not know. Should I drift off presently, like a puff of smoke
from a gun, in some kind of half-material body, an attenuated version of my
material self? Should I find myself suddenly among the innumerable hosts
of the dead, and know the world about me for the phantasmagoria it had
always seemed? Should I drift to some spiritualistic siance, and there make
foolish, incomprehensible attempts to affect a purblind medium? It was a
state of unemotional curiosity, of colourless expectation. And then I realised
a growing stress upon me, a feeling as though some huge human magnet
was drawing me upward out of my body. The stress grew and grew. I
seemed an atom for which monstrous forces were fighting. For one brief,
terrible moment sensation came back to me. That feeling of falling
headlong which comes in nightmares, that feeling a thousand times
intensified, that and a black horror swept across my thoughts in a torrent.
Then the two doctors, the naked body with its cut side, the little room,
swept away from under me and vanished, as a speck of foam vanishes down
an eddy.
I was in mid-air. Far below was the West End of London, receding
rapidly,—for I seemed to be flying swiftly upward,—and as it receded,
passing westward like a panorama. I could see, through the faint haze of
smoke, the innumerable roofs chimney-set, the narrow roadways, stippled
with people and conveyances, the little specks of squares, and the church
steeples like thorns sticking out of the fabric. But it spun away as the earth
rotated on its axis, and in a few seconds (as it seemed) I was over the
scattered clumps of town about Ealing, the little Thames a thread of blue to
the south, and the Chiltern Hills and the North Downs coming up like the
rim of a basin, far away and faint with haze. Up I rushed. And at first I had
not the faintest conception what this headlong rush upward could mean.
Every moment the circle of scenery beneath me grew wider and wider,
and the details of town and field, of hill and valley, got more and more hazy
and pale and indistinct, a luminous grey was mingled more and more with

the blue of the hills and the green of the open meadows; and a little patch of
cloud, low and far to the west, shone ever more dazzlingly white. Above, as
the veil of atmosphere between myself and outer space grew thinner, the
sky, which had been a fair springtime blue at first, grew deeper and richer in
colour, passing steadily through the intervening shades, until presently it
was as dark as the blue sky of midnight, and presently as black as the
blackness of a frosty starlight, and at last as black as no blackness I had
ever beheld. And first one star, and then many, and at last an innumerable
host broke out upon the sky: more stars than anyone has ever seen from the
face of the earth. For the blueness of the sky in the light of the sun and stars
sifted and spread abroad blindingly: there is diffused light even in the
darkest skies of winter, and we do not see the stars by day only because of
the dazzling irradiation of the sun. But now I saw things—I know not how;
assuredly with no mortal eyes—and that defect of bedazzlement blinded me
no longer. The sun was incredibly strange and wonderful. The body of it
was a disc of blinding white light: not yellowish, as it seems to those who
live upon the earth, but livid white, all streaked with scarlet streaks and
rimmed about with a fringe of writhing tongues of red fire. And shooting
half-way across the heavens from either side of it and brighter than the
Milky Way, were two pinions of silver white, making it look more like
those winged globes I have seen in Egyptian sculpture than anything else I
can remember upon earth. These I knew for the solar corona, though I had
never seen anything of it but a picture during the days of my earthly life.
When my attention came back to the earth again, I saw that it had fallen
very far away from me. Field and town were long since indistinguishable,
and all the varied hues of the country were merging into a uniform bright
grey, broken only by the brilliant white of the clouds that lay scattered in
flocculent masses over Ireland and the west of England. For now I could
see the outlines of the north of France and Ireland, and all this Island of
Britain, save where Scotland passed over the horizon to the north, or where
the coast was blurred or obliterated by cloud. The sea was a dull grey, and
darker than the land; and the whole panorama was rotating slowly towards
the east.
All this had happened so swiftly that until I was some thousand miles or
so from the earth I had no thought for myself. But now I perceived I had
neither hands nor feet, neither parts nor organs, and that I felt neither alarm

nor pain. All about me I perceived that the vacancy (for I had already left
the air behind) was cold beyond the imagination of man; but it troubled me
not. The sun's rays shot through the void, powerless to light or heat until
they should strike on matter in their course. I saw things with a serene self-
forgetfulness, even as if I were God. And down below there, rushing away
from me,—countless miles in a second,—where a little dark spot on the
grey marked the position of London, two doctors were struggling to restore
life to the poor hacked and outworn shell I had abandoned. I felt then such
release, such serenity as I can compare to no mortal delight I have ever
known.
It was only after I had perceived all these things that the meaning of that
headlong rush of the earth grew into comprehension. Yet it was so simple,
so obvious, that I was amazed at my never anticipating the thing that was
happening to me. I had suddenly been cut adrift from matter: all that was
material of me was there upon earth, whirling away through space, held to
the earth by gravitation, partaking of the earth-inertia, moving in its wreath
of epicycles round the sun, and with the sun and the planets on their vast
march through space. But the immaterial has no inertia, feels nothing of the
pull of matter for matter: where it parts from its garment of flesh, there it
remains (so far as space concerns it any longer) immovable in space. I was
not leaving the earth: the earth was leaving me, and not only the earth but
the whole solar system was streaming past. And about me in space,
invisible to me, scattered in the wake of the earth upon its journey, there
must be an innumerable multitude of souls, stripped like myself of the
material, stripped like myself of the passions of the individual and the
generous emotions of the gregarious brute, naked intelligences, things of
new-born wonder and thought, marvelling at the strange release that had
suddenly come on them!
As I receded faster and faster from the strange white sun in the black
heavens, and from the broad and shining earth upon which my being had
begun, I seemed to grow in some incredible manner vast: vast as regards
this world I had left, vast as regards the moments and periods of a human
life. Very soon I saw the full circle of the earth, slightly gibbous, like the
moon when she nears her full, but very large; and the silvery shape of
America was now in the noonday blaze wherein (as it seemed) little
England had been basking but a few minutes ago. At first the earth was

large, and shone in the heavens, filling a great part of them; but every
moment she grew smaller and more distant. As she shrank, the broad moon
in its third quarter crept into view over the rim of her disc. I looked for the
constellations. Only that part of Aries directly behind the sun and the Lion,
which the earth covered, were hidden. I recognised the tortuous, tattered
band of the Milky Way with Vega very bright between sun and earth; and
Sirius and Orion shone splendid against the unfathomable blackness in the
opposite quarter of the heavens. The Pole Star was overhead, and the Great
Bear hung over the circle of the earth. And away beneath and beyond the
shining corona of the sun were strange groupings of stars I had never seen
in my life—notably a dagger-shaped group that I knew for the Southern
Cross. All these were no larger than when they had shone on earth, but the
little stars that one scarce sees shone now against the setting of black
vacancy as brightly as the first-magnitudes had done, while the larger
worlds were points of indescribable glory and colour. Aldebaran was a spot
of blood-red fire, and Sirius condensed to one point the light of innumerable
sapphires. And they shone steadily: they did not scintillate, they were
calmly glorious. My impressions had an adamantine hardness and
brightness: there was no blurring softness, no atmosphere, nothing but
infinite darkness set with the myriads of these acute and brilliant points and
specks of light. Presently, when I looked again, the little earth seemed no
bigger than the sun, and it dwindled and turned as I looked, until in a
second's space (as it seemed to me), it was halved; and so it went on swiftly
dwindling. Far away in the opposite direction, a little pinkish pin's head of
light, shining steadily, was the planet Mars. I swam motionless in vacancy,
and, without a trace of terror or astonishment, watched the speck of cosmic
dust we call the world fall away from me.
Presently it dawned upon me that my sense of duration had changed; that
my mind was moving not faster but infinitely slower, that between each
separate impression there was a period of many days. The moon spun once
round the earth as I noted this; and I perceived clearly the motion of Mars in
his orbit. Moreover, it appeared as if the time between thought and thought
grew steadily greater, until at last a thousand years was but a moment in my
perception.
At first the constellations had shone motionless against the black
background of infinite space; but presently it seemed as though the group of

stars about Hercules and the Scorpion was contracting, while Orion and
Aldebaran and their neighbours were scattering apart. Flashing suddenly
out of the darkness there came a flying multitude of particles of rock,
glittering like dust-specks in a sunbeam, and encompassed in a faintly
luminous cloud. They swirled all about me, and vanished again in a
twinkling far behind. And then I saw that a bright spot of light, that shone a
little to one side of my path, was growing very rapidly larger, and perceived
that it was the planet Saturn rushing towards me. Larger and larger it grew,
swallowing up the heavens behind it, and hiding every moment a fresh
multitude, of stars. I perceived its flattened, whirling body, its disc-like belt,
and seven of its little satellites. It grew and grew, till it towered enormous;
and then I plunged amid a streaming multitude of clashing stones and
dancing dust-particles and gas-eddies, and saw for a moment the mighty
triple belt like three concentric arches of moonlight above me, its shadow
black on the boiling tumult below. These things happened in one-tenth of
the time it takes to tell them. The planet went by like a flash of lightning;
for a few seconds it blotted out the sun, and there and then became a mere
black, dwindling, winged patch against the light. The earth, the mother
mote of my being, I could no longer see.
So with a stately swiftness, in the profoundest silence, the solar system
fell from me as it had been a garment, until the sun was a mere star amid
the multitude of stars, with its eddy of planet-specks lost in the confused
glittering of the remoter light. I was no longer a denizen of the solar system:
I had come to the outer Universe, I seemed to grasp and comprehend the
whole world of matter. Ever more swiftly the stars closed in about the spot
where Antares and Vega had vanished in a phosphorescent haze, until that
part of the sky had the semblance of a whirling mass of nebulae, and ever
before me yawned vaster gaps of vacant blackness, and the stars shone
fewer and fewer. It seemed as if I moved towards a point between Orion's
belt and sword; and the void about that region opened vaster and vaster
every second, an incredible gulf of nothingness into which I was falling.
Faster and ever faster the universe rushed by, a hurry of whirling motes at
last, speeding silently into the void. Stars glowing brighter and brighter,
with their circling planets catching the light in a ghostly fashion as I neared
them, shone out and vanished again into inexistence; faint comets, clusters
of meteorites, winking specks of matter, eddying light-points, whizzed past,

some perhaps a hundred millions of miles or so from me at most, few
nearer, travelling with unimaginable rapidity, shooting constellations,
momentary darts of fire, through that black, enormous night. More than
anything else it was like a dusty draught, sunbeam-lit. Broader and wider
and deeper grew the starless space, the vacant Beyond, into which I was
being drawn. At last a quarter of the heavens was black and blank, and the
whole headlong rush of stellar universe closed in behind me like a veil of
light that is gathered together. It drove away from me like a monstrous jack-
o'-lantern driven by the wind. I had come out into the wilderness of space.
Ever the vacant blackness grew broader, until the hosts of the stars seemed
only like a swarm of fiery specks hurrying away from me, inconceivably
remote, and the darkness, the nothingness and emptiness, was about me on
every side. Soon the little universe of matter, the cage of points in which I
had begun to be, was dwindling, now to a whirling disc of luminous
glittering, and now to one minute disc of hazy light. In a little while it
would shrink to a point, and at last would vanish altogether.
Suddenly feeling came back to me—feeling in the shape of
overwhelming terror; such a dread of those dark vastitudes as no words can
describe, a passionate resurgence of sympathy and social desire. Were there
other souls, invisible to me as I to them, about me in the blackness? or was I
indeed, even as I felt, alone? Had I passed out of being into something that
was neither being nor not-being? The covering of the body, the covering of
matter, had been torn from me, and the hallucinations of companionship and
security. Everything was black and silent. I had ceased to be. I was nothing.
There was nothing, save only that infinitesimal dot of light that dwindled in
the gulf. I strained myself to hear and see, and for a while there was naught
but infinite silence, intolerable darkness, horror, and despair.
Then I saw that about the spot of light into which the whole world of
matter had shrunk there was a faint glow. And in a band on either side of
that the darkness was not absolute. I watched it for ages, as it seemed to me,
and through the long waiting the haze grew imperceptibly more distinct.
And then about the band appeared an irregular cloud of the faintest, palest
brown. I felt a passionate impatience; but the things grew brighter so slowly
that they scarce seemed to change. What was unfolding itself? What was
this strange reddish dawn in the interminable night of space?

The cloud's shape was grotesque. It seemed to be looped along its lower
side into four projecting masses, and, above, it ended in a straight line.
What phantom was it? I felt assured I had seen that figure before; but I
could not think what, nor where, nor when it was. Then the realisation
rushed upon me. It was a clenched Hand. I was alone in space, alone with
this huge, shadowy Hand, upon which the whole Universe of Matter lay
like an unconsidered speck of dust. It seemed as though I watched it
through vast periods of time. On the forefinger glittered a ring; and the
universe from which I had come was but a spot of light upon the ring's
curvature. And the thing that the hand gripped had the likeness of a black
rod. Through a long eternity I watched this Hand, with the ring and the rod,
marvelling and fearing and waiting helplessly on what might follow. It
seemed as though nothing could follow: that I should watch for ever, seeing
only the Hand and the thing it held, and understanding nothing of its import.
Was the whole universe but a refracting speck upon some greater Being?
Were our worlds but the atoms of another universe, and those again of
another, and so on through an endless progression? And what was I? Was I
indeed immaterial? A vague persuasion of a body gathering about me came
into my suspense. The abysmal darkness about the Hand filled with
impalpable suggestions, with uncertain, fluctuating shapes.
Then, suddenly, came a sound, like the sound of a tolling bell: faint, as if
infinitely far; muffled, as though heard through thick swathings of darkness:
a deep, vibrating resonance, with vast gulfs of silence between each stroke.
And the Hand appeared to tighten on the rod. And I saw far above the Hand,
towards the apex of the darkness, a circle of dim phosphorescence, a
ghostly sphere whence these sounds came throbbing; and at the last stroke
the Hand vanished, for the hour had come, and I heard a noise of many
waters. But the black rod remained as a great band across the sky. And then
a voice, which seemed to run to the uttermost parts of space, spoke, saying,
"There will be no more pain."
At that an almost intolerable gladness and radiance rushed in upon me,
and I saw the circle shining white and bright, and the rod black and shining,
and many things else distinct and clear. And the circle was the face of the
clock, and the rod the rail of my bed. Haddon was standing at the foot,
against the rail, with a small pair of scissors on his fingers; and the hands of
my clock on the mantel over his shoulder were clasped together over the

hour of twelve. Mowbray was washing something in a basin at the
octagonal table, and at my side I felt a subdued feeling that could scarce be
spoken of as pain.
The operation had not killed me. And I perceived, suddenly, that the dull
melancholy of half a year was lifted from my mind.

XIII. — THE SEA RAIDERS.
I. — Until the extraordinary affair at Sidmouth, the peculiar species
Haploteuthis ferox was known to science only generically, on the strength
of a half-digested tentacle obtained near the Azores, and a decaying body
pecked by birds and nibbled by fish, found early in 1896 by Mr. Jennings,
near Land's End.
In no department of zoological science, indeed, are we quite so much in
the dark as with regard to the deep-sea cephalopods. A mere accident, for
instance, it was that led to the Prince of Monaco's discovery of nearly a
dozen new forms in the summer of 1895, a discovery in which the before-
mentioned tentacle was included. It chanced that a cachalot was killed off
Terceira by some sperm whalers, and in its last struggles charged almost to
the Prince's yacht, missed it, rolled under, and died within twenty yards of
his rudder. And in its agony it threw up a number of large objects, which the
Prince, dimly perceiving they were strange and important, was, by a happy
expedient, able to secure before they sank. He set his screws in motion, and
kept them circling in the vortices thus created until a boat could be lowered.
And these specimens were whole cephalopods and fragments of
cephalopods, some of gigantic proportions, and almost all of them unknown
to science!
It would seem, indeed, that these large and agile creatures, living in the
middle depths of the sea, must, to a large extent, for ever remain unknown
to us, since under water they are too nimble for nets, and it is only by such
rare, unlooked-for accidents that specimens can be obtained. In the case of
Haploteuthis ferox, for instance, we are still altogether ignorant of its
habitat, as ignorant as we are of the breeding-ground of the herring or the
sea-ways of the salmon. And zoologists are altogether at a loss to account
for its sudden appearance on our coast. Possibly it was the stress of a
hunger migration that drove it hither out of the deep. But it will be, perhaps,
better to avoid necessarily inconclusive discussion, and to proceed at once
with our narrative.

The first human being to set eyes upon a living Haploteuthis—the first
human being to survive, that is, for there can be little doubt now that the
wave of bathing fatalities and boating accidents that travelled along the
coast of Cornwall and Devon in early May was due to this cause—was a
retired tea-dealer of the name of Fison, who was stopping at a Sidmouth
boarding-house. It was in the afternoon, and he was walking along the cliff
path between Sidmouth and Ladram Bay. The cliffs in this direction are
very high, but down the red face of them in one place a kind of ladder
staircase has been made. He was near this when his attention was attracted
by what at first he thought to be a cluster of birds struggling over a
fragment of food that caught the sunlight, and glistened pinkish-white. The
tide was right out, and this object was not only far below him, but remote
across a broad waste of rock reefs covered with dark seaweed and
interspersed with silvery shining tidal pools. And he was, moreover, dazzled
by the brightness of the further water.
In a minute, regarding this again, he perceived that his judgment was in
fault, for over this struggle circled a number of birds, jackdaws and gulls for
the most part, the latter gleaming blindingly when the sunlight smote their
wings, and they seemed minute in comparison with it. And his curiosity
was, perhaps, aroused all the more strongly because of his first insufficient
explanations.
As he had nothing better to do than amuse himself, he decided to make
this object, whatever it was, the goal of his afternoon walk, instead of
Ladram Bay, conceiving it might perhaps be a great fish of some sort,
stranded by some chance, and flapping about in its distress. And so he
hurried down the long steep ladder, stopping at intervals of thirty feet or so
to take breath and scan the mysterious movement.
At the foot of the cliff he was, of course, nearer his object than he had
been; but, on the other hand, it now came up against the incandescent sky,
beneath the sun, so as to seem dark and indistinct. Whatever was pinkish of
it was now hidden by a skerry of weedy boulders. But he perceived that it
was made up of seven rounded bodies distinct or connected, and that the
birds kept up a constant croaking and screaming, but seemed afraid to
approach it too closely.

Mr. Fison, torn by curiosity, began picking his way across the wave-worn
rocks, and finding the wet seaweed that covered them thickly rendered them
extremely slippery, he stopped, removed his shoes and socks, and rolled his
trousers above his knees. His object was, of course, merely to avoid
stumbling into the rocky pools about him, and perhaps he was rather glad,
as all men are, of an excuse to resume, even for a moment, the sensations of
his boyhood. At any rate, it is to this, no doubt, that he owes his life.
He approached his mark with all the assurance which the absolute
security of this country against all forms of animal life gives its inhabitants.
The round bodies moved to and fro, but it was only when he surmounted
the skerry of boulders I have mentioned that he realised the horrible nature
of the discovery. It came upon him with some suddenness.
The rounded bodies fell apart as he came into sight over the ridge, and
displayed the pinkish object to be the partially devoured body of a human
being, but whether of a man or woman he was unable to say. And the
rounded bodies were new and ghastly-looking creatures, in shape somewhat
resembling an octopus, with huge and very long and flexible tentacles,
coiled copiously on the ground. The skin had a glistening texture,
unpleasant to see, like shiny leather. The downward bend of the tentacle-
surrounded mouth, the curious excrescence at the bend, the tentacles, and
the large intelligent eyes, gave the creatures a grotesque suggestion of a
face. They were the size of a fair-sized swine about the body, and the
tentacles seemed to him to be many feet in length. There were, he thinks,
seven or eight at least of the creatures. Twenty yards beyond them, amid the
surf of the now returning tide, two others were emerging from the sea.
Their bodies lay flatly on the rocks, and their eyes regarded him with evil
interest; but it does not appear that Mr. Fison was afraid, or that he realised
that he was in any danger. Possibly his confidence is to be ascribed to the
limpness of their attitudes. But he was horrified, of course, and intensely
excited and indignant, at such revolting creatures preying upon human
flesh. He thought they had chanced upon a drowned body. He shouted to
them, with the idea of driving them off, and finding they did not budge, cast
about him, picked up a big rounded lump of rock, and flung it at one.

And then, slowly uncoiling their tentacles, they all began moving
towards him—creeping at first deliberately, and making a soft purring
sound to each other.
In a moment Mr. Fison realised that he was in danger. He shouted again,
threw both his boots, and started off, with a leap, forthwith. Twenty yards
off he stopped and faced about, judging them slow, and behold! the
tentacles of their leader were already pouring over the rocky ridge on which
he had just been standing!
At that he shouted again, but this time not threatening, but a cry of
dismay, and began jumping, striding, slipping, wading across the uneven
expanse between him and the beach. The tall red cliffs seemed suddenly at a
vast distance, and he saw, as though they were creatures in another world,
two minute workmen engaged in the repair of the ladder-way, and little
suspecting the race for life that was beginning below them. At one time he
could hear the creatures splashing in the pools not a dozen feet behind him,
and once he slipped and almost fell.
They chased him to the very foot of the cliffs, and desisted only when he
had been joined by the workmen at the foot of the ladder-way up the cliff.
All three of the men pelted them with stones for a time, and then hurried to
the cliff top and along the path towards Sidmouth, to secure assistance and a
boat, and to rescue the desecrated body from the clutches of these
abominable creatures.
II. — And, as if he had not already been in sufficient peril that day, Mr.
Fison went with the boat to point out the exact spot of his adventure.
As the tide was down, it required a considerable detour to reach the spot,
and when at last they came off the ladder-way, the mangled body had
disappeared. The water was now running in, submerging first one slab of
slimy rock and then another, and the four men in the boat—the workmen,
that is, the boatman, and Mr. Fison—now turned their attention from the
bearings off shore to the water beneath the keel.
At first they could see little below them, save a dark jungle of laminaria,
with an occasional darting fish. Their minds were set on adventure, and they
expressed their disappointment freely. But presently they saw one of the

monsters swimming through the water seaward, with a curious rolling
motion that suggested to Mr. Fison the spinning roll of a captive balloon.
Almost immediately after, the waving streamers of laminaria were
extraordinarily perturbed, parted for a moment, and three of these beasts
became darkly visible, struggling for what was probably some fragment of
the drowned man. In a moment the copious olive-green ribbons had poured
again over this writhing group.
At that all four men, greatly excited, began beating the water with oars
and shouting, and immediately they saw a tumultuous movement among the
weeds. They desisted to see more clearly, and as soon as the water was
smooth, they saw, as it seemed to them, the whole sea bottom among the
weeds set with eyes.
"Ugly swine!" cried one of the men. "Why, there's dozens!"
And forthwith the things began to rise through the water about them. Mr.
Fison has since described to the writer this startling eruption out of the
waving laminaria meadows. To him it seemed to occupy a considerable
time, but it is probable that really it was an affair of a few seconds only. For
a time nothing but eyes, and then he speaks of tentacles streaming out and
parting the weed fronds this way and that. Then these things, growing
larger, until at last the bottom was hidden by their intercoiling forms, and
the tips of tentacles rose darkly here and there into the air above the swell of
the waters.
One came up boldly to the side of the boat, and clinging to this with three
of its sucker-set tentacles, threw four others over the gunwale, as if with an
intention either of oversetting the boat or of clambering into it. Mr. Fison at
once caught up the boat-hook, and, jabbing furiously at the soft tentacles,
forced it to desist. He was struck in the back and almost pitched overboard
by the boatman, who was using his oar to resist a similar attack on the other
side of the boat. But the tentacles on either side at once relaxed their hold,
slid out of sight, and splashed into the water.
"We'd better get out of this," said Mr. Fison, who was trembling violently.
He went to the tiller, while the boatman and one of the workmen seated
themselves and began rowing. The other workman stood up in the fore part
of the boat, with the boat-hook, ready to strike any more tentacles that

might appear. Nothing else seems to have been said. Mr. Fison had
expressed the common feeling beyond amendment. In a hushed, scared
mood, with faces white and drawn, they set about escaping from the
position into which they had so recklessly blundered.
But the oars had scarcely dropped into the water before dark, tapering,
serpentine ropes had bound them, and were about the rudder; and creeping
up the sides of the boat with a looping motion came the suckers again. The
men gripped their oars and pulled, but it was like trying to move a boat in a
floating raft of weeds. "Help here!" cried the boatman, and Mr. Fison and
the second workman rushed to help lug at the oar.
Then the man with the boat-hook—his name was Ewan, or Ewen—
sprang up with a curse and began striking downward over the side, as far as
he could reach, at the bank of tentacles that now clustered along the boat's
bottom. And, at the same time, the two rowers stood up to get a better
purchase for the recovery of their oars. The boatman handed his to Mr.
Fison, who lugged desperately, and, meanwhile, the boatman opened a big
clasp-knife, and leaning over the side of the boat, began hacking at the
spiring arms upon the oar shaft.
Mr. Fison, staggering with the quivering rocking of the boat, his teeth set,
his breath coming short, and the veins starting on his hands as he pulled at
his oar, suddenly cast his eyes seaward. And there, not fifty yards off, across
the long rollers of the incoming tide, was a large boat standing in towards
them, with three women and a little child in it. A boatman was rowing, and
a little man in a pink-ribboned straw hat and whites stood in the stern
hailing them. For a moment, of course, Mr. Fison thought of help, and then
he thought of the child. He abandoned his oar forthwith, threw up his arms
in a frantic gesture, and screamed to the party in the boat to keep away "for
God's sake!" It says much for the modesty and courage of Mr. Fison that he
does not seem to be aware that there was any quality of heroism in his
action at this juncture. The oar he had abandoned was at once drawn under,
and presently reappeared floating about twenty yards away.
At the same moment Mr. Fison felt the boat under him lurch violently,
and a hoarse scream, a prolonged cry of terror from Hill, the boatman,
caused him to forget the party of excursionists altogether. He turned, and

saw Hill crouching by the forward row-lock, his face convulsed with terror,
and his right arm over the side and drawn tightly down. He gave now a
succession of short, sharp cries, "Oh! oh! oh!—oh!" Mr. Fison believes that
he must have been hacking at the tentacles below the water-line, and have
been grasped by them, but, of course, it is quite impossible to say now
certainly what had happened. The boat was heeling over, so that the
gunwale was within ten inches of the water, and both Ewan and the other
labourer were striking down into the water, with oar and boat-hook, on
either side of Hill's arm. Mr. Fison instinctively placed himself to
counterpoise them.
Then Hill, who was a burly, powerful man, made a strenuous effort, and
rose almost to a standing position. He lifted his arm, indeed, clean out of the
water. Hanging to it was a complicated tangle of brown ropes, and the eyes
of one of the brutes that had hold of him, glaring straight and resolute,
showed momentarily above the surface. The boat heeled more and more,
and the green-brown water came pouring in a cascade over the side. Then
Hill slipped and fell with his ribs across the side, and his arm and the mass
of tentacles about it splashed back into the water. He rolled over; his boot
kicked Mr. Fison's knee as that gentleman rushed forward to seize him, and
in another moment fresh tentacles had whipped about his waist and neck,
and after a brief, convulsive struggle, in which the boat was nearly
capsized, Hill was lugged overboard. The boat righted with a violent jerk
that all but sent Mr. Fison over the other side, and hid the struggle in the
water from his eyes.
He stood staggering to recover his balance for a moment, and as he did so
he became aware that the struggle and the inflowing tide had carried them
close upon the weedy rocks again. Not four yards off a table of rock still
rose in rhythmic movements above the in-wash of the tide. In a moment Mr.
Fison seized the oar from Ewan, gave one vigorous stroke, then dropping it,
ran to the bows and leapt. He felt his feet slide over the rock, and, by a
frantic effort, leapt again towards a further mass. He stumbled over this,
came to his knees, and rose again.
"Look out!" cried someone, and a large drab body struck him. He was
knocked flat into a tidal pool by one of the workmen, and as he went down
he heard smothered, choking cries, that he believed at the time came from

Hill. Then he found himself marvelling at the shrillness and variety of Hill's
voice. Someone jumped over him, and a curving rush of foamy water
poured over him, and passed. He scrambled to his feet dripping, and
without looking seaward, ran as fast as his terror would let him shoreward.
Before him, over the flat space of scattered rocks, stumbled the two work-
men—one a dozen yards in front of the other.
He looked over his shoulder at last, and seeing that he was not pursued,
faced about. He was astonished. From the moment of the rising of the
cephalopods out of the water he had been acting too swiftly to fully
comprehend his actions. Now it seemed to him as if he had suddenly
jumped out of an evil dream.
For there were the sky, cloudless and blazing with the afternoon sun, the
sea weltering under its pitiless brightness, the soft creamy foam of the
breaking water, and the low, long, dark ridges of rock. The righted boat
floated, rising and falling gently on the swell about a dozen yards from
shore. Hill and the monsters, all the stress and tumult of that fierce fight for
life, had vanished as though they had never been.
Mr. Fison's heart was beating violently; he was throbbing to the finger-
tips, and his breath came deep.
There was something missing. For some seconds he could not think
clearly enough what this might be. Sun, sky, sea, rocks—what was it? Then
he remembered the boat-load of excursionists. It had vanished. He
wondered whether he had imagined it. He turned, and saw the two
workmen standing side by side under the projecting masses of the tall pink
cliffs. He hesitated whether he should make one last attempt to save the
man Hill. His physical excitement seemed to desert him suddenly, and leave
him aimless and helpless. He turned shoreward, stumbling and wading
towards his two companions.
He looked back again, and there were now two boats floating, and the
one farthest out at sea pitched clumsily, bottom upward.
III. — So it was Haploteuthis ferox made its appearance upon the
Devonshire coast. So far, this has been its most serious aggression. Mr.
Fison's account, taken together with the wave of boating and bathing

casualties to which I have already alluded, and the absence of fish from the
Cornish coasts that year, points clearly to a shoal of these voracious deep-
sea monsters prowling slowly along the sub-tidal coast-line. Hunger
migration has, I know, been suggested as the force that drove them hither;
but, for my own part, I prefer to believe the alternative theory of Hemsley.
Hemsley holds that a pack or shoal of these creatures may have become
enamoured of human flesh by the accident of a foundered ship sinking
among them, and have wandered in search of it out of their accustomed
zone; first waylaying and following ships, and so coming to our shores in
the wake of the Atlantic traffic. But to discuss Hemsley's cogent and
admirably-stated arguments would be out of place here.
It would seem that the appetites of the shoal were satisfied by the catch
of eleven people—for, so far as can be ascertained, there were ten people in
the second boat, and certainly these creatures gave no further signs of their
presence off Sidmouth that day. The coast between Seaton and Budleigh
Salterton was patrolled all that evening and night by four Preventive
Service boats, the men in which were armed with harpoons and cutlasses,
and as the evening advanced, a number of more or less similarly equipped
expeditions, organised by private individuals, joined them. Mr. Fison took
no part in any of these expeditions.
About midnight excited hails were heard from a boat about a couple of
miles out at sea to the south-east of Sidmouth, and a lantern was seen
waving in a strange manner to and fro and up and down. The nearer boats at
once hurried towards the alarm. The venturesome occupants of the boat—a
seaman, a curate, and two schoolboys—had actually seen the monsters
passing under their boat. The creatures, it seems, like most deep-sea
organisms, were phosphorescent, and they had been floating, five fathoms
deep or so, like creatures of moonshine through the blackness of the water,
their tentacles retracted and as if asleep, rolling over and over, and moving
slowly in a wedge-like formation towards the south-east.
These people told their story in gesticulated fragments, as first one boat
drew alongside and then another. At last there was a little fleet of eight or
nine boats collected together, and from them a tumult, like the chatter of a
market-place, rose into the stillness of the night. There was little or no
disposition to pursue the shoal, the people had neither weapons nor

experience for such a dubious chase, and presently—even with a certain
relief, it may be—the boats turned shoreward.
And now to tell what is perhaps the most astonishing fact in this whole
astonishing raid. We have not the slightest knowledge of the subsequent
movements of the shoal, although the whole south-west coast was now alert
for it. But it may, perhaps, be significant that a cachalot was stranded off
Sark on June 3. Two weeks and three days after this Sidmouth affair, a
living Haploteuthis came ashore on Calais sands. It was alive, because
several witnesses saw its tentacles moving in a convulsive way. But it is
probable that it was dying. A gentleman named Pouchet obtained a rifle and
shot it.
That was the last appearance of a living Haploteuthis. No others were
seen on the French coast. On the 15th of June a dead carcass, almost
complete, was washed ashore near Torquay, and a few days later a boat
from the Marine Biological station, engaged in dredging off Plymouth,
picked up a rotting specimen, slashed deeply with a cutlass wound. How the
former had come by its death it is impossible to say. And on the last day of
June, Mr. Egbert Caine, an artist, bathing near Newlyn, threw up his arms,
shrieked, and was drawn under. A friend bathing with him made no attempt
to save him, but swam at once for the shore. This is the last fact to tell of
this extraordinary raid from the deeper sea. Whether it is really the last of
these horrible creatures it is, as yet, premature to say. But it is believed, and
certainly it is to be hoped, that they have returned now, and returned for
good, to the sunless depths of the middle seas, out of which they have so
strangely and so mysteriously arisen.

XIV. — THE OBLITERATED MAN.
I was—you shall hear immediately why I am not now—Egbert Craddock
Cummins. The name remains. I am still (Heaven help me!) Dramatic Critic
to the Fiery Cross. What I shall be in a little while I do not know. I write in
great trouble and confusion of mind. I will do what I can to make myself
clear in the face of terrible difficulties. You must bear with me a little.
When a man is rapidly losing his own identity, he naturally finds a difficulty
in expressing himself. I will make it perfectly plain in a minute, when once
I get my grip upon the story. Let me see—where am I? I wish I knew. Ah, I
have it! Dead self! Egbert Craddock Cummins!
In the past I should have disliked writing anything quite so full of "I" as
this story must be. It is full of "I's" before and behind, like the beast in
Revelation—the one with a head like a calf, I am afraid. But my tastes have
changed since I became a Dramatic Critic and studied the masters—G.A.S.,
G.B.S., G.R.S., and the others. Everything has changed since then. At least
the story is about myself—so that there is some excuse for me. And it is
really not egotism, because, as I say, since those days my identity has
undergone an entire alteration.
That past!... I was—in those days—rather a nice fellow, rather shy—
taste for grey in my clothes, weedy little moustache, face "interesting,"
slight stutter which I had caught in my early life from a schoolfellow.
Engaged to a very nice girl, named Delia. Fairly new, she was— cigarettes
—liked me because I was human and original. Considered I was like Lamb
—on the strength of the stutter, I believe. Father, an eminent authority on
postage stamps. She read a great deal in the British Museum. (A perfect
pairing ground for literary people, that British Museum—you should read
George Egerton and Justin Huntly M'Carthy and Gissing and the rest of
them.) We loved in our intellectual way, and shared the brightest hopes. (All
gone now.) And her father liked me because I seemed honestly eager to hear
about stamps. She had no mother. Indeed, I had the happiest prospects a
young man could have. I never went to theatres in those days. My Aunt
Charlotte before she died had told me not to.

Then Barnaby, the editor of the Fiery Cross, made me—in spite of my
spasmodic efforts to escape—Dramatic Critic. He is a fine, healthy man,
Barnaby, with an enormous head of frizzy black hair and a convincing
manner, and he caught me on the staircase going to see Wembly. He had
been dining, and was more than usually buoyant. "Hullo, Cummins!" he
said. "The very man I want!" He caught me by the shoulder or the collar or
something, ran me up the little passage, and flung me over the waste-paper
basket into the arm-chair in his office. "Pray be seated," he said, as he did
so. Then he ran across the room and came back with some pink and yellow
tickets and pushed them into my hand. "Opera Comique," he said,
"Thursday; Friday, the Surrey; Saturday, the Frivolity. That's all, I think."
"But—" I began.
"Glad you're free," he said, snatching some proofs off the desk and
beginning to read.
"I don't quite understand," I said.
"Eigh?" he said, at the top of his voice, as though he thought I had gone
and was startled at my remark.
"Do you want me to criticise these plays?"
"Do something with 'em... Did you think it was a treat?"
"But I can't."
"Did you call me a fool?"
"Well, I've never been to a theatre in my life."
"Virgin soil."
"But I don't know anything about it, you know."
"That's just it. New view. No habits. No clichis in stock. Ours is a live
paper, not a bag of tricks. None of your clockwork professional journalism
in this office. And I can rely on your integrity——"
"But I've conscientious scruples——"

He caught me up suddenly and put me outside his door. "Go and talk to
Wembly about that," he said. "He'll explain."
As I stood perplexed, he opened the door again, said, "I forgot this,"
thrust a fourth ticket into my hand (it was for that night—in twenty minutes'
time) and slammed the door upon me. His expression was quite calm, but I
caught his eye.
I hate arguments. I decided that I would take his hint and become (to my
own destruction) a Dramatic Critic. I walked slowly down the passage to
Wembly. That Barnaby has a remarkable persuasive way. He has made few
suggestions during our very pleasant intercourse of four years that he has
not ultimately won me round to adopting. It may be, of course, that I am of
a yielding disposition; certainly I am too apt to take my colour from my
circumstances. It is, indeed, to my unfortunate susceptibility to vivid
impressions that all my misfortunes are due. I have already alluded to the
slight stammer I had acquired from a schoolfellow in my youth. However,
this is a digression... I went home in a cab to dress.
I will not trouble the reader with my thoughts about the first-night
audience, strange assembly as it is,—those I reserve for my Memoirs,—nor
the humiliating story of how I got lost during the entr'acte in a lot of red
plush passages, and saw the third act from the gallery. The only point upon
which I wish to lay stress was the remarkable effect of the acting upon me.
You must remember I had lived a quiet and retired life, and had never been
to the theatre before, and that I am extremely sensitive to vivid impressions.
At the risk of repetition I must insist upon these points.
The first effect was a profound amazement, not untinctured by alarm.
The phenomenal unnaturalness of acting is a thing discounted in the minds
of most people by early visits to the theatre. They get used to the fantastic
gestures, the flamboyant emotions, the weird mouthings, melodious
snortings, agonising yelps, lip-gnawings, glaring horrors, and other
emotional symbolism of the stage. It becomes at last a mere deaf-and-dumb
language to them, which they read intelligently pari passu with the hearing
of the dialogue. But all this was new to me. The thing was called a modern
comedy, the people were supposed to be English and were dressed like
fashionable Americans of the current epoch, and I fell into the natural error

of supposing that the actors were trying to represent human beings. I looked
round on my first-night audience with a kind of wonder, discovered—as all
new Dramatic Critics do—that it rested with me to reform the Drama, and,
after a supper choked with emotion, went off to the office to write a
column, piebald with "new paragraphs" (as all my stuff is—it fills out so)
and purple with indignation. Barnaby was delighted.
But I could not sleep that night. I dreamt of actors—actors glaring, actors
smiting their chests, actors flinging out a handful of extended fingers, actors
smiling bitterly, laughing despairingly, falling hopelessly, dying idiotically.
I got up at eleven with a slight headache, read my notice in the Fiery Cross,
breakfasted, and went back to my room to shave, (It's my habit to do so.)
Then an odd thing happened. I could not find my razor. Suddenly it
occurred to me that I had not unpacked it the day before.
"Ah!" said I, in front of the looking-glass. Then "Hullo!"
Quite involuntarily, when I had thought of my portmanteau, I had flung
up the left arm (fingers fully extended) and clutched at my diaphragm with
my right hand. I am an acutely self-conscious man at all times. The gesture
struck me as absolutely novel for me. I repeated it, for my own satisfaction.
"Odd!" Then (rather puzzled) I turned to my portmanteau.
After shaving, my mind reverted to the acting I had seen, and I
entertained myself before the cheval glass with some imitations of
Jafferay's more exaggerated gestures. "Really, one might think it a disease,"
I said—"Stage-Walkitis!" (There's many a truth spoken in jest.) Then, if I
remember rightly, I went off to see Wembly, and afterwards lunched at the
British Museum with Delia. We actually spoke about our prospects, in the
light of my new appointment.
But that appointment was the beginning of my downfall. From that day I
necessarily became a persistent theatre-goer, and almost insensibly I began
to change. The next thing I noticed after the gesture about the razor was to
catch myself bowing ineffably when I met Delia, and stooping in an old-
fashioned, courtly way over her hand. Directly I caught myself, I
straightened myself up and became very uncomfortable. I remember she
looked at me curiously. Then, in the office, I found myself doing "nervous
business," fingers on teeth, when Barnaby asked me a question I could not

very well answer. Then, in some trifling difference with Delia, I clasped my
hand to my brow. And I pranced through my social transactions at times
singularly like an actor! I tried not to—no one could be more keenly alive
to the arrant absurdity of the histrionic bearing. And I did!
It began to dawn on me what it all meant. The acting, I saw, was too
much for my delicately-strung nervous system. I have always, I know, been
too amenable to the suggestions of my circumstances. Night after night of
concentrated attention to the conventional attitudes and intonation of the
English stage was gradually affecting my speech and carriage. I was giving
way to the infection of sympathetic imitation. Night after night my plastic
nervous system took the print of some new amazing gesture, some new
emotional exaggeration—and retained it. A kind of theatrical veneer
threatened to plate over and obliterate my private individuality altogether. I
saw myself in a kind of vision. Sitting by myself one night, my new self
seemed to me to glide, posing and gesticulating, across the room. He
clutched his throat, he opened his fingers, he opened his legs in walking like
a high-class marionette. He went from attitude to attitude. He might have
been clockwork. Directly after this I made an ineffectual attempt to resign
my theatrical work. But Barnaby persisted in talking about the Polywhiddle
Divorce all the time I was with him, and I could get no opportunity of
saying what I wished.
And then Delia's manner began to change towards me. The ease of our
intercourse vanished. I felt she was learning to dislike me. I grinned, and
capered, and scowled, and posed at her in a thousand ways, and knew—
with what a voiceless agony!—that I did it all the time. I tried to resign
again, and Barnaby talked about "X" and "Z" and "Y" in the New Review,
and gave me a strong cigar to smoke, and so routed me. And then I walked
up the Assyrian Gallery in the manner of Irving to meet Delia, and so
precipitated the crisis.
"Ah!—Dear!" I said, with more sprightliness and emotion in my voice
than had ever been in all my life before I became (to my own undoing) a
Dramatic Critic.
She held out her hand rather coldly, scrutinising my face as she did so. I
prepared, with a new-won grace, to walk by her side. "Egbert," she said,

standing still, and thought. Then she looked at me.
I said nothing. I felt what was coming. I tried to be the old Egbert
Craddock Cummins of shambling gait and stammering sincerity, whom she
loved, but I felt even as I did so that I was a new thing, a thing of surging
emotions and mysterious fixity—like no human being that ever lived,
except upon the stage. "Egbert," she said, "you are not yourself."
"Ah!" Involuntarily I clutched my diaphragm and averted my head (as is
the way with them).
"There!" she said.
"What do you mean?" I said, whispering in vocal italics—you know how
they do it—turning on her, perplexity on face, right hand down, left on
brow. I knew quite well what she meant. I knew quite well the dramatic
unreality of my behaviour. But I struggled against it in vain. "What do you
mean?" I said, and, in a kind of hoarse whisper, "I don't understand!"
She really looked as though she disliked me. "What do you keep on
posing for?" she said. "I don't like it. You didn't use to."
"Didn't use to!" I said slowly, repeating this twice. I glared up and down
the gallery with short, sharp glances. "We are alone," I said swiftly.
"Listen!" I poked my forefinger towards her, and glared at her. "I am under
a curse."
I saw her hand tighten upon her sunshade. "You are under some bad
influence or other," said Delia. "You should give it up. I never knew anyone
change as you have done."
"Delia!" I said, lapsing into the pathetic. "Pity me, Augh! Delia! Pit—y
me!"
She eyed me critically. "Why you keep playing the fool like this I don't
know," she said. "Anyhow, I really cannot go about with a man who
behaves as you do. You made us both ridiculous on Wednesday. Frankly, I
dislike you, as you are now. I met you here to tell you so—as it's about the
only place where we can be sure of being alone together——"

"Delia!" said I, with intensity, knuckles of clenched hands white. "You
don't mean——"
"I do," said Delia. "A woman's lot is sad enough at the best of times. But
with you——"
I clapped my hand on my brow.
"So, good-bye," said Delia, without emotion.
"Oh, Delia!" I said. "Not this?"
"Good-bye, Mr. Cummins," she said.
By a violent effort I controlled myself and touched her hand. I tried to
say some word of explanation to her. She looked into my working face and
winced. "I must do it," she said hopelessly. Then she turned from me and
began walking rapidly down the gallery.
Heavens! How the human agony cried within me! I loved Delia. But
nothing found expression—I was already too deeply crusted with my
acquired self.
"Good-baye!" I said at last, watching her retreating figure. How I hated
myself for doing it! After she had vanished, I repeated in a dreamy way,
"Good-baye!" looking hopelessly round me. Then, with a kind of heart-
broken cry, I shook my clenched fists in the air, staggered to the pedestal of
a winged figure, buried my face in my arms, and made my shoulders heave.
Something within me said "Ass!" as I did so. (I had the greatest difficulty in
persuading the Museum policeman, who was attracted by my cry of agony,
that I was not intoxicated, but merely suffering from a transient
indisposition.)
But even this great sorrow has not availed to save me from my fate. I see
it; everyone sees it: I grow more "theatrical" every day. And no one could
be more painfully aware of the pungent silliness of theatrical ways. The
quiet, nervous, but pleasing E.C. Cummins vanishes. I cannot save him. I
am driven like a dead leaf before the winds of March. My tailor even enters
into the spirit of my disorder. He has a peculiar sense of what is fitting. I
tried to get a dull grey suit from him this spring, and he foisted a brilliant

blue upon me, and I see he has put braid down the sides of my new dress
trousers. My hairdresser insists upon giving me a "wave."
I am beginning to associate with actors. I detest them, but it is only in
their company that I can feel I am not glaringly conspicuous. Their talk
infects me. I notice a growing tendency to dramatic brevity, to dashes and
pauses in my style, to a punctuation of bows and attitudes. Barnaby has
remarked it too. I offended Wembly by calling him "Dear Boy" yesterday. I
dread the end, but I cannot escape from it.
The fact is, I am being obliterated. Living a grey, retired life all my
youth, I came to the theatre a delicate sketch of a man, a thing of tints and
faint lines. Their gorgeous colouring has effaced me altogether. People
forget how much mode of expression, method of movement, are a matter of
contagion. I have heard of stage-struck people before, and thought it a
figure of speech. I spoke of it jestingly, as a disease. It is no jest. It is a
disease. And I have got it badly! Deep down within me I protest against the
wrong done to my personality—unavailingly. For three hours or more a
week I have to go and concentrate my attention on some fresh play, and the
suggestions of the drama strengthen their awful hold upon me. My manners
grow so flamboyant, my passions so professional, that I doubt, as I said at
the outset, whether it is really myself that behaves in such a manner. I feel
merely the core to this dramatic casing, that grows thicker and presses upon
me—me and mine. I feel like King John's abbot in his cope of lead.
I doubt, indeed, whether I should not abandon the struggle altogether—
leave this sad world of ordinary life for which I am so ill fitted, abandon the
name of Cummins for some professional pseudonym, complete my self-
effacement, and—a thing of tricks and tatters, of posing and pretence—go
upon the stage. It seems my only resort—"to hold the mirror up to Nature."
For in the ordinary life, I will confess, no one now seems to regard me as
both sane and sober. Only upon the stage, I feel convinced, will people take
me seriously. That will be the end of it. I know that will be the end of it.
And yet ... I will frankly confess ... all that marks off your actor from your
common man ... I detest. I am still largely of my Aunt Charlotte's opinion,
that play-acting is unworthy of a pure-minded man's attention, much more
participation. Even now I would resign my dramatic criticism and try a rest.
Only I can't get hold of Barnaby. Letters of resignation he never notices. He

says it is against the etiquette of journalism to write to your Editor. And
when I go to see him, he gives me another big cigar and some strong
whisky and soda, and then something always turns up to prevent my
explanation.

XV. — THE PLATTNER STORY.
Whether the story of Gottfried Plattner is to be credited or not is a pretty
question in the value of evidence. On the one hand, we have seven
witnesses—to be perfectly exact, we have six and a half pairs of eyes, and
one undeniable fact; and on the other we have—what is it?—prejudice,
common-sense, the inertia of opinion. Never were there seven more honest-
seeming witnesses; never was there a more undeniable fact than the
inversion of Gottfried Plattner's anatomical structure, and—never was there
a more preposterous story than the one they have to tell! The most
preposterous part of the story is the worthy Gottfried's contribution (for I
count him as one of the seven). Heaven forbid that I should be led into
giving countenance to superstition by a passion for impartiality, and so
come to share the fate of Eusapia's patrons! Frankly, I believe there is
something crooked about this business of Gottfried Plattner; but what that
crooked factor is, I will admit as frankly, I do not know. I have been
surprised at the credit accorded to the story in the most unexpected and
authoritative quarters. The fairest way to the reader, however, will be for me
to tell it without further comment.
Gottfried Plattner is, in spite of his name, a freeborn Englishman. His
father was an Alsatian who came to England in the 'sixties, married a
respectable English girl of unexceptionable antecedents, and died, after a
wholesome and uneventful life (devoted, I understand, chiefly to the laying
of parquet flooring), in 1887. Gottfried's age is seven-and-twenty. He is, by
virtue of his heritage of three languages, Modern Languages Master in a
small private school in the south of England. To the casual observer he is
singularly like any other Modern Languages Master in any other small
private school. His costume is neither very costly nor very fashionable, but,
on the other hand, it is not markedly cheap or shabby; his complexion, like
his height and his bearing, is inconspicuous. You would notice, perhaps,
that, like the majority of people, his face was not absolutely symmetrical,
his right eye a little larger than the left, and his jaw a trifle heavier on the
right side. If you, as an ordinary careless person, were to bare his chest and
feel his heart beating, you would probably find it quite like the heart of

anyone else. But here you and the trained observer would part company. If
you found his heart quite ordinary, the trained observer would find it quite
otherwise. And once the thing was pointed out to you, you too would
perceive the peculiarity easily enough. It is that Gottfried's heart beats on
the right side of his body.
Now, that is not the only singularity of Gottfried's structure, although it is
the only one that would appeal to the untrained mind. Careful sounding of
Gottfried's internal arrangements by a well-known surgeon seems to point
to the fact that all the other unsymmetrical parts of his body are similarly
misplaced. The right lobe of his liver is on the left side, the left on his right;
while his lungs, too, are similarly contraposed. What is still more singular,
unless Gottfried is a consummate actor, we must believe that his right hand
has recently become his left. Since the occurrences we are about to consider
(as impartially as possible), he has found the utmost difficulty in writing,
except from right to left across the paper with his left hand. He cannot
throw with his right hand, he is perplexed at meal-times between knife and
fork, and his ideas of the rule of the road—he is a cyclist—are still a
dangerous confusion. And there is not a scrap of evidence to show that
before these occurrences Gottfried was at all left-handed.
There is yet another wonderful fact in this preposterous business.
Gottfried produces three photographs of himself. You have him at the age of
five or six, thrusting fat legs at you from under a plaid frock, and scowling.
In that photograph his left eye is a little larger than his right, and his jaw is a
trifle heavier on the left side. This is the reverse of his present living
condition. The photograph of Gottfried at fourteen seems to contradict these
facts, but that is because it is one of those cheap "Gem" photographs that
were then in vogue, taken direct upon metal, and therefore reversing things
just as a looking-glass would. The third photograph represents him at one-
and-twenty, and confirms the record of the others. There seems here
evidence of the strongest confirmatory character that Gottfried has
exchanged his left side for his right. Yet how a human being can be so
changed, short of a fantastic and pointless miracle, it is exceedingly hard to
suggest.
In one way, of course, these facts might be explicable on the supposition
that Plattner has undertaken an elaborate mystification, on the strength of

his heart's displacement. Photographs may be faked, and left-handedness
imitated. But the character of the man does not lend itself to any such
theory. He is quiet, practical, unobtrusive, and thoroughly sane, from the
Nordau standpoint. He likes beer, and smokes moderately, takes walking
exercise daily, and has a healthily high estimate of the value of his teaching.
He has a good but untrained tenor voice, and takes a pleasure in singing airs
of a popular and cheerful character. He is fond, but not morbidly fond, of
reading,—chiefly fiction pervaded with a vaguely pious optimism,—sleeps
well, and rarely dreams. He is, in fact, the very last person to evolve a
fantastic fable. Indeed, so far from forcing this story upon the world, he has
been singularly reticent on the matter. He meets enquirers with a certain
engaging—bashfulness is almost the word, that disarms the most
suspicious. He seems genuinely ashamed that anything so unusual has
occurred to him.
It is to be regretted that Plattner's aversion to the idea of post-mortem
dissection may postpone, perhaps for ever, the positive proof that his entire
body has had its left and right sides transposed. Upon that fact mainly the
credibility of his story hangs. There is no way of taking a man and moving
him about in space as ordinary people understand space, that will result in
our changing his sides. Whatever you do, his right is still his right, his left
his left. You can do that with a perfectly thin and flat thing, of course. If you
were to cut a figure out of paper, any figure with a right and left side, you
could change its sides simply by lifting it up and turning it over. But with a
solid it is different. Mathematical theorists tell us that the only way in which
the right and left sides of a solid body can be changed is by taking that body
clean out of space as we know it,—taking it out of ordinary existence, that
is, and turning it somewhere outside space. This is a little abstruse, no
doubt, but anyone with any knowledge of mathematical theory will assure
the reader of its truth. To put the thing in technical language, the curious
inversion of Plattner's right and left sides is proof that he has moved out of
our space into what is called the Fourth Dimension, and that he has returned
again to our world. Unless we choose to consider ourselves the victims of
an elaborate and motiveless fabrication, we are almost bound to believe that
this has occurred.
So much for the tangible facts. We come now to the account of the
phenomena that attended his temporary disappearance from the world. It

appears that in the Sussexville Proprietary School, Plattner not only
discharged the duties of Modern Languages Master, but also taught
chemistry, commercial geography, bookkeeping, shorthand, drawing, and
any other additional subject to which the changing fancies of the boys'
parents might direct attention. He knew little or nothing of these various
subjects, but in secondary as distinguished from Board or elementary
schools, knowledge in the teacher is, very properly, by no means so
necessary as high moral character and gentlemanly tone. In chemistry he
was particularly deficient, knowing, he says, nothing beyond the Three
Gases (whatever the three gases may be). As, however, his pupils began by
knowing nothing, and derived all their information from him, this caused
him (or anyone) but little inconvenience for several terms. Then a little boy
named Whibble joined the school, who had been educated (it seems) by
some mischievous relative into an inquiring habit of mind. This little boy
followed Plattner's lessons with marked and sustained interest, and in order
to exhibit his zeal on the subject, brought, at various times, substances for
Plattner to analyse. Plattner, flattered by this evidence of his power of
awakening interest, and trusting to the boy's ignorance, analysed these, and
even, made general statements as to their composition. Indeed, he was so
far stimulated by his pupil as to obtain a work upon analytical chemistry,
and study it during his supervision of the evening's preparation. He was
surprised to find chemistry quite an interesting subject.
So far the story is absolutely commonplace. But now the greenish
powder comes upon the scene. The source of that greenish powder seems,
unfortunately, lost. Master Whibble tells a tortuous story of finding it done
up in a packet in a disused limekiln near the Downs. It would have been an
excellent thing for Plattner, and possibly for Master Whibble's family, if a
match could have been applied to that powder there and then. The young
gentleman certainly did not bring it to school in a packet, but in a common
eight-ounce graduated medicine bottle, plugged with masticated newspaper.
He gave it to Plattner at the end of the afternoon school. Four boys had been
detained after school prayers in order to complete some neglected tasks, and
Plattner was supervising these in the small class-room in which the
chemical teaching was conducted. The appliances for the practical teaching
of chemistry in the Sussexville Proprietary School, as in most small schools
in this country, are characterised by a severe simplicity. They are kept in a

small cupboard standing in a recess, and having about the same capacity as
a common travelling trunk. Plattner, being bored with his passive
superintendence, seems to have welcomed the intervention of Whibble with
his green powder as an agreeable diversion, and, unlocking this cupboard,
proceeded at once with his analytical experiments. Whibble sat, luckily for
himself, at a safe distance, regarding him. The four malefactors, feigning a
profound absorption in their work, watched him furtively with the keenest
interest. For even within the limits of the Three Gases, Plattner's practical
chemistry was, I understand, temerarious.
They are practically unanimous in their account of Plattner's proceedings.
He poured a little of the green powder into a test-tube, and tried the
substance with water, hydrochloric acid, nitric acid, and sulphuric acid in
succession. Getting no result, he emptied out a little heap—nearly half the
bottleful, in fact—upon a slate and tried a match. He held the medicine
bottle in his left hand. The stuff began to smoke and melt, and then
exploded with deafening violence and a blinding flash.
The five boys, seeing the flash and being prepared for catastrophes,
ducked below their desks, and were none of them seriously hurt. The
window was blown out into the playground, and the blackboard on its easel
was upset. The slate was smashed to atoms. Some plaster fell from the
ceiling. No other damage was done to the school edifice or appliances, and
the boys at first, seeing nothing of Plattner, fancied he was knocked down
and lying out of their sight below the desks. They jumped out of their places
to go to his assistance, and were amazed to find the space empty. Being still
confused by the sudden violence of the report, they hurried to the open
door, under the impression that he must have been hurt, and have rushed out
of the room. But Carson, the foremost, nearly collided in the doorway with
the principal, Mr. Lidgett.
Mr. Lidgett is a corpulent, excitable man with one eye. The boys describe
him as stumbling into the room mouthing some of those tempered
expletives irritable schoolmasters accustom themselves to use—lest worse
befall. "Wretched mumchancer!" he said. "Where's Mr. Plattner?" The boys
are agreed on the very words. ("Wobbler," "snivelling puppy," and
"mumchancer" are, it seems, among the ordinary small change of Mr.
Lidgett's scholastic commerce.)

Where's Mr. Plattner? That was a question that was to be repeated many
times in the next few days. It really seemed as though that frantic
hyperbole, "blown to atoms," had for once realised itself. There was not a
visible particle of Plattner to be seen; not a drop of blood nor a stitch of
clothing to be found. Apparently he had been blown clean out of existence
and left not a wrack behind. Not so much as would cover a sixpenny piece,
to quote a proverbial expression! The evidence of his absolute
disappearance as a consequence of that explosion is indubitable.
It is not necessary to enlarge here upon the commotion excited in the
Sussexville Proprietary School, and in Sussexville and elsewhere, by this
event. It is quite possible, indeed, that some of the readers of these pages
may recall the hearing of some remote and dying version of that excitement
during the last summer holidays. Lidgett, it would seem, did everything in
his power to suppress and minimise the story. He instituted a penalty of
twenty-five lines for any mention of Plattner's name among the boys, and
stated in the schoolroom that he was clearly aware of his assistant's
whereabouts. He was afraid, he explains, that the possibility of an explosion
happening, in spite of the elaborate precautions taken to minimise the
practical teaching of chemistry, might injure the reputation of the school;
and so might any mysterious quality in Plattner's departure. Indeed, he did
everything in his power to make the occurrence seem as ordinary as
possible. In particular, he cross-examined the five eye-witnesses of the
occurrence so searchingly that they began to doubt the plain evidence of
their senses. But, in spite of these efforts, the tale, in a magnified and
distorted state, made a nine days' wonder in the district, and several parents
withdrew their sons on colourable pretexts. Not the least remarkable point
in the matter is the fact that a large number of people in the neighbourhood
dreamed singularly vivid dreams of Plattner during the period of excitement
before his return, and that these dreams had a curious uniformity. In almost
all of them Plattner was seen, sometimes singly, sometimes in company,
wandering about through a coruscating iridescence. In all cases his face was
pale and distressed, and in some he gesticulated towards the dreamer. One
or two of the boys, evidently under the influence of nightmare, fancied that
Plattner approached them with remarkable swiftness, and seemed to look
closely into their very eyes. Others fled with Plattner from the pursuit of
vague and extraordinary creatures of a globular shape. But all these fancies

were forgotten in inquiries and speculations when on the Wednesday next
but one after the Monday of the explosion, Plattner returned.
The circumstances of his return were as singular as those of his
departure. So far as Mr. Lidgett's somewhat choleric outline can be filled in
from Plattner's hesitating statements, it would appear that on Wednesday
evening, towards the hour of sunset, the former gentleman, having
dismissed evening preparation, was engaged in his garden, picking and
eating strawberries, a fruit of which he is inordinately fond. It is a large old-
fashioned garden, secured from observation, fortunately, by a high and ivy-
covered red-brick wall. Just as he was stooping over a particularly prolific
plant, there was a flash in the air and a heavy thud, and before he could look
round, some heavy body struck him violently from behind. He was pitched
forward, crushing the strawberries he held in his hand, and that so roughly,
that his silk hat—Mr. Lidgett adheres to the older ideas of scholastic
costume—was driven violently down upon his forehead, and almost over
one eye. This heavy missile, which slid over him sideways and collapsed
into a sitting posture among the strawberry plants, proved to be our long-
lost Mr. Gottfried Plattner, in an extremely dishevelled condition. He was
collarless and hatless, his linen was dirty, and there was blood upon his
hands. Mr. Lidgett was so indignant and surprised that he remained on all-
fours, and with his hat jammed down on his eye, while he expostulated
vehemently with Plattner for his disrespectful and unaccountable conduct.
This scarcely idyllic scene completes what I may call the exterior version
of the Plattner story—its exoteric aspect. It is quite unnecessary to enter
here into all the details of his dismissal by Mr. Lidgett. Such details, with
the full names and dates and references, will be found in the larger report of
these occurrences that was laid before the Society for the Investigation of
Abnormal Phenomena. The singular transposition of Plattner's right and left
sides was scarcely observed for the first day or so, and then first in
connection with his disposition to write from right to left across the
blackboard. He concealed rather than ostended this curious confirmatory
circumstance, as he considered it would unfavourably affect his prospects in
a new situation. The displacement of his heart was discovered some months
after, when he was having a tooth extracted under anaesthetics. He then,
very unwillingly, allowed a cursory surgical examination to be made of
himself, with a view to a brief account in the Journal of Anatomy. That

exhausts the statement of the material facts; and we may now go on to
consider Plattner's account of the matter.
But first let us clearly differentiate between the preceding portion of this
story and what is to follow. All I have told thus far is established by such
evidence as even a criminal lawyer would approve. Every one of the
witnesses is still alive; the reader, if he have the leisure, may hunt the lads
out to-morrow, or even brave the terrors of the redoubtable Lidgett, and
cross-examine and trap and test to his heart's content; Gottfried Plattner
himself, and his twisted heart and his three photographs, are producible. It
may be taken as proved that he did disappear for nine days as the
consequence of an explosion; that he returned almost as violently, under
circumstances in their nature annoying to Mr. Lidgett, whatever the details
of those circumstances may be; and that he returned inverted, just as a
reflection returns from a mirror. From the last fact, as I have already stated,
it follows almost inevitably that Plattner, during those nine days, must have
been in some state of existence altogether out of space. The evidence to
these statements is, indeed, far stronger than that upon which most
murderers are hanged. But for his own particular account of where he had
been, with its confused explanations and wellnigh self-contradictory details,
we have only Mr. Gottfried Plattner's word. I do not wish to discredit that,
but I must point out—what so many writers upon obscure psychic
phenomena fail to do—that we are passing here from the practically
undeniable to that kind of matter which any reasonable man is entitled to
believe or reject as he thinks proper. The previous statements render it
plausible; its discordance with common experience tilts it towards the
incredible. I would prefer not to sway the beam of the reader's judgment
either way, but simply to tell the story as Plattner told it me.
He gave me his narrative, I may state, at my house at Chislehurst, and so
soon as he had left me that evening, I went into my study and wrote down
everything as I remembered it. Subsequently he was good enough to read
over a type-written copy, so that its substantial correctness is undeniable.
He states that at the moment of the explosion he distinctly thought he was
killed. He felt lifted off his feet and driven forcibly backward. It is a curious
fact for psychologists that he thought clearly during his backward flight,
and wondered whether he should hit the chemistry cupboard or the

blackboard easel. His heels struck ground, and he staggered and fell heavily
into a sitting position on something soft and firm. For a moment the
concussion stunned him. He became aware at once of a vivid scent of
singed hair, and he seemed to hear the voice of Lidgett asking for him. You
will understand that for a time his mind was greatly confused.
At first he was under the impression that he was still standing in the
class-room. He perceived quite distinctly the surprise of the boys and the
entry of Mr. Lidgett. He is quite positive upon that score. He did not hear
their remarks; but that he ascribed to the deafening effect of the experiment.
Things about him seemed curiously dark and faint, but his mind explained
that on the obvious but mistaken idea that the explosion had engendered a
huge volume of dark smoke. Through the dimness the figures of Lidgett and
the boys moved, as faint and silent as ghosts. Plattner's face still tingled
with the stinging heat of the flash. He, was, he says, "all muddled." His first
definite thoughts seem to have been of his personal safety. He thought he
was perhaps blinded and deafened. He felt his limbs and face in a gingerly
manner. Then his perceptions grew clearer, and he was astonished to miss
the old familiar desks and other schoolroom furniture about him. Only dim,
uncertain, grey shapes stood in the place of these. Then came a thing that
made him shout aloud, and awoke his stunned faculties to instant activity.
Two of the boys, gesticulating, walked one after the other clean through
him! Neither manifested the slightest consciousness of his presence. It is
difficult to imagine the sensation he felt. They came against him, he says,
with no more force than a wisp of mist.
Plattner's first thought after that was that he was dead. Having been
brought up with thoroughly sound views in these matters, however, he was
a little surprised to find his body still about him. His second conclusion was
that he was not dead, but that the others were: that the explosion had
destroyed the Sussexville Proprietary School and every soul in it except
himself. But that, too, was scarcely satisfactory. He was thrown back upon
astonished observation.
Everything about him was profoundly dark: at first it seemed to have an
altogether ebony blackness. Overhead was a black firmament. The only
touch of light in the scene was a faint greenish glow at the edge of the sky
in one direction, which threw into prominence a horizon of undulating

black hills. This, I say, was his impression at first. As his eye grew
accustomed to the darkness, he began to distinguish a faint quality of
differentiating greenish colour in the circumambient night. Against this
background the furniture and occupants of the class-room, it seems, stood
out like phosphorescent spectres, faint and impalpable. He extended his
hand, and thrust it without an effort through the wall of the room by the
fireplace.
He describes himself as making a strenuous effort to attract attention. He
shouted to Lidgett, and tried to seize the boys as they went to and fro. He
only desisted from these attempts when Mrs. Lidgett, whom he (as an
Assistant Master) naturally disliked, entered the room. He says the
sensation of being in the world, and yet not a part of it, was an
extraordinarily disagreeable one. He compared his feelings, not inaptly, to
those of a cat watching a mouse through a window. Whenever he made a
motion to communicate with the dim, familiar world about him, he found
an invisible, incomprehensible barrier preventing intercourse.
He then turned his attention to his solid environment. He found the
medicine bottle still unbroken in his hand, with the remainder of the green
powder therein. He put this in his pocket, and began to feel about him.
Apparently he was sitting on a boulder of rock covered with a velvety moss.
The dark country about him he was unable to see, the faint, misty picture of
the schoolroom blotting it out, but he had a feeling (due perhaps to a cold
wind) that he was near the crest of a hill, and that a steep valley fell away
beneath his feet. The green glow along the edge of the sky seemed to be
growing in extent and intensity. He stood up, rubbing his eyes.
It would seem that he made a few steps, going steeply downhill, and then
stumbled, nearly fell, and sat down again upon a jagged mass of rock to
watch the dawn. He became aware that the world about him was absolutely
silent. It was as still as it was dark, and though there was a cold wind
blowing up the hill-face, the rustle of grass, the soughing of the boughs that
should have accompanied it, were absent. He could hear, therefore, if he
could not see, that the hillside upon which he stood was rocky and desolate.
The green grew brighter every moment, and as it did so a faint, transparent
blood-red mingled with, but did not mitigate, the blackness of the sky
overhead and the rocky desolations about him. Having regard to what

follows, I am inclined to think that that redness may have been an optical
effect due to contrast. Something black fluttered momentarily against the
livid yellow-green of the lower sky, and then the thin and penetrating voice
of a bell rose out of the black gulf below him. An oppressive expectation
grew with the growing light.
It is probable that an hour or more elapsed while he sat there, the strange
green light growing brighter every moment, and spreading slowly, in
flamboyant fingers, upward towards the zenith. As it grew, the spectral
vision of our world became relatively or absolutely fainter. Probably both,
for the time must have been about that of our earthly sunset. So far as his
vision of our world went, Plattner, by his few steps downhill, had passed
through the floor of the class-room, and was now, it seemed, sitting in mid-
air in the larger schoolroom downstairs. He saw the boarders distinctly, but
much more faintly than he had seen Lidgett. They were preparing their
evening tasks, and he noticed with interest that several were cheating with
their Euclid riders by means of a crib, a compilation whose existence he had
hitherto never suspected. As the time passed, they faded steadily, as steadily
as the light of the green dawn increased.
Looking down into the valley, he saw that the light had crept far down its
rocky sides, and that the profound blackness of the abyss was now broken
by a minute green glow, like the light of a glow-worm. And almost
immediately the limb of a huge heavenly body of blazing green rose over
the basaltic undulations of the distant hills, and the monstrous hill-masses
about him came out gaunt and desolate, in green light and deep, ruddy black
shadows. He became aware of a vast number of ball-shaped objects drifting
as thistledown drifts over the high ground. There were none of these nearer
to him than the opposite side of the gorge. The bell below twanged quicker
and quicker, with something like impatient insistence, and several lights
moved hither and thither. The boys at work at their desks were now almost
imperceptibly faint.
This extinction of our world, when the green sun of this other universe
rose, is a curious point upon which Plattner insists. During the Other-World
night it is difficult to move about, on account of the vividness with which
the things of this world are visible. It becomes a riddle to explain why, if
this is the case, we in this world catch no glimpse of the Other-World. It is

due, perhaps, to the comparatively vivid illumination of this world of ours.
Plattner describes the midday of the Other-World, at its brightest, as not
being nearly so bright as this world at full moon, while its night is
profoundly black. Consequently, the amount of light, even in an ordinary
dark room, is sufficient to render the things of the Other-World invisible, on
the same principle that faint phosphorescence is only visible in the
profoundest darkness. I have tried, since he told me his story, to see
something of the Other-World by sitting for a long space in a photographer's
dark room at night. I have certainly seen indistinctly the form of greenish
slopes and rocks, but only, I must admit, very indistinctly indeed. The
reader may possibly be more successful. Plattner tells me that since his
return he has dreamt and seen and recognised places in the Other-World, but
this is probably due to his memory of these scenes. It seems quite possible
that people with unusually keen eyesight may occasionally catch a glimpse
of this strange Other-World about us.
However, this is a digression. As the green sun rose, a long street of black
buildings became perceptible, though only darkly and indistinctly, in the
gorge, and after some hesitation, Plattner began to clamber down the
precipitous descent towards them. The descent was long and exceedingly
tedious, being so not only by the extraordinary steepness, but also by reason
of the looseness of the boulders with which the whole face of the hill was
strewn. The noise of his descent—now and then his heels struck fire from
the rocks—seemed now the only sound in the universe, for the beating of
the bell had ceased. As he drew nearer, he perceived that the various
edifices had a singular resemblance to tombs and mausoleums and
monuments, saving only that they were all uniformly black instead of being
white, as most sepulchres are. And then he saw, crowding out of the largest
building, very much as people disperse from church, a number of pallid,
rounded, pale-green figures. These dispersed in several directions about the
broad street of the place, some going through side alleys and reappearing
upon the steepness of the hill, others entering some of the small black
buildings which lined the way.
At the sight of these things drifting up towards him, Plattner stopped,
staring. They were not walking, they were indeed limbless, and they had the
appearance of human heads, beneath which a tadpole-like body swung. He
was too astonished at their strangeness, too full, indeed, of strangeness, to

be seriously alarmed by them. They drove towards him, in front of the chill
wind that was blowing uphill, much as soap-bubbles drive before a draught.
And as he looked at the nearest of those approaching, he saw it was indeed
a human head, albeit with singularly large eyes, and wearing such an
expression of distress and anguish as he had never seen before upon mortal
countenance. He was surprised to find that it did not turn to regard him, but
seemed to be watching and following some unseen moving thing. For a
moment he was puzzled, and then it occurred to him that this creature was
watching with its enormous eyes something that was happening in the
world he had just left. Nearer it came, and nearer, and he was too astonished
to cry out. It made a very faint fretting sound as it came close to him. Then
it struck his face with a gentle pat—its touch was very cold—and drove past
him, and upward towards the crest of the hill.
An extraordinary conviction flashed across Plattner's mind that this head
had a strong likeness to Lidgett. Then he turned his attention to the other
heads that were now swarming thickly up the hill-side. None made the
slightest sign of recognition. One or two, indeed, came close to his head and
almost followed the example of the first, but he dodged convulsively out of
the way. Upon most of them he saw the same expression of unavailing
regret he had seen upon the first, and heard the same faint sounds of
wretchedness from them. One or two wept, and one rolling swiftly uphill
wore an expression of diabolical rage. But others were cold, and several had
a look of gratified interest in their eyes. One, at least, was almost in an
ecstasy of happiness. Plattner does not remember that he recognised any
more likenesses in those he saw at this time.
For several hours, perhaps, Plattner watched these strange things
dispersing themselves over the hills, and not till long after they had ceased
to issue from the clustering black buildings in the gorge, did he resume his
downward climb. The darkness about him increased so much that he had a
difficulty in stepping true. Overhead the sky was now a bright, pale green.
He felt neither hunger nor thirst. Later, when he did, he found a chilly
stream running down the centre of the gorge, and the rare moss upon the
boulders, when he tried it at last in desperation, was good to eat.
He groped about among the tombs that ran down the gorge, seeking
vaguely for some clue to these inexplicable things. After a long time he

came to the entrance of the big mausoleum-like building from which the
heads had issued. In this he found a group of green lights burning upon a
kind of basaltic altar, and a bell-rope from a belfry overhead hanging down
into the centre of the place. Round the wall ran a lettering of fire in a
character unknown to him. While he was still wondering at the purport of
these things, he heard the receding tramp of heavy feet echoing far down
the street. He ran out into the darkness again, but he could see nothing. He
had a mind to pull the bell-rope, and finally decided to follow the footsteps.
But, although he ran far, he never overtook them; and his shouting was of
no avail. The gorge seemed to extend an interminable distance. It was as
dark as earthly starlight throughout its length, while the ghastly green day
lay along the upper edge of its precipices. There were none of the heads,
now, below. They were all, it seemed, busily occupied along the upper
slopes. Looking up, he saw them drifting hither and thither, some hovering
stationary, some flying swiftly through the air. It reminded him, he said, of
"big snowflakes"; only these were black and pale green.
In pursuing the firm, undeviating footsteps that he never overtook, in
groping into new regions of this endless devil's dyke, in clambering up and
down the pitiless heights, in wandering about the summits, and in watching
the drifting faces, Plattner states that he spent the better part of seven or
eight days. He did not keep count, he says. Though once or twice he found
eyes watching him, he had word with no living soul. He slept among the
rocks on the hillside. In the gorge things earthly were invisible, because,
from the earthly standpoint, it was far underground. On the altitudes, so
soon as the earthly day began, the world became visible to him. He found
himself sometimes stumbling over the dark green rocks, or arresting himself
on a precipitous brink, while all about him the green branches of the
Sussexville lanes were swaying; or, again, he seemed to be walking through
the Sussexville streets, or watching unseen the private business of some
household. And then it was he discovered, that to almost every human being
in our world there pertained some of these drifting heads; that everyone in
the world is watched intermittently by these helpless disembodiments.
What are they—these Watchers of the Living? Plattner never learned. But
two, that presently found and followed him, were like his childhood's
memory of his father and mother. Now and then other faces turned their
eyes upon him: eyes like those of dead people who had swayed him, or

injured him, or helped him in his youth and manhood. Whenever they
looked at him, Plattner was overcome with a strange sense of responsibility.
To his mother he ventured to speak; but she made no answer. She looked
sadly, steadfastly, and tenderly—a little reproachfully, too, it seemed—into
his eyes.
He simply tells this story: he does not endeavour to explain. We are left
to surmise who these Watchers of the Living may be, or, if they are indeed
the Dead, why they should so closely and passionately watch a world they
have left for ever. It may be—indeed to my mind it seems just—that, when
our life has closed, when evil or good is no longer a choice for us, we may
still have to witness the working out of the train of consequences we have
laid. If human souls continue after death, then surely human interests
continue after death. But that is merely my own guess at the meaning of the
things seen. Plattner offers no interpretation, for none was given him. It is
well the reader should understand this clearly. Day after day, with his head
reeling, he wandered about this strange lit world outside the world, weary
and, towards the end, weak and hungry. By day—by our earthly day, that is
—the ghostly vision of the old familiar scenery of Sussexville, all about
him, irked and worried him. He could not see where to put his feet, and ever
and again with a chilly touch one of these Watching Souls would come
against his face. And after dark the multitude of these Watchers about him,
and their intent distress, confused his mind beyond describing. A great
longing to return to the earthly life that was so near and yet so remote
consumed him. The unearthliness of things about him produced a positively
painful mental distress. He was worried beyond describing by his own
particular followers. He would shout at them to desist from staring at him,
scold at them, hurry away from them. They were always mute and intent.
Run as he might over the uneven ground, they followed his destinies.
On the ninth day, towards evening, Plattner heard the invisible footsteps
approaching, far away down the gorge. He was then wandering over the
broad crest of the same hill upon which he had fallen in his entry into this
strange Other-World of his. He turned to hurry down into the gorge, feeling
his way hastily, and was arrested by the sight of the thing that was
happening in a room in a back street near the school. Both of the people in
the room he knew by sight. The windows were open, the blinds up, and the
setting sun shone clearly into it, so that it came out quite brightly at first, a

vivid oblong of room, lying like a magic-lantern picture upon the black
landscape and the livid green dawn. In addition to the sunlight, a candle had
just been lit in the room.
On the bed lay a lank man, his ghastly white face terrible upon the
tumbled pillow. His clenched hands were raised above his head. A little
table beside the bed carried a few medicine bottles, some toast and water,
and an empty glass. Every now and then the lank man's lips fell apart, to
indicate a word he could not articulate. But the woman did not notice that
he wanted anything, because she was busy turning out papers from an old-
fashioned bureau in the opposite corner of the room. At first the picture was
very vivid indeed, but as the green dawn behind it grew brighter and
brighter, so it became fainter and more and more transparent.
As the echoing footsteps paced nearer and nearer, those footsteps that
sound so loud in that Other-World and come so silently in this, Plattner
perceived about him a great multitude of dim faces gathering together out
of the darkness and watching the two people in the room. Never before had
he seen so many of the Watchers of the Living. A multitude had eyes only
for the sufferer in the room, another multitude, in infinite anguish, watched
the woman as she hunted with greedy eyes for something she could not
find. They crowded about Plattner, they came across his sight and buffeted
his face, the noise of their unavailing regrets was all about him. He saw
clearly only now and then. At other times the picture quivered dimly,
through the veil of green reflections upon their movements. In the room it
must have been very still, and Plattner says the candle flame streamed up
into a perfectly vertical line of smoke, but in his ears each footfall and its
echoes beat like a clap of thunder. And the faces! Two, more particularly
near the woman's: one a woman's also, white and clear-featured, a face
which might have once been cold and hard, but which was now softened by
the touch of a wisdom strange to earth. The other might have been the
woman's father. Both were evidently absorbed in the contemplation of some
act of hateful meanness, so it seemed, which they could no longer guard
against and prevent. Behind were others, teachers, it may be, who had
taught ill, friends whose influence had failed. And over the man, too—a
multitude, but none that seemed to be parents or teachers! Faces that might
once have been coarse, now purged to strength by sorrow! And in the
forefront one face, a girlish one, neither angry nor remorseful, but merely

patient and weary, and, as it seemed to Plattner, waiting for relief. His
powers of description fail him at the memory of this multitude of ghastly
countenances. They gathered on the stroke of the bell. He saw them all in
the space of a second. It would seem that he was so worked on by his
excitement that, quite involuntarily, his restless fingers took the bottle of
green powder out of his pocket and held it before him. But he does not
remember that.
Abruptly the footsteps ceased. He waited for the next, and there was
silence, and then suddenly, cutting through the unexpected stillness like a
keen, thin blade, came the first stroke of the bell. At that the multitudinous
faces swayed to and fro, and a louder crying began all about him. The
woman did not hear; she was burning something now in the candle flame.
At the second stroke everything grew dim, and a breath of wind, icy cold,
blew through the host of watchers. They swirled about him like an eddy of
dead leaves in the spring, and at the third stroke something was extended
through them to the bed. You have heard of a beam of light. This was like a
beam of darkness, and looking again at it, Plattner saw that it was a
shadowy arm and hand.
The green sun was now topping the black desolations of the horizon, and
the vision of the room was very faint. Plattner could see that the white of
the bed struggled, and was convulsed; and that the woman looked round
over her shoulder at it, startled.
The cloud of watchers lifted high like a puff of green dust before the
wind, and swept swiftly downward towards the temple in the gorge. Then
suddenly Plattner understood the meaning of the shadowy black arm that
stretched across his shoulder and clutched its prey. He did not dare turn his
head to see the Shadow behind the arm. With a violent effort, and covering
his eyes, he set himself to run, made, perhaps, twenty strides, then slipped
on a boulder, and fell. He fell forward on his hands; and the bottle smashed
and exploded as he touched the ground.
In another moment he found himself, stunned and bleeding, sitting face
to face with Lidgett in the old walled garden behind the school.

There the story of Plattner's experiences ends. I have resisted, I believe
successfully, the natural disposition of a writer of fiction to dress up
incidents of this sort. I have told the thing as far as possible in the order in
which Plattner told it to me. I have carefully avoided any attempt at style,
effect, or construction. It would have been easy, for instance, to have
worked the scene of the death-bed into a kind of plot in which Plattner
might have been involved. But, quite apart from the objectionableness of
falsifying a most extraordinary true story, any such trite devices would
spoil, to my mind, the peculiar effect of this dark world, with its livid green
illumination and its drifting Watchers of the Living, which, unseen and
unapproachable to us, is yet lying all about us.
It remains to add that a death did actually occur in Vincent Terrace, just
beyond the school garden, and, so far as can be proved, at the moment of
Plattner's return. Deceased was a rate-collector and insurance agent. His
widow, who was much younger than himself, married last month a Mr.
Whymper, a veterinary surgeon of Allbeeding. As the portion of this story
given here has in various forms circulated orally in Sussexville, she has
consented to my use of her name, on condition that I make it distinctly
known that she emphatically contradicts every detail of Plattner's account of
her husband's last moments. She burnt no will, she says, although Plattner
never accused her of doing so; her husband made but one will, and that just
after their marriage. Certainly, from a man who had never seen it, Plattner's
account of the furniture of the room was curiously accurate.
One other thing, even at the risk of an irksome repetition, I must insist
upon, lest I seem to favour the credulous, superstitious view. Plattner's
absence from the world for nine days is, I think, proved. But that does not
prove his story. It is quite conceivable that even outside space
hallucinations may be possible. That, at least, the reader must bear distinctly
in mind.

XVI. — THE RED ROOM.
"I can assure you," said I, "that it will take a very tangible ghost to
frighten me." And I stood up before the fire with my glass in my hand.
"It is your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm, and
glanced at me askance.
"Eight-and-twenty years," said I, "I have lived, and never a ghost have I
seen as yet."
The old woman sat staring hard into the fire, her pale eyes wide open.
"Ay," she broke in; "and eight-and-twenty years you have lived and never
seen the likes of this house, I reckon. There's a many things to see, when
one's still but eight-and-twenty." She swayed her head slowly from side to
side. "A many things to see and sorrow for."
I half suspected the old people were trying to enhance the spiritual terrors
of their house by their droning insistence. I put down my empty glass on the
table and looked about the room, and caught a glimpse of myself,
abbreviated and broadened to an impossible sturdiness, in the queer old
mirror at the end of the room. "Well," I said, "if I see anything to-night, I
shall be so much the wiser. For I come to the business with an open mind."
"It's your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm once more.
I heard the sound of a stick and a shambling step on the flags in the
passage outside, and the door creaked on its hinges as a second old man
entered, more bent, more wrinkled, more aged even than the first. He
supported himself by a single crutch, his eyes were covered by a shade, and
his lower lip, half averted, hung pale and pink from his decaying yellow
teeth. He made straight for an arm-chair on the opposite side of the table,
sat down clumsily, and began to cough. The man with the withered arm
gave this new-comer a short glance of positive dislike; the old woman took
no notice of his arrival, but remained with her eyes fixed steadily on the
fire.

"I said—it's your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm,
when the coughing had ceased for a while.
"It's my own choosing," I answered.
The man with the shade became aware of my presence for the first time,
and threw his head back for a moment and sideways, to see me. I caught a
momentary glimpse of his eyes, small and bright and inflamed. Then he
began to cough and splutter again.
"Why don't you drink?" said the man with the withered arm, pushing the
beer towards him. The man with the shade poured out a glassful with a
shaky hand that splashed half as much again on the deal table. A monstrous
shadow of him crouched upon the wall and mocked his action as he poured
and drank. I must confess I had scarce expected these grotesque custodians.
There is to my mind something inhuman in senility, something crouching
and atavistic; the human qualities seem to drop from old people insensibly
day by day. The three of them made me feel uncomfortable, with their gaunt
silences, their bent carriage, their evident unfriendliness to me and to one
another.
"If," said I, "you will show me to this haunted room of yours, I will make
myself comfortable there."
The old man with the cough jerked his head back so suddenly that it
startled me, and shot another glance of his red eyes at me from under the
shade; but no one answered me. I waited a minute, glancing from one to the
other.
"If," I said a little louder, "if you will show me to this haunted room of
yours, I will relieve you from the task of entertaining me."
"There's a candle on the slab outside the door," said the man with the
withered arm, looking at my feet as he addressed me. "But if you go to the
red room to-night——"
("This night of all nights!" said the old woman.)
"You go alone."
"Very well," I answered. "And which way do I go?"

"You go along the passage for a bit," said he, "until you come to a door,
and through that is a spiral staircase, and half-way up that is a landing and
another door covered with baize. Go through that and down the long
corridor to the end, and the red room is on your left up the steps."
"Have I got that right?" I said, and repeated his directions. He corrected
me in one particular.
"And are you really going?" said the man with the shade, looking at me
again for the third time, with that queer, unnatural tilting of the face.
("This night of all nights!" said the old woman.)
"It is what I came for," I said, and moved towards the door. As I did so,
the old man with the shade rose and staggered round the table, so as to be
closer to the others and to the fire. At the door I turned and looked at them,
and saw they were all close together, dark against the firelight, staring at me
over their shoulders, with an intent expression on their ancient faces.
"Good-night," I said, setting the door open.
"It's your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm.
I left the door wide open until the candle was well alight, and then I shut
them in and walked down the chilly, echoing passage.
I must confess that the oddness of these three old pensioners in whose
charge her ladyship had left the castle, and the deep-toned, old-fashioned
furniture of the housekeeper's room in which they foregathered, affected me
in spite of my efforts to keep myself at a matter-of-fact phase. They seemed
to belong to another age, an older age, an age when things spiritual were
different from this of ours, less certain; an age when omens and witches
were credible, and ghosts beyond denying. Their very existence was
spectral; the cut of their clothing, fashions born in dead brains. The
ornaments and conveniences of the room about them were ghostly—the
thoughts of vanished men, which still haunted rather than participated in the
world of to-day. But with an effort I sent such thoughts to the right-about.
The long, draughty subterranean passage was chilly and dusty, and my
candle flared and made the shadows cower and quiver. The echoes rang up
and down the spiral staircase, and a shadow came sweeping up after me,

and one fled before me into the darkness overhead. I came to the landing
and stopped there for a moment, listening to a rustling that I fancied I heard;
then, satisfied of the absolute silence, I pushed open the baize-covered door
and stood in the corridor.
The effect was scarcely what I expected, for the moonlight, coming in by
the great window on the grand staircase, picked out everything in vivid
black shadow or silvery illumination. Everything was in its place: the house
might have been deserted on the yesterday instead of eighteen months ago.
There were candles in the sockets of the sconces, and whatever dust had
gathered on the carpets or upon the polished flooring was distributed so
evenly as to be invisible in the moonlight. I was about to advance, and
stopped abruptly. A bronze group stood upon the landing, hidden from me
by the corner of the wall, but its shadow fell with marvellous distinctness
upon the white panelling, and gave me the impression of someone
crouching to waylay me. I stood rigid for half a minute perhaps. Then, with
my hand in the pocket that held my revolver, I advanced, only to discover a
Ganymede and Eagle glistening in the moonlight. That incident for a time
restored my nerve, and a porcelain Chinaman on a buhl table, whose head
rocked silently as I passed him, scarcely startled me.
The door to the red room and the steps up to it were in a shadowy corner.
I moved my candle from side to side, in order to see clearly the nature of
the recess in which I stood before opening the door. Here it was, thought I,
that my predecessor was found, and the memory of that story gave me a
sudden twinge of apprehension. I glanced over my shoulder at the
Ganymede in the moonlight, and opened the door of the red room rather
hastily, with my face half turned to the pallid silence of the landing.
I entered, closed the door behind me at once, turned the key I found in
the lock within, and stood with the candle held aloft, surveying the scene of
my vigil, the great red room of Lorraine Castle, in which the young duke
had died. Or, rather, in which he had begun his dying, for he had opened the
door and fallen headlong down the steps I had just ascended. That had been
the end of his vigil, of his gallant attempt to conquer the ghostly tradition of
the place, and never, I thought, had apoplexy better served the ends of
superstition. And there were other and older stories that clung to the room,
back to the half-credible beginning of it all, the tale of a timid wife and the

tragic end that came to her husband's jest of frightening her. And looking
around that large sombre room, with its shadowy window bays, its recesses
and alcoves, one could well understand the legends that had sprouted in its
black corners, its germinating darkness. My candle was a little tongue of
light in its vastness, that failed to pierce the opposite end of the room, and
left an ocean of mystery and suggestion beyond its island of light.
I resolved to make a systematic examination of the place at once, and
dispel the fanciful suggestions of its obscurity before they obtained a hold
upon me. After satisfying myself of the fastening of the door, I began to
walk about the room, peering round each article of furniture, tucking up the
valances of the bed, and opening its curtains wide. I pulled up the blinds
and examined the fastenings of the several windows before closing the
shutters, leant forward and looked up the blackness of the wide chimney,
and tapped the dark oak panelling for any secret opening. There were two
big mirrors in the room, each with a pair of sconces bearing candles, and on
the mantelshelf, too, were more candles in china candlesticks. All these I lit
one after the other. The fire was laid, an unexpected consideration from the
old housekeeper,—and I lit it, to keep down any disposition to shiver, and
when it was burning well, I stood round with my back to it and regarded the
room again. I had pulled up a chintz-covered arm-chair and a table, to form
a kind of barricade before me, and on this lay my revolver ready to hand.
My precise examination had done me good, but I still found the remoter
darkness of the place, and its perfect stillness, too stimulating for the
imagination. The echoing of the stir and crackling of the fire was no sort of
comfort to me. The shadow in the alcove at the end in particular, had that
undefinable quality of a presence, that odd suggestion of a lurking, living
thing, that comes so easily in silence and solitude. At last, to reassure
myself, I walked with a candle into it, and satisfied myself that there was
nothing tangible there. I stood that candle upon the floor of the alcove, and
left it in that position.
By this time I was in a state of considerable nervous tension, although to
my reason there was no adequate cause for the condition. My mind,
however, was perfectly clear. I postulated quite unreservedly that nothing
supernatural could happen, and to pass the time I began to string some
rhymes together, Ingoldsby fashion, of the original legend of the place. A
few I spoke aloud, but the echoes were not pleasant. For the same reason I

also abandoned, after a time, a conversation with myself upon the
impossibility of ghosts and haunting. My mind reverted to the three old and
distorted people downstairs, and I tried to keep it upon that topic. The
sombre reds and blacks of the room troubled, me; even with seven candles
the place was merely dim. The one in the alcove flared in a draught, and the
fire-flickering kept the shadows and penumbra perpetually shifting and
stirring. Casting about for a remedy, I recalled the candles I had seen in the
passage, and, with a slight effort, walked out into the moonlight, carrying a
candle and leaving the door open, and presently returned with as many as
ten. These I put in various knick-knacks of china with which the room was
sparsely adorned, lit and placed where the shadows had lain deepest, some
on the floor, some in the window recesses, until at last my seventeen
candles were so arranged that not an inch of the room but had the direct
light of at least one of them. It occurred to me that when the ghost came, I
could warn him not to trip over them. The room was now quite brightly
illuminated. There was something very cheery and reassuring in these little
streaming flames, and snuffing them gave me an occupation, and afforded a
helpful sense of the passage of time. Even with that, however, the brooding
expectation of the vigil weighed heavily upon me. It was after midnight that
the candle in the alcove suddenly went out, and the black shadow sprang
back to its place there. I did not see the candle go out; I simply turned and
saw that the darkness was there, as one might start and see the unexpected
presence of a stranger. "By Jove!" said I aloud; "that draught's a strong
one!" and, taking the matches from the table, I walked across the room in a
leisurely manner, to relight the corner again. My first match would not
strike, and as I succeeded with the second, something seemed to blink on
the wall before me. I turned my head involuntarily, and saw that the two
candles on the little table by the fireplace were extinguished. I rose at once
to my feet.
"Odd!" I said. "Did I do that myself in a flash of absent-mindedness?"
I walked back, relit one, and as I did so, I saw the candle in the right
sconce of one of the mirrors wink and go right out, and almost immediately
its companion followed it. There was no mistake about it. The flame
vanished, as if the wicks had been suddenly nipped between a finger and a
thumb, leaving the wick neither glowing nor smoking, but black. While I

stood gaping, the candle at the foot of the bed went out, and the shadows
seemed to take another step towards me.
"This won't do!" said I, and first one and then another candle on the
mantelshelf followed.
"What's up?" I cried, with a queer high note getting into my voice
somehow. At that the candle on the wardrobe went out, and the one I had
relit in the alcove followed.
"Steady on!" I said. "These candles are wanted," speaking with a half-
hysterical facetiousness, and scratching away at a match the while for the
mantel candlesticks. My hands trembled so much that twice I missed the
rough paper of the matchbox. As the mantel emerged from darkness again,
two candles in the remoter end of the window were eclipsed. But with the
same match I also relit the larger mirror candles, and those on the floor near
the doorway, so that for the moment I seemed to gain on the extinctions.
But then in a volley there vanished four lights at once in different corners of
the room, and I struck another match in quivering haste, and stood
hesitating whither to take it.
As I stood undecided, an invisible hand seemed to sweep out the two
candles on the table. With a cry of terror, I dashed at the alcove, then into
the corner, and then into the window, relighting three, as two more vanished
by the fireplace; then, perceiving a better way, I dropped the matches on the
iron-bound deed-box in the corner, and caught up the bedroom candlestick.
With this I avoided the delay of striking matches; but for all that the steady
process of extinction went on, and the shadows I feared and fought against
returned, and crept in upon me, first a step gained on this side of me and
then on that. It was like a ragged storm-cloud sweeping out the stars. Now
and then one returned for a minute, and was lost again. I was now almost
frantic with the horror of the coming darkness, and my self-possession
deserted me. I leaped panting and dishevelled from candle to candle, in a
vain struggle against that remorseless advance.
I bruised myself on the thigh against the table, I sent a chair headlong, I
stumbled and fell and whisked the cloth from the table in my fall. My
candle rolled away from me, and I snatched another as I rose. Abruptly this
was blown out, as I swung it off the table by the wind of my sudden

movement, and immediately the two remaining candles followed. But there
was light still in the room, a red light that staved off the shadows from me.
The fire! Of course I could still thrust my candle between the bars and
relight it!
I turned to where the flames were still dancing between the glowing
coals, and splashing red reflections upon the furniture, made two steps
towards the grate, and incontinently the flames dwindled and vanished, the
glow vanished, the reflections rushed together and vanished, and as I thrust
the candle between the bars darkness closed upon me like the shutting of an
eye, wrapped about me in a stifling embrace, sealed my vision, and crushed
the last vestiges of reason from my brain. The candle fell from my hand. I
flung out my arms in a vain effort to thrust that ponderous blackness away
from me, and, lifting up my voice, screamed with all my might—once,
twice, thrice. Then I think I must have staggered to my feet. I know I
thought suddenly of the moonlit corridor, and, with my head bowed and my
arms over my face, made a run for the door.
But I had forgotten the exact position of the door, and struck myself
heavily against the corner of the bed. I staggered back, turned, and was
either struck or struck myself against some other bulky furniture. I have a
vague memory of battering myself thus, to and fro in the darkness, of a
cramped struggle, and of my own wild crying as I darted to and fro, of a
heavy blow at last upon my forehead, a horrible sensation of falling that
lasted an age, of my last frantic effort to keep my footing, and then I
remember no more.
I opened my eyes in daylight. My head was roughly bandaged, and the
man with the withered arm was watching my face. I looked about me,
trying to remember what had happened, and for a space I could not
recollect. I rolled my eyes into the corner, and saw the old woman, no
longer abstracted, pouring out some drops of medicine from a little blue
phial into a glass. "Where am I?" I asked; "I seem to remember you, and yet
I cannot remember who you are."
They told me then, and I heard of the haunted Red Room as one who
hears a tale. "We found you at dawn," said he, "and there was blood on your
forehead and lips."

It was very slowly I recovered my memory of my experience. "You
believe now," said the old man, "that the room is haunted?" He spoke no
longer as one who greets an intruder, but as one who grieves for a broken
friend.
"Yes," said I; "the room is haunted."
"And you have seen it. And we, who have lived here all our lives, have
never set eyes upon it. Because we have never dared... Tell us, is it truly the
old earl who——"
"No," said I; "it is not."
"I told you so," said the old lady, with the glass in her hand. "It is his
poor young countess who was frightened——"
"It is not," I said. "There is neither ghost of earl nor ghost of countess in
that room, there is no ghost there at all; but worse, far worse——"
"Well?" they said.
"The worst of all the things that haunt poor mortal man," said I; "and that
is, in all its nakedness—Fear that will not have light nor sound, that will not
bear with reason, that deafens and darkens and overwhelms. It followed me
through the corridor, it fought against me in the room——"
I stopped abruptly. There was an interval of silence. My hand went up to
my bandages.
Then the man with the shade sighed and spoke. "That is it," said he. "I
knew that was it. A power of darkness. To put such a curse upon a woman!
It lurks there always. You can feel it even in the daytime, even of a bright
summer's day, in the hangings, in the curtains, keeping behind you however
you face about. In the dusk it creeps along the corridor and follows you, so
that you dare not turn. There is Fear in that room of hers—black Fear, and
there will be—so long as this house of sin endures."

XVII. — THE PURPLE PILEUS
Mr. Coombes was sick of life. He walked away from his unhappy home,
and, sick not only of his own existence but of everybody else's, turned aside
down Gaswork Lane to avoid the town, and, crossing the wooden bridge
that goes over the canal to Starling's Cottages, was presently alone in the
damp pine woods and out of sight and sound of human habitation. He
would stand it no longer. He repeated aloud with blasphemies unusual to
him that he would stand it no longer.
He was a pale-faced little man, with dark eyes and a fine and very black
moustache. He had a very stiff, upright collar slightly frayed, that gave him
an illusory double chin, and his overcoat (albeit shabby) was trimmed with
astrachan. His gloves were a bright brown with black stripes over the
knuckles, and split at the finger ends. His appearance, his wife had said
once in the dear, dead days beyond recall—before he married her, that is—
was military. But now she called him—it seems a dreadful thing to tell of
between husband and wife, but she called him "a little grub." It wasn't the
only thing she had called him, either.
The row had arisen about that beastly Jennie again. Jennie was his wife's
friend, and, by no invitation of Mr. Coombes, she came in every blessed
Sunday to dinner, and made a shindy all the afternoon. She was a big, noisy
girl, with a taste for loud colours and a strident laugh; and this Sunday she
had outdone all her previous intrusions by bringing in a fellow with her, a
chap as showy as herself. And Mr. Coombes, in a starchy, clean collar and
his Sunday frock-coat, had sat dumb and wrathful at his own table, while
his wife and her guests talked foolishly and undesirably, and laughed aloud.
Well, he stood that, and after dinner (which, "as usual," was late), what
must Miss Jennie do but go to the piano and play banjo tunes, for all the
world as if it were a week-day! Flesh and blood could not endure such
goings on. They would hear next door, they would hear in the road, it was a
public announcement of their disrepute. He had to speak.

He had felt himself go pale, and a kind of rigour had affected his
respiration as he delivered himself. He had been sitting on one of the chairs
by the window—the new guest had taken possession of the arm-chair. He
turned his head. "Sun Day!" he said over the collar, in the voice of one who
warns. "Sun Day!" What people call a "nasty" tone, it was.
Jennie had kept on playing, but his wife, who was looking through some
music that was piled on the top of the piano, had stared at him. "What's
wrong now?" she said; "can't people enjoy themselves?"
"I don't mind rational 'njoyment, at all," said little Coombes, "but I ain't
a-going to have week-day tunes playing on a Sunday in this house."
"What's wrong with my playing now?" said Jennie, stopping and twirling
round on the music-stool with a monstrous rustle of flounces.
Coombes saw it was going to be a row, and opened too vigorously, as is
common with your timid, nervous men all the world over. "Steady on with
that music-stool!" said he; "it ain't made for 'eavy-weights."
"Never you mind about weights," said Jennie, incensed. "What was you
saying behind my back about my playing?"
"Surely you don't 'old with not having a bit of music on a Sunday, Mr.
Coombes?" said the new guest, leaning back in the arm-chair, blowing a
cloud of cigarette smoke and smiling in a kind of pitying way. And
simultaneously his wife said something to Jennie about "Never mind 'im.
You go on, Jinny."
"I do," said Mr. Coombes, addressing the new guest.
"May I arst why?" said the new guest, evidently enjoying both his
cigarette and the prospect of an argument. He was, by-the-by, a lank young
man, very stylishly dressed in bright drab, with a white cravat and a pearl
and silver pin. It had been better taste to come in a black coat, Mr. Coombes
thought.
"Because," began Mr. Coombes, "it don't suit me. I'm a business man. I
'ave to study my connection. Rational 'njoyment—"

"His connection!" said Mrs. Coombes scornfully. "That's what he's
always a-saying. We got to do this, and we got to do that—"
"If you don't mean to study my connection," said Mr. Coombes, "what
did you marry me for?"
"I wonder," said Jennie, and turned back to the piano.
"I never saw such a man as you," said Mrs. Coombes.
"You've altered all round since we were married. Before—"
Then Jennie began at the turn, turn, turn again.
"Look here!" said Mr. Coombes, driven at last to revolt, standing up and
raising his voice. "I tell you I won't have that." The frock-coat heaved with
his indignation.
"No vi'lence, now," said the long young man in drab, sitting up.
"Who the juice are you?" said Mr. Coombes fiercely.
Whereupon they all began talking at once. The new guest said he was
Jennie's "intended," and meant to protect her, and Mr. Coombes said he was
welcome to do so anywhere but in his (Mr. Coombes') house; and Mrs.
Coombes said he ought to be ashamed of insulting his guests, and (as I have
already mentioned) that he was getting a regular little grub; and the end
was, that Mr. Coombes ordered his visitors out of the house, and they
wouldn't go, and so he said he would go himself. With his face burning and
tears of excitement in his eyes, he went into the passage, and as he
struggled with his overcoat—his frock-coat sleeves got concertinaed up his
arm—and gave a brush at his silk hat, Jennie began again at the piano, and
strummed him insultingly out of the house. Turn, turn, turn. He slammed
the shop door so that the house quivered. That, briefly, was the immediate
making of his mood. You will perhaps begin to understand his disgust with
existence.
As he walked along the muddy path under the firs,—it was late October,
and the ditches and heaps of fir needles were gorgeous with clumps of
fungi,—he recapitulated the melancholy history of his marriage. It was brief
and commonplace enough. He now perceived with sufficient clearness that

his wife had married him out of a natural curiosity and in order to escape
from her worrying, laborious, and uncertain life in the workroom; and, like
the majority of her class, she was far too stupid to realise that it was her
duty to co-operate with him in his business. She was greedy of enjoyment,
loquacious, and socially-minded, and evidently disappointed to find the
restraints of poverty still hanging about her. His worries exasperated her,
and the slightest attempt to control her proceedings resulted in a charge of
"grumbling." Why couldn't he be nice— as he used to be? And Coombes
was such a harmless little man, too, nourished mentally on Self-Help, and
with a meagre ambition of self-denial and competition, that was to end in a
"sufficiency." Then Jennie came in as a female Mephistopheles, a gabbling
chronicle of "fellers," and was always wanting his wife to go to theatres,
and "all that." And in addition were aunts of his wife, and cousins (male and
female) to eat up capital, insult him personally, upset business
arrangements, annoy good customers, and generally blight his life. It was
not the first occasion by many that Mr. Coombes had fled his home in wrath
and indignation, and something like fear, vowing furiously and even aloud
that he wouldn't stand it, and so frothing away his energy along the line of
least resistance. But never before had he been quite so sick of life as on this
particular Sunday afternoon. The Sunday dinner may have had its share in
his despair—and the greyness of the sky. Perhaps, too, he was beginning to
realise his unendurable frustration as a business man as the consequence of
his marriage. Presently bankruptcy, and after that—— Perhaps she might
have reason to repent when it was too late. And destiny, as I have already
intimated, had planted the path through the wood with evil-smelling fungi,
thickly and variously planted it, not only on the right side, but on the left.
A small shopman is in such a melancholy position, if his wife turns out a
disloyal partner. His capital is all tied up in his business, and to leave her
means to join the unemployed in some strange part of the earth. The
luxuries of divorce are beyond him altogether. So that the good old tradition
of marriage for better or worse holds inexorably for him, and things work
up to tragic culminations. Bricklayers kick their wives to death, and dukes
betray theirs; but it is among the small clerks and shopkeepers nowadays
that it comes most often to a cutting of throats. Under the circumstances it is
not so very remarkable—and you must take it as charitably as you can—
that the mind of Mr. Coombes ran for a while on some such glorious close

to his disappointed hopes, and that he thought of razors, pistols, bread-
knives, and touching letters to the coroner denouncing his enemies by
name, and praying piously for forgiveness. After a time his fierceness gave
way to melancholia. He had been married in this very overcoat, in his first
and only frock-coat that was buttoned up beneath it. He began to recall their
courting along this very walk, his years of penurious saving to get capital,
and the bright hopefulness of his marrying days. For it all to work out like
this! Was there no sympathetic ruler anywhere in the world? He reverted to
death as a topic.
He thought of the canal he had just crossed, and doubted whether he
shouldn't stand with his head out, even in the middle, and it was while
drowning was in his mind that the purple pileus caught his eye. He looked
at it mechanically for a moment, and stopped and stooped towards it to pick
it up, under the impression that it was some such small leather object as a
purse. Then he saw that it was the purple top of a fungus, a peculiarly
poisonous-looking purple: slimy, shiny, and emitting a sour odour. He
hesitated with his hand an inch or so from it, and the thought of poison
crossed his mind. With that he picked the thing, and stood up again with it
in his hand.
The odour was certainly strong—acrid, but by no means disgusting. He
broke off a piece, and the fresh surface was a creamy white, that changed
like magic in the space of ten seconds to a yellowish-green colour. It was
even an inviting-looking change. He broke off two other pieces to see it
repeated. They were wonderful things these fungi, thought Mr. Coombes,
and all of them the deadliest poisons, as his father had often told him.
Deadly poisons!
There is no time like the present for a rash resolve. Why not here and
now? thought Mr. Coombes. He tasted a little piece, a very little piece
indeed—a mere crumb. It was so pungent that he almost spat it out again,
then merely hot and full-flavoured: a kind of German mustard with a touch
of horse-radish and—well, mushroom. He swallowed it in the excitement of
the moment. Did he like it or did he not? His mind was curiously careless.
He would try another bit. It really wasn't bad—it was good. He forgot his
troubles in the interest of the immediate moment. Playing with death it was.
He took another bite, and then deliberately finished a mouthful. A curious,

tingling sensation began in his finger-tips and toes. His pulse began to move
faster. The blood in his ears sounded like a mill-race. "Try bi' more," said
Mr. Coombes. He turned and looked about him, and found his feet
unsteady. He saw, and struggled towards, a little patch of purple a dozen
yards away. "Jol' goo' stuff," said Mr. Coombes. "E—lomore ye'." He
pitched forward and fell on his face, his hands outstretched towards the
cluster of pilei. But he did not eat any more of them. He forgot forthwith.
He rolled over and sat up with a look of astonishment on his face. His
carefully brushed silk hat had rolled away towards the ditch. He pressed his
hand to his brow. Something had happened, but he could not rightly
determine what it was. Anyhow, he was no longer dull—he felt bright,
cheerful. And his throat was afire. He laughed in the sudden gaiety of his
heart. Had he been dull? He did not know; but at any rate he would be dull
no longer. He got up and stood unsteadily, regarding the universe with an
agreeable smile. He began to remember. He could not remember very well,
because of a steam roundabout that was beginning in his head. And he knew
he had been disagreeable at home, just because they wanted to be happy.
They were quite right; life should be as gay as possible. He would go home
and make it up, and reassure them. And why not take some of this delightful
toadstool with him, for them to eat? A hatful, no less. Some of those red
ones with white spots as well, and a few yellow. He had been a dull dog, an
enemy to merriment; he would make up for it. It would be gay to turn his
coat-sleeves inside out, and stick some yellow gorse into his waistcoat
pockets. Then home—singing—-for a jolly evening.
After the departure of Mr. Coombes, Jennie discontinued playing, and
turned round on the music-stool again. "What a fuss about nothing!" said
Jennie.
"You see, Mr. Clarence, what I've got to put up with," said Mrs.
Coombes.
"He is a bit hasty," said Mr. Clarence judicially.
"He ain't got the slightest sense of our position," said Mrs. Coombes;
"that's what I complain of. He cares for nothing but his old shop; and if I
have a bit of company, or buy anything to keep myself decent, or get any
little thing I want out of the housekeeping money, there's disagreeables.

'Economy' he says; 'struggle for life,' and all that. He lies awake of nights
about it, worrying how he can screw me out of a shilling. He wanted us to
eat Dorset butter once. If once I was to give in to him—there!"
"Of course," said Jennie.
"If a man values a woman," said Mr. Clarence, lounging back in the arm-
chair, "he must be prepared to make sacrifices for her. For my own part,"
said Mr. Clarence, with his eye on Jennie, "I shouldn't think of marrying till
I was in a position to do the thing in style. It's downright selfishness. A man
ought to go through the rough-and-tumble by himself, and not drag her—"
"I don't agree altogether with that," said Jennie. "I don't see why a man
shouldn't have a woman's help, provided he doesn't treat her meanly, you
know. It's meanness—"
"You wouldn't believe," said Mrs. Coombes. "But I was a fool to 'ave 'im.
I might 'ave known. If it 'adn't been for my father, we shouldn't 'ave 'ad not
a carriage to our wedding."
"Lord! he didn't stick out at that?" said Mr. Clarence, quite shocked.
"Said he wanted the money for his stock, or some such rubbish. Why, he
wouldn't have a woman in to help me once a week if it wasn't for my
standing out plucky. And the fusses he makes about money—comes to me,
well, pretty near crying, with sheets of paper and figgers. 'If only we can
tide over this year,' he says, 'the business is bound to go.' 'If only we can
tide over this year,' I says; 'then it'll be, if only we can tide over next year. I
know you,' I says. 'And you don't catch me screwing myself lean and ugly.
Why didn't you marry a slavey?' I says, 'if you wanted one—instead of a
respectable girl,' I says."
So Mrs. Coombes. But we will not follow this unedifying conversation
further. Suffice it that Mr. Coombes was very satisfactorily disposed of, and
they had a snug little time round the fire. Then Mrs. Coombes went to get
the tea, and Jennie sat coquettishly on the arm of Mr. Clarence's chair until
the tea-things clattered outside. "What was that I heard?" asked Mrs.
Coombes playfully, as she entered, and there was badinage about kissing.
They were just sitting down to the little circular table when the first
intimation of Mr. Coombes' return was heard.

This was a fumbling at the latch of the front door.
"'Ere's my lord," said Mrs. Coombes. "Went out like a lion and comes
back like a lamb, I'll lay."
Something fell over in the shop: a chair, it sounded like. Then there was a
sound as of some complicated step exercise in the passage. Then the door
opened and Coombes appeared. But it was Coombes transfigured. The
immaculate collar had been torn carelessly from his throat. His carefully-
brushed silk hat, half-full of a crush of fungi, was under one arm; his coat
was inside out, and his waistcoat adorned with bunches of yellow-
blossomed furze. These little eccentricities of Sunday costume, however,
were quite overshadowed by the change in his face; it was livid white, his
eyes were unnaturally large and bright, and his pale blue lips were drawn
back in a cheerless grin. "Merry!" he said. He had stopped dancing to open
the door. "Rational 'njoyment. Dance." He made three fantastic steps into
the room, and stood bowing.
"Jim!" shrieked Mrs. Coombes, and Mr. Clarence sat petrified, with a
dropping lower jaw.
"Tea," said Mr. Coombes. "Jol' thing, tea. Tose-stools, too. Brosher."
"He's drunk," said Jennie in a weak voice. Never before had she seen this
intense pallor in a drunken man, or such shining, dilated eyes.
Mr. Coombes held out a handful of scarlet agaric to Mr. Clarence. "Jo'
stuff," said he; "ta' some."
At that moment he was genial. Then at the sight of their startled faces he
changed, with the swift transition of insanity, into overbearing fury. And it
seemed as if he had suddenly recalled the quarrel of his departure. In such a
huge voice as Mrs. Coombes had never heard before, he shouted, "My
house. I'm master 'ere. Eat what I give yer!" He bawled this, as it seemed,
without an effort, without a violent gesture, standing there as motionless as
one who whispers, holding out a handful of fungus.
Clarence approved himself a coward. He could not meet the mad fury in
Coombes' eyes; he rose to his feet, pushing back his chair, and turned,

stooping. At that Coombes rushed at him. Jennie saw her opportunity, and,
with the ghost of a shriek, made for the door.
Mrs. Coombes followed her. Clarence tried to dodge. Over went the tea-
table with a smash as Coombes clutched him by the collar and tried to
thrust the fungus into his mouth. Clarence was content to leave his collar
behind him, and shot out into the passage with red patches of fly agaric still
adherent to his face. "Shut 'im in!" cried Mrs. Coombes, and would have
closed the door, but her supports deserted her; Jennie saw the shop door
open, and vanished thereby, locking it behind her, while Clarence went on
hastily into the kitchen. Mr. Coombes came heavily against the door, and
Mrs. Coombes, finding the key was inside, fled upstairs and locked herself
in the spare bedroom.
So the new convert to joie de vivre emerged upon the passage, his
decorations a little scattered, but that respectable hatful of fungi still under
his arm. He hesitated at the three ways, and decided on the kitchen.
Whereupon Clarence, who was fumbling with the key, gave up the attempt
to imprison his host, and fled into the scullery, only to be captured before he
could open the door into the yard. Mr. Clarence is singularly reticent of the
details of what occurred. It seems that Mr. Coombes' transitory irritation
had vanished again, and he was once more a genial playfellow. And as there
were knives and meat choppers about, Clarence very generously resolved to
humour him and so avoid anything tragic. It is beyond dispute that Mr.
Coombes played with Mr. Clarence to his heart's content; they could not
have been more playful and familiar if they had known each other for years.
He insisted gaily on Clarence trying the fungi, and, after a friendly tussle,
was smitten with remorse at the mess he was making of his guest's face. It
also appears that Clarence was dragged under the sink and his face
scrubbed with the blacking brush—he being still resolved to humour the
lunatic at any cost—and that finally, in a somewhat dishevelled, chipped,
and discoloured condition, he was assisted to his coat and shown out by the
back door, the shopway being barred by Jennie. Mr. Coombes' wandering
thoughts then turned to Jennie. Jennie had been unable to unfasten the shop
door, but she shot the bolts against Mr. Coombes' latch-key, and remained
in possession of the shop for the rest of the evening.

It would appear that Mr. Coombes then returned to the kitchen, still in
pursuit of gaiety, and, albeit a strict Good Templar, drank (or spilt down the
front of the first and only frock-coat) no less than five bottles of the stout
Mrs. Coombes insisted upon having for her health's sake. He made cheerful
noises by breaking off the necks of the bottles with several of his wife's
wedding-present dinner-plates, and during the earlier part of this great
drunk he sang divers merry ballads. He cut his finger rather badly with one
of the bottles—the only bloodshed in this story—and what with that, and
the systematic convulsion of his inexperienced physiology by the liquorish
brand of Mrs. Coombes' stout, it may be the evil of the fungus poison was
somehow allayed. But we prefer to draw a veil over the concluding
incidents of this Sunday afternoon. They ended in the coal cellar, in a deep
and healing sleep.
An interval of five years elapsed. Again it was a Sunday afternoon in
October, and again Mr. Coombes walked through the pine wood beyond the
canal. He was still the same dark-eyed, black-moustached little man that he
was at the outset of the story, but his double chin was now scarcely so
illusory as it had been. His overcoat was new, with a velvet lapel, and a
stylish collar with turn-down corners, free of any coarse starchiness, had
replaced the original all-round article. His hat was glossy, his gloves newish
—though one finger had split and been carefully mended. And a casual
observer would have noticed about him a certain rectitude of bearing, a
certain erectness of head that marks the man who thinks well of himself. He
was a master now, with three assistants. Beside him walked a larger
sunburnt parody of himself, his brother Tom, just back from Australia. They
were recapitulating their early struggles, and Mr. Coombes had just been
making a financial statement.
"It's a very nice little business, Jim," said brother Tom. "In these days of
competition you're jolly lucky to have worked it up so. And you're jolly
lucky, too, to have a wife who's willing to help like yours does."
"Between ourselves," said Mr. Coombes, "it wasn't always so. It wasn't
always like this. To begin with, the missus was a bit giddy. Girls are funny
creatures."
"Dear me!"

"Yes. You'd hardly think it, but she was downright extravagant, and
always having slaps at me. I was a bit too easy and loving, and all that, and
she thought the whole blessed show was run for her. Turned the 'ouse into a
regular caravansery, always having her relations and girls from business in,
and their chaps. Comic songs a' Sunday, it was getting to, and driving trade
away. And she was making eyes at the chaps, too! I tell you, Tom, the place
wasn't my own."
"Shouldn't 'a' thought it."
"It was so. Well—I reasoned with her. I said, 'I ain't a duke, to keep a
wife like a pet animal. I married you for 'elp and company.' I said, 'You got
to 'elp and pull the business through.' She wouldn't 'ear of it. 'Very well,' I
says?? 'I'm a mild man till I'm roused,' I says, 'and it's getting to that.' But
she wouldn't 'ear of no warnings."
"Well?"
"It's the way with women. She didn't think I 'ad it in me to be roused.
Women of her sort (between ourselves, Tom) don't respect a man until
they're a bit afraid of him. So I just broke out to show her. In comes a girl
named Jennie, that used to work with her, and her chap. We 'ad a bit of a
row, and I came out 'ere—it was just such another day as this—and I
thought it all out. Then I went back and pitched into them."
"You did?"
"I did. I was mad, I can tell you. I wasn't going to 'it 'er if I could 'elp it,
so I went back and licked into this chap, just to show 'er what I could do. 'E
was a big chap, too. Well, I chucked him, and smashed things about, and
gave 'er a scaring, and she ran up and locked 'erself into the spare room."
"Well?"
"That's all. I says to 'er the next morning, 'Now you know,' I says, 'what
I'm like when I'm roused.' And I didn't have to say anything more."
"And you've been happy ever after, eh?"
"So to speak. There's nothing like putting your foot down with them. If it
'adn't been for that afternoon I should 'a' been tramping the roads now, and

she'd 'a' been grumbling at me, and all her family grumbling for bringing
her to poverty—I know their little ways. But we're all right now. And it's a
very decent little business, as you say."
They proceeded on their way meditatively. "Women are funny creatures,"
said Brother Tom.
"They want a firm hand," says Coombes.
"What a lot of these funguses there are about here!" remarked Brother
Tom presently. "I can't see what use they are in the world."
Mr. Coombes looked. "I dessay they're sent for some wise purpose," said
Mr. Coombes.
And that was as much thanks as the purple pileus ever got for maddening
this absurd little man to the pitch of decisive action, and so altering the
whole course of his life.

XVIII. — A SLIP UNDER THE MICROSCOPE.
Outside the laboratory windows was a watery-grey fog, and within a
close warmth and the yellow light of the green-shaded gas lamps that stood
two to each table down its narrow length. On each table stood a couple of
glass jars containing the mangled vestiges of the crayfish, mussels, frogs,
and guinea-pigs upon which the students had been working, and down the
side of the room, facing the windows, were shelves bearing bleached
dissections in spirits, surmounted by a row of beautifully executed
anatomical drawings in white-wood frames and overhanging a row of
cubical lockers. All the doors of the laboratory were panelled with
blackboard, and on these were the half-erased diagrams of the previous
day's work. The laboratory was empty, save for the demonstrator, who sat
near the preparation-room door, and silent, save for a low, continuous
murmur and the clicking of the rocker microtome at which he was working.
But scattered about the room were traces of numerous students: hand-bags,
polished boxes of instruments, in one place a large drawing covered by
newspaper, and in another a prettily bound copy of News from Nowhere, a
book oddly at variance with its surroundings. These things had been put
down hastily as the students had arrived and hurried at once to secure their
seats in the adjacent lecture theatre. Deadened by the closed door, the
measured accents of the professor sounded as a featureless muttering.
Presently, faint through the closed windows came the sound of the
Oratory clock striking the hour of eleven. The clicking of the microtome
ceased, and the demonstrator looked at his watch, rose, thrust his hands into
his pockets, and walked slowly down the laboratory towards the lecture
theatre door. He stood listening for a moment, and then his eye fell on the
little volume by William Morris. He picked it up, glanced at the title,
smiled, opened it, looked at the name on the fly-leaf, ran the leaves through
with his hand, and put it down. Almost immediately the even murmur of the
lecturer ceased, there was a sudden burst of pencils rattling on the desks in
the lecture theatre, a stirring, a scraping of feet, and a number of voices
speaking together. Then a firm footfall approached the door, which began to

open, and stood ajar, as some indistinctly heard question arrested the new-
comer.
The demonstrator turned, walked slowly back past the microtome, and
left the laboratory by the preparation-room door. As he did so, first one, and
then several students carrying notebooks entered the laboratory from the
lecture theatre, and distributed themselves among the little tables, or stood
in a group about the doorway. They were an exceptionally heterogeneous
assembly, for while Oxford and Cambridge still recoil from the blushing
prospect of mixed classes, the College of Science anticipated America in
the matter years ago—mixed socially, too, for the prestige of the College is
high, and its scholarships, free of any age limit, dredge deeper even than do
those of the Scotch universities. The class numbered one-and-twenty, but
some remained in the theatre questioning the professor, copying the black-
board diagrams before they were washed off, or examining the special
specimens he had produced to illustrate the day's teaching. Of the nine who
had come into the laboratory three were girls, one of whom, a little fair
woman, wearing spectacles and dressed in greyish-green, was peering out
of the window at the fog, while the other two, both wholesome-looking,
plain-faced schoolgirls, unrolled and put on the brown holland aprons they
wore while dissecting. Of the men, two went down the laboratory to their
places, one a pallid, dark-bearded man, who had once been a tailor; the
other a pleasant-featured, ruddy young man of twenty, dressed in a well-
fitting brown suit; young Wedderburn, the son of Wedderburn, the eye
specialist. The others formed a little knot near the theatre door. One of
these, a dwarfed, spectacled figure, with a hunchback, sat on a bent wood
stool; two others, one a short, dark youngster, and the other a flaxen-haired,
reddish-complexioned young man, stood leaning side by side against the
slate sink, while the fourth stood facing them, and maintained the larger
share of the conversation.
This last person was named Hill. He was a sturdily built young fellow, of
the same age as Wedderburn; he had a white face, dark grey eyes, hair of an
indeterminate colour, and prominent, irregular features. He talked rather
louder than was needful, and thrust his hands deeply into his pockets. His
collar was frayed and blue with the starch of a careless laundress, his
clothes were evidently ready-made, and there was a patch on the side of his
boot near the toe. And as he talked or listened to the others, he glanced now

and again towards the lecture theatre door. They were discussing the
depressing peroration of the lecture they had just heard, the last lecture it
was in the introductory course in zoology. "From ovum to ovum is the goal
of the higher vertebrata," the lecturer had said in his melancholy tones, and
so had neatly rounded off the sketch of comparative anatomy he had been
developing. The spectacled hunchback had repeated it, with noisy
appreciation, had tossed it towards the fair-haired student with an evident
provocation, and had started one of these vague, rambling discussions on
generalities, so unaccountably dear to the student mind all the world over.
"That is our goal, perhaps—I admit it, as far as science goes," said the
fair-haired student, rising to the challenge. "But there are things above
science."
"Science," said Hill confidently, "is systematic knowledge. Ideas that
don't come into the system—must anyhow—be loose ideas." He was not
quite sure whether that was a clever saying or a fatuity until his hearers took
it seriously.
"The thing I cannot understand," said the hunchback, at large, "is whether
Hill is a materialist or not."
"There is one thing above matter," said Hill promptly, feeling he had a
better thing this time; aware, too, of someone in the doorway behind him,
and raising his voice a trifle for her benefit, "and that is, the delusion that
there is something above matter."
"So we have your gospel at last," said the fair student. "It's all a delusion,
is it? All our aspirations to lead something more than dogs' lives, all our
work for anything beyond ourselves. But see how inconsistent you are.
Your socialism, for instance. Why do you trouble about the interests of the
race? Why do you concern yourself about the beggar in the gutter? Why are
you bothering yourself to lend that book "— he indicated William Morris
by a movement of the head—"to everyone in the lab.?"
"Girl," said the hunchback indistinctly, and glanced guiltily over his
shoulder.
The girl in brown, with the brown eyes, had come into the laboratory, and
stood on the other side of the table behind him, with her rolled-up apron in

one hand, looking over her shoulder, listening to the discussion. She did not
notice the hunchback, because she was glancing from Hill to his
interlocutor. Hill's consciousness of her presence betrayed itself to her only
in his studious ignorance of the fact; but she understood that, and it pleased
her. "I see no reason," said he, "why a man should live like a brute because
he knows of nothing beyond matter, and does not expect to exist a hundred
years hence."
"Why shouldn't he?" said the fair-haired student.
"Why should he?" said Hill.
"What inducement has he?"
"That's the way with all you religious people. It's all a business of
inducements. Cannot a man seek after righteousness for righteousness'
sake?"
There was a pause. The fair man answered, with a kind of vocal padding,
"But—you see—inducement—when I said inducement," to gain time. And
then the hunchback came to his rescue and inserted a question. He was a
terrible person in the debating society with his questions, and they
invariably took one form—a demand for a definition, "What's your
definition of righteousness?" said the hunchback at this stage.
Hill experienced a sudden loss of complacency at this question, but even
as it was asked, relief came in the person of Brooks, the laboratory
attendant, who entered by the preparation-room door, carrying a number of
freshly killed guinea-pigs by their hind legs. "This is the last batch of
material this session," said the youngster who had not previously spoken.
Brooks advanced up the laboratory, smacking down a couple of guinea-pigs
at each table. The rest of the class, scenting the prey from afar, came
crowding in by the lecture theatre door, and the discussion perished
abruptly as the students who were not already in their places hurried to
them to secure the choice of a specimen. There was a noise of keys rattling
on split rings as lockers were opened and dissecting instruments taken out.
Hill was already standing by his table, and his box of scalpels was sticking
out of his pocket. The girl in brown came a step towards him, and, leaning
over his table, said softly, "Did you see that I returned your book, Mr. Hill?"

During the whole scene she and the book had been vividly present in his
consciousness; but he made a clumsy pretence of looking at the book and
seeing it for the first time. "Oh, yes," he said, taking it up. "I see. Did you
like it?"
"I want to ask you some questions about it—some time."
"Certainly," said Hill. "I shall be glad." He stopped awkwardly. "You
liked it?" he said.
"It's a wonderful book. Only some things I don't understand."
Then suddenly the laboratory was hushed by a curious, braying noise. It
was the demonstrator. He was at the blackboard ready to begin the day's
instruction, and it was his custom to demand silence by a sound midway
between the "Er" of common intercourse and the blast of a trumpet. The girl
in brown slipped back to her place: it was immediately in front of Hill's, and
Hill, forgetting her forthwith, took a notebook out of the drawer of his table,
turned over its leaves hastily, drew a stumpy pencil from his pocket, and
prepared to make a copious note of the coming demonstration. For
demonstrations and lectures are the sacred text of the College students.
Books, saving only the Professor's own, you may—it is even expedient to—
ignore.
Hill was the son of a Landport cobbler, and had been hooked by a chance
blue paper the authorities had thrown out to the Landport Technical
College. He kept himself in London on his allowance of a guinea a week,
and found that, with proper care, this also covered his clothing allowance,
an occasional waterproof collar, that is; and ink and needles and cotton, and
such-like necessaries for a man about town. This was his first year and his
first session, but the brown old man in Landport had already got himself
detested in many public-houses by boasting of his son, "the Professor." Hill
was a vigorous youngster, with a serene contempt for the clergy of all
denominations, and a fine ambition to reconstruct the world. He regarded
his scholarship as a brilliant opportunity. He had begun to read at seven, and
had read steadily whatever came in his way, good or bad, since then. His
worldly experience had been limited to the island of Portsea, and acquired
chiefly in the wholesale boot factory in which he had worked by day, after
passing the seventh standard of the Board school. He had a considerable gift

of speech, as the College Debating Society, which met amidst the crushing
machines and mine models in the metallurgical theatre downstairs, already
recognised—recognised by a violent battering of desks whenever he rose.
And he was just at that fine emotional age when life opens at the end of a
narrow pass like a broad valley at one's feet, full of the promise of
wonderful discoveries and tremendous achievements. And his own
limitations, save that he knew that he knew neither Latin nor French, were
all unknown to him.
At first his interest had been divided pretty equally between his
biological work at the College and social and theological theorising, an
employment which he took in deadly earnest. Of a night, when the big
museum library was not open, he would sit on the bed of his room in
Chelsea with his coat and a muffler on, and write out the lecture notes and
revise his dissection memoranda, until Thorpe called him out by a whistle—
the landlady objected to open the door to attic visitors—and then the two
would go prowling about the shadowy, shiny, gas-lit streets, talking, very
much in the fashion of the sample just given, of the God idea, and
Righteousness, and Carlyle, and the Reorganisation of Society. And in the
midst of it all, Hill, arguing not only for Thorpe, but for the casual passer-
by, would lose the thread of his argument glancing at some pretty painted
face that looked meaningly at him as he passed. Science and Righteousness!
But once or twice lately there had been signs that a third interest was
creeping into his life, and he had found his attention wandering from the
fate of the mesoblastic somites or the probable meaning of the blastopore,
to the thought of the girl with the brown eyes who sat at the table before
him.
She was a paying student; she descended inconceivable social altitudes to
speak to him. At the thought of the education she must have had, and the
accomplishments she must possess, the soul of Hill became abject within
him. She had spoken to him first over a difficulty about the alisphenoid of a
rabbit's skull, and he had found that, in biology at least, he had no reason
for self-abasement. And from that, after the manner of young people
starting from any starting-point, they got to generalities, and while Hill
attacked her upon the question of socialism—some instinct told him to
spare her a direct assault upon her religion—she was gathering resolution to
undertake what she told herself was his aesthetic education. She was a year

or two older than he, though the thought never occurred to him. The loan of
News from Nowhere was the beginning of a series of cross loans. Upon
some absurd first principle of his, Hill had never "wasted time" upon poetry,
and it seemed an appalling deficiency to her. One day in the lunch hour,
when she chanced upon him alone in the little museum where the skeletons
were arranged, shamefully eating the bun that constituted his midday meal,
she retreated, and returned to lend him, with a slightly furtive air, a volume
of Browning. He stood sideways towards her and took the book rather
clumsily, because he was holding the bun in the other hand. And in the
retrospect his voice lacked the cheerful clearness he could have wished.
That occurred after the examination in comparative anatomy, on the day
before the College turned out its students, and was carefully locked up by
the officials, for the Christmas holidays. The excitement of cramming for
the first trial of strength had for a little while dominated Hill, to the
exclusion of his other interests. In the forecasts of the result in which
everyone indulged he was surprised to find that no one regarded him as a
possible competitor for the Harvey Commemoration Medal, of which this
and the two subsequent examinations disposed. It was about this time that
Wedderburn, who so far had lived inconspicuously on the uttermost margin
of Hill's perceptions, began to take on the appearance of an obstacle. By a
mutual agreement, the nocturnal prowlings with Thorpe ceased for the three
weeks before the examination, and his landlady pointed out that she really
could not supply so much lamp oil at the price. He walked to and fro from
the College with little slips of mnemonics in his hand, lists of crayfish
appendages, rabbits' skull-bones, and vertebrate nerves, for example, and
became a positive nuisance to foot passengers in the opposite direction.
But, by a natural reaction, Poetry and the girl with the brown eyes ruled
the Christmas holiday. The pending results of the examination became such
a secondary consideration that Hill marvelled at his father's excitement.
Even had he wished it, there was no comparative anatomy to read in
Landport, and he was too poor to buy books, but the stock of poets in the
library was extensive, and Hill's attack was magnificently sustained. He
saturated himself with the fluent numbers of Longfellow and Tennyson, and
fortified himself with Shakespeare; found a kindred soul in Pope, and a
master in Shelley, and heard and fled the siren voices of Eliza Cook and

Mrs. Hemans. But he read no more Browning, because he hoped for the
loan of other volumes from Miss Haysman when he returned to London.
He walked from his lodgings to the College with that volume of
Browning in his shiny black bag, and his mind teeming with the finest
general propositions about poetry. Indeed, he framed first this little speech
and then that with which to grace the return. The morning was an
exceptionally pleasant one for London; there was a clear, hard frost and
undeniable blue in the sky, a thin haze softened every outline, and warm
shafts of sunlight struck between the house blocks and turned the sunny
side of the street to amber and gold. In the hall of the College he pulled off
his glove and signed his name with fingers so stiff with cold that the
characteristic dash under the signature he cultivated became a quivering
line. He imagined Miss Haysman about him everywhere. He turned at the
staircase, and there, below, he saw a crowd struggling at the foot of the
notice-board. This, possibly, was the biology list. He forgot Browning and
Miss Haysman for the moment, and joined the scrimmage. And at last, with
his cheek flattened against the sleeve of the man on the step above him, he
read the list—
CLASS I H. J. Somers Wedderburn William Hill
and thereafter followed a second class that is outside our present
sympathies. It was characteristic that he did not trouble to look for Thorpe
on the physics list, but backed out of the struggle at once, and in a curious
emotional state between pride over common second-class humanity and
acute disappointment at Wedderburn's success, went on his way upstairs. At
the top, as he was hanging up his coat in the passage, the zoological
demonstrator, a young man from Oxford, who secretly regarded him as a
blatant "mugger" of the very worst type, offered his heartiest
congratulations.
At the laboratory door Hill stopped for a second to get his breath, and
then entered. He looked straight up the laboratory and saw all five girl
students grouped in their places, and Wedderburn, the once retiring
Wedderburn, leaning rather gracefully against the window, playing with the
blind tassel and talking, apparently, to the five of them. Now, Hill could talk
bravely enough and even overbearingly to one girl, and he could have made

a speech to a roomful of girls, but this business of standing at ease and
appreciating, fencing, and returning quick remarks round a group was, he
knew, altogether beyond him. Coming up the staircase his feelings for
Wedderburn had been generous, a certain admiration perhaps, a willingness
to shake his hand conspicuously and heartily as one who had fought but the
first round. But before Christmas Wedderburn had never gone up to that end
of the room to talk. In a flash Hill's mist of vague excitement condensed
abruptly to a vivid dislike of Wedderburn. Possibly his expression changed.
As he came up to his place, Wedderburn nodded carelessly to him, and the
others glanced round. Miss Haysman looked at him and away again, the
faintest touch of her eyes. "I can't agree with you, Mr. Wedderburn," she
said.
"I must congratulate you on your first-class, Mr. Hill," said the spectacled
girl in green, turning round and beaming at him.
"It's nothing," said Hill, staring at Wedderburn and Miss Haysman talking
together, and eager to hear what they talked about.
"We poor folks in the second class don't think so," said the girl in
spectacles.
What was it Wedderburn was saying? Something about William Morris!
Hill did not answer the girl in spectacles, and the smile died out of his face.
He could not hear, and failed to see how he could "cut in." Confound
Wedderburn! He sat down, opened his bag, hesitated whether to return the
volume of Browning forthwith, in the sight of all, and instead drew out his
new notebooks for the short course in elementary botany that was now
beginning, and which would terminate in February. As he did so, a fat,
heavy man, with a white face and pale grey eyes—Bindon, the professor of
botany, who came up from Kew for January and February—came in by the
lecture theatre door, and passed, rubbing his hands together and smiling, in
silent affability down the laboratory.

In the subsequent six weeks Hill experienced some very rapid and
curiously complex emotional developments. For the most part he had
Wedderburn in focus—a fact that Miss Haysman never suspected. She told
Hill (for in the comparative privacy of the museum she talked a good deal

to him of socialism and Browning and general propositions) that she had
met Wedderburn at the house of some people she knew, and "he's inherited
his cleverness; for his father, you know, is the great eye-specialist."
"My father is a cobbler," said Hill, quite irrelevantly, and perceived the
want of dignity even as he said it. But the gleam of jealousy did not offend
her. She conceived herself the fundamental source of it. He suffered bitterly
from a sense of Wedderburn's unfairness, and a realisation of his own
handicap. Here was this Wedderburn had picked up a prominent man for a
father, and instead of his losing so many marks on the score of that
advantage, it was counted to him for righteousness! And while Hill had to
introduce himself and talk to Miss Haysman clumsily over mangled guinea-
pigs in the laboratory, this Wedderburn, in some backstairs way, had access
to her social altitudes, and could converse in a polished argot that Hill
understood perhaps, but felt incapable of speaking. Not, of course, that he
wanted to. Then it seemed to Hill that for Wedderburn to come there day
after day with cuffs unfrayed, neatly tailored, precisely barbered, quietly
perfect, was in itself an ill-bred, sneering sort of proceeding. Moreover, it
was a stealthy thing for Wedderburn to behave insignificantly for a space, to
mock modesty, to lead Hill to fancy that he himself was beyond dispute the
man of the year, and then suddenly to dart in front of him, and incontinently
to swell up in this fashion. In addition to these things, Wedderburn
displayed an increasing disposition to join in any conversational grouping
that included Miss Haysman, and would venture, and indeed seek occasion,
to pass opinions derogatory to socialism and atheism. He goaded Hill to
incivilities by neat, shallow, and exceedingly effective personalities about
the socialist leaders, until Hill hated Bernard Shaw's graceful egotisms,
William Morris's limited editions and luxurious wall-papers, and Walter
Crane's charmingly absurd ideal working men, about as much as he hated
Wedderburn. The dissertations in the laboratory, that had been his glory in
the previous term, became a danger, degenerated into inglorious tussels
with Wedderburn, and Hill kept to them only out of an obscure perception
that his honour was involved. In the debating society Hill knew quite
clearly that, to a thunderous accompaniment of banged desks, he could have
pulverised Wedderburn. Only Wedderburn never attended the debating
society to be pulverised, because—nauseous affectation!—he "dined late."

You must not imagine that these things presented themselves in quite
such a crude form to Hill's perception. Hill was a born generaliser.
Wedderburn to him was not so much an individual obstacle as a type, the
salient angle of a class. The economic theories that, after infinite ferment,
had shaped themselves in Hill's mind, became abruptly concrete at the
contact. The world became full of easy-mannered, graceful, gracefully-
dressed, conversationally dexterous, finally shallow Wedderburns, Bishops
Wedderburn, Wedderburn M.P.'s, Professors Wedderburn, Wedderburn
landlords, all with finger-bowl shibboleths and epigrammatic cities of
refuge from a sturdy debater. And everyone ill-clothed or ill-dressed, from
the cobbler to the cab-runner, was a man and a brother, a fellow-sufferer, to
Hill's imagination. So that he became, as it were, a champion of the fallen
and oppressed, albeit to outward seeming only a self-assertive, ill-mannered
young man, and an unsuccessful champion at that. Again and again a
skirmish over the afternoon tea that the girl students had inaugurated left
Hill with flushed cheeks and a tattered temper, and the debating society
noticed a new quality of sarcastic bitterness in his speeches.
You will understand now how it was necessary, if only in the interests of
humanity, that Hill should demolish Wedderburn in the forthcoming
examination and outshine him in the eyes of Miss Haysman; and you will
perceive, too, how Miss Haysman fell into some common feminine
misconceptions. The Hill-Wedderburn quarrel, for in his unostentatious way
Wedderburn reciprocated Hill's ill-veiled rivalry, became a tribute to her
indefinable charm; she was the Queen of Beauty in a tournament of scalpels
and stumpy pencils. To her confidential friend's secret annoyance, it even
troubled her conscience, for she was a good girl, and painfully aware, from
Ruskin and contemporary fiction, how entirely men's activities are
determined by women's attitudes. And if Hill never by any chance
mentioned the topic of love to her, she only credited him with the finer
modesty for that omission. So the time came on for the second examination,
and Hill's increasing pallor confirmed the general rumour that he was
working hard. In the aerated bread shop near South Kensington Station you
would see him, breaking his bun and sipping his milk, with his eyes intent
upon a paper of closely written notes. In his bedroom there were
propositions about buds and stems round his looking-glass, a diagram to
catch his eye, if soap should chance to spare it, above his washing basin. He

missed several meetings of the debating society, but he found the chance
encounters with Miss Haysman in the spacious ways of the adjacent art
museum, or in the little museum at the top of the College, or in the College
corridors, more frequent and very restful. In particular, they used to meet in
a little gallery full of wrought-iron chests and gates, near the art library, and
there Hill used to talk, under the gentle stimulus of her flattering attention,
of Browning and his personal ambitions. A characteristic she found
remarkable in him was his freedom from avarice. He contemplated quite
calmly the prospect of living all his life on an income below a hundred
pounds a year. But he was determined to be famous, to make, recognisably
in his own proper person, the world a better place to live in. He took
Bradlaugh and John Burns for his leaders and models, poor, even
impecunious, great men. But Miss Haysman thought that such lives were
deficient on the aesthetic side, by which, though she did not know it, she
meant good wall-paper and upholstery, pretty books, tasteful clothes,
concerts, and meals nicely cooked and respectfully served.
At last came the day of the second examination, and the professor of
botany, a fussy, conscientious man, rearranged all the tables in a long
narrow laboratory to prevent copying, and put his demonstrator on a chair
on a table (where he felt, he said, like a Hindoo god), to see all the cheating,
and stuck a notice outside the door, "Door closed," for no earthly reason
that any human being could discover. And all the morning from ten till one
the quill of Wedderburn shrieked defiance at Hill's, and the quills of the
others chased their leaders in a tireless pack, and so also it was in the
afternoon. Wedderburn was a little quieter than usual, and Hill's face was
hot all day, and his overcoat bulged with textbooks and notebooks against
the last moment's revision. And the next day, in the morning and in the
afternoon, was the practical examination, when sections had to be cut and
slides identified. In the morning Hill was depressed because he knew he had
cut a thick section, and in the afternoon came the mysterious slip.
It was just the kind of thing that the botanical professor was always
doing. Like the income tax, it offered a premium to the cheat. It was a
preparation under the microscope, a little glass slip, held in its place on the
stage of the instrument by light steel clips, and the inscription set forth that
the slip was not to be moved. Each student was to go in turn to it, sketch it,
write in his book of answers what he considered it to be, and return to his

place. Now, to move such a slip is a thing one can do by a chance
movement of the finger, and in a fraction of a second. The professor's
reason for decreeing that the slip should not be moved depended on the fact
that the object he wanted identified was characteristic of a certain tree stem.
In the position in which it was placed it was a difficult thing to recognise,
but once the slip was moved so as to bring other parts of the preparation
into view, its nature was obvious enough.
Hill came to this, flushed from a contest with staining re-agents, sat down
on the little stool before the microscope, turned the mirror to get the best
light, and then, out of sheer habit, shifted the slips. At once he remembered
the prohibition, and, with an almost continuous motion of his hands, moved
it back, and sat paralysed with astonishment at his action.
Then, slowly, he turned his head. The professor was out of the room; the
demonstrator sat aloft on his impromptu rostrum, reading the Q. Jour. Mi.
Sci.; the rest of the examinees were busy, and with their backs to him.
Should he own up to the accident now? He knew quite clearly what the
thing was. It was a lenticel, a characteristic preparation from the elder-tree.
His eyes roved over his intent fellow-students, and Wedderburn suddenly
glanced over his shoulder at him with a queer expression in his eyes. The
mental excitement that had kept Hill at an abnormal pitch of vigour these
two days gave way to a curious nervous tension. His book of answers was
beside him. He did not write down what the thing was, but with one eye at
the microscope he began making a hasty sketch of it. His mind was full of
this grotesque puzzle in ethics that had suddenly been sprung upon him.
Should he identify it? or should he leave this question unanswered? In that
case Wedderburn would probably come out first in the second result. How
could he tell now whether he might not have identified the thing without
shifting it? It was possible that Wedderburn had failed to recognise it, of
course. Suppose Wedderburn too had shifted the slide? He looked up at the
clock. There were fifteen minutes in which to make up his mind. He
gathered up his book of answers and the coloured pencils he used in
illustrating his replies and walked back to his seat.
He read through his manuscript, and then sat thinking and gnawing his
knuckle. It would look queer now if he owned up. He must beat
Wedderburn. He forgot the examples of those starry gentlemen, John Burns

and Bradlaugh. Besides, he reflected, the glimpse of the rest of the slip he
had had was, after all, quite accidental, forced upon him by chance, a kind
of providential revelation rather than an unfair advantage. It was not nearly
so dishonest to avail himself of that as it was of Broome, who believed in
the efficacy of prayer, to pray daily for a first-class. "Five minutes more,"
said the demonstrator, folding up his paper and becoming observant. Hill
watched the clock hands until two minutes remained; then he opened the
book of answers, and, with hot ears and an affectation of ease, gave his
drawing of the lenticel its name.
When the second pass list appeared, the previous positions of
Wedderburn and Hill were reversed, and the spectacled girl in green, who
knew the demonstrator in private life (where he was practically human),
said that in the result of the two examinations taken together Hill had the
advantage of a mark—167 to 166 out of a possible 200. Everyone admired
Hill in a way, though the suspicion of "mugging" clung to him. But Hill was
to find congratulations and Miss Haysman's enhanced opinion of him, and
even the decided decline in the crest of Wedderburn, tainted by an unhappy
memory. He felt a remarkable access of energy at first, and the note of a
democracy marching to triumph returned to his debating-society speeches;
he worked at his comparative anatomy with tremendous zeal and effect, and
he went on with his aesthetic education. But through it all, a vivid little
picture was continually coming before his mind's eye—of a sneakish person
manipulating a slide.
No human being had witnessed the act, and he was cocksure that no
higher power existed to see, it; but for all that it worried him. Memories are
not dead things but alive; they dwindle in disuse, but they harden and
develop in all sorts of queer ways if they are being continually fretted.
Curiously enough, though at the time he perceived clearly that the shifting
was accidental, as the days wore on, his memory became confused about it,
until at last he was not sure—although he assured himself that he was sure
—whether the movement had been absolutely involuntary. Then it is
possible that Hill's dietary was conducive to morbid conscientiousness; a
breakfast frequently eaten in a hurry, a midday bun, and, at such hours after
five as chanced to be convenient, such meat as his means determined,
usually in a chop-house in a back street off the Brompton Road.
Occasionally he treated himself to threepenny or ninepenny classics, and

they usually represented a suppression of potatoes or chops. It is
indisputable that outbreaks of self-abasement and emotional revival have a
distinct relation to periods of scarcity. But apart from this influence on the
feelings, there was in Hill a distinct aversion to falsity that the blasphemous
Landport cobbler had inculcated by strap and tongue from his earliest years.
Of one fact about professed atheists I am convinced; they may be—they
usually are—fools, void of subtlety, revilers of holy institutions, brutal
speakers, and mischievous knaves, but they lie with difficulty. If it were not
so, if they had the faintest grasp of the idea of compromise, they would
simply be liberal churchmen. And, moreover, this memory poisoned his
regard for Miss Haysman. For she now so evidently preferred him to
Wedderburn that he felt sure he cared for her, and began reciprocating her
attentions by timid marks of personal regard; at one time he even bought a
bunch of violets, carried it about in his pocket, and produced it, with a
stumbling explanation, withered and dead, in the gallery of old iron. It
poisoned, too, the denunciation of capitalist dishonesty that had been one of
his life's pleasures. And, lastly, it poisoned his triumph in Wedderburn.
Previously he had been Wedderburn's superior in his own eyes, and had
raged simply at a want of recognition. Now he began to fret at the darker
suspicion of positive inferiority. He fancied he found justifications for his
position in Browning, but they vanished on analysis. At last—moved,
curiously enough, by exactly the same motive forces that had resulted in his
dishonesty—he went to Professor Bindon, and made a clean breast of the
whole affair. As Hill was a paid student, Professor Bindon did not ask him
to sit down, and he stood before the professor's desk as he made his
confession.
"It's a curious story," said Professor Bindon, slowly realising how the
thing reflected on himself, and then letting his anger rise,—"a most
remarkable story. I can't understand your doing it, and I can't understand
this avowal. You're a type of student—Cambridge men would never dream
—I suppose I ought to have thought—why did you cheat?"
"I didn't cheat," said Hill.
"But you have just been telling me you did."
"I thought I explained—"

"Either you cheated or you did not cheat."
"I said my motion was involuntary."
"I am not a metaphysician, I am a servant of science—of fact. You were
told not to move the slip. You did move the slip. If that is not cheating—"
"If I was a cheat," said Hill, with the note of hysterics in his voice,
"should I come here and tell you?"
"Your repentance, of course, does you credit," said Professor Bindon,
"but it does not alter the original facts."
"No, sir," said Hill, giving in in utter self-abasement.
"Even now you cause an enormous amount of trouble. The examination
list will have to be revised."
"I suppose so, sir."
"Suppose so? Of course it must be revised. And I don't see how I can
conscientiously pass you."
"Not pass me?" said Hill. "Fail me?"
"It's the rule in all examinations. Or where should we be? What else did
you expect? You don't want to shirk the consequences of your own acts?"
"I thought, perhaps——" said Hill. And then, "Fail me? I thought, as I
told you, you would simply deduct the marks given for that slip."
"Impossible!" said Bindon. "Besides, it would still leave you above
Wedderburn. Deduct only the marks! Preposterous! The Departmental
Regulations distinctly say——"
"But it's my own admission, sir."
"The Regulations say nothing whatever of the manner in which the
matter comes to light. They simply provide——"
"It will ruin me. If I fail this examination, they won't renew my
scholarship."

"You should have thought of that before."
"But, sir, consider all my circumstances——"
"I cannot consider anything. Professors in this College are machines. The
Regulations will not even let us recommend our students for appointments.
I am a machine, and you have worked me. I have to do——"
"It's very hard, sir."
"Possibly it is."
"If I am to be failed this examination, I might as well go home at once."
"That is as you think proper." Bindon's voice softened a little; he
perceived he had been unjust, and, provided he did not contradict himself,
he was disposed to amelioration. "As a private person," he said, "I think this
confession of yours goes far to mitigate your offence. But you have set the
machinery in motion, and now it must take its course. I—I am really sorry
you gave way."
A wave of emotion prevented Hill from answering. Suddenly, very
vividly, he saw the heavily-lined face of the old Landport cobbler, his
father. "Good God! What a fool I have been!" he said hotly and abruptly.
"I hope," said Bindon, "that it will be a lesson to you."
But, curiously enough, they were not thinking of quite the same
indiscretion.
There was a pause.
"I would like a day to think, sir, and then I will let you know—about
going home, I mean," said Hill, moving towards the door.

The next day Hill's place was vacant. The spectacled girl in green was, as
usual, first with the news. Wedderburn and Miss Haysman were talking of a
performance of The Meistersingers when she came up to them.
"Have you heard?" she said.

"Heard what?"
"There was cheating in the examination."
"Cheating!" said Wedderburn, with his face suddenly hot. "How?"
"That slide—"
"Moved? Never!"
"It was. That slide that we weren't to move—"
"Nonsense!" said Wedderburn. "Why! How could they find out? Who do
they say—?"
"It was Mr. Hill."
Hill!"
"Mr. Hill!"
"Not—surely not the immaculate Hill?" said Wedderburn, recovering.
"I don't believe it," said Miss Haysman. "How do you know?"
"I didn't," said the girl in spectacles. "But I know it now for a fact. Mr.
Hill went and confessed to Professor Bindon himself."
"By Jove!" said Wedderburn. "Hill of all people. But I am always
inclined to distrust these philanthropists-on-principle—"
"Are you quite sure?" said Miss Haysman, with a catch in her breath.
"Quite. It's dreadful, isn't it? But, you know, what can you expect? His
father is a cobbler."
Then Miss Haysman astonished the girl in spectacles.
"I don't care. I will not believe it," she said, flushing darkly under her
warm-tinted skin. "I will not believe it until he has told me so himself—
face to face. I would scarcely believe it then," and abruptly she turned her
back on the girl in spectacles, and walked to her own place.

"It's true, all the same," said the girl in spectacles, peering and smiling at
Wedderburn.
But Wedderburn did not answer her. She was indeed one of those people
who seemed destined to make unanswered remarks.

XIX. — THE CRYSTAL EGG.
There was, until a year ago, a little and very grimy-looking shop near
Seven Dials, over which, in weather-worn yellow lettering, the name of "C.
Cave, Naturalist and Dealer in Antiquities," was inscribed. The contents of
its window were curiously variegated. They comprised some elephant tusks
and an imperfect set of chessmen, beads and weapons, a box of eyes, two
skulls of tigers and one human, several moth-eaten stuffed monkeys (one
holding a lamp), an old-fashioned cabinet, a fly-blown ostrich egg or so,
some fishing-tackle, and an extraordinarily dirty, empty glass fish-tank.
There was also, at the moment the story begins, a mass of crystal, worked
into the shape of an egg and brilliantly polished. And at that two people
who stood outside the window were looking, one of them a tall, thin
clergyman, the other a black-bearded young man of dusky complexion and
unobtrusive costume. The dusky young man spoke with eager gesticulation,
and seemed anxious for his companion to purchase the article.
While they were there, Mr. Cave came into his shop, his beard still
wagging with the bread and butter of his tea. When he saw these men and
the object of their regard, his countenance fell. He glanced guiltily over his
shoulder, and softly shut the door. He was a little old man, with pale face
and peculiar watery blue eyes; his hair was a dirty grey, and he wore a
shabby blue frock-coat, an ancient silk hat, and carpet slippers very much
down at heel. He remained watching the two men as they talked. The
clergyman went deep into his trouser pocket, examined a handful of money,
and showed his teeth in an agreeable smile. Mr. Cave seemed still more
depressed when they came into the shop.
The clergyman, without any ceremony, asked the price of the crystal egg.
Mr. Cave glanced nervously towards the door leading into the parlour, and
said five pounds. The clergyman protested that the price was high, to his
companion as well as to Mr. Cave—it was, indeed, very much more than
Mr. Cave had intended to ask when he had stocked the article—and an
attempt at bargaining ensued. Mr. Cave stepped to the shop door, and held it
open. "Five pounds is my price," he said, as though he wished to save

himself the trouble of unprofitable discussion. As he did so, the upper
portion of a woman's face appeared above the blind in the glass upper panel
of the door leading into the parlour, and stared curiously at the two
customers. "Five pounds is my price," said Mr. Cave, with a quiver in his
voice.
The swarthy young man had so far remained a spectator, watching Cave
keenly. Now he spoke. "Give him five pounds," he said. The clergyman
glanced at him to see if he were in earnest, and when he looked at Mr. Cave
again, he saw that the latter's face was white. "It's a lot of money," said the
clergyman, and, diving into his pocket, began counting his resources. He
had little more than thirty shillings, and he appealed to his companion, with
whom he seemed to be on terms of considerable intimacy. This gave Mr.
Cave an opportunity of collecting his thoughts, and he began to explain in
an agitated manner that the crystal was not, as a matter of fact, entirely free
for sale. His two customers were naturally surprised at this, and inquired
why he had not thought of that before he began to bargain. Mr. Cave
became confused, but he stuck to his story, that the crystal was not in the
market that afternoon, that a probable purchaser of it had already appeared.
The two, treating this as an attempt to raise the price still further, made as if
they would leave the shop. But at this point the parlour door opened, and
the owner of the dark fringe and the little eyes appeared.
She was a coarse-featured, corpulent woman, younger and very much
larger than Mr. Cave; she walked heavily, and her face was flushed. "That
crystal is for sale," she said. "And five pounds is a good enough price for it.
I can't think what you're about, Cave, not to take the gentleman's offer!"
Mr. Cave, greatly perturbed by the irruption, looked angrily at her over
the rims of his spectacles, and, without excessive assurance, asserted his
right to manage his business in his own way. An altercation began. The two
customers watched the scene with interest and some amusement,
occasionally assisting Mrs. Cave with suggestions. Mr. Cave, hard driven,
persisted in a confused and impossible story of an inquiry for the crystal
that morning, and his agitation became painful. But he stuck to his point
with extraordinary persistence. It was the young Oriental who ended this
curious controversy. He proposed that they should call again in the course
of two days—so as to give the alleged inquirer a fair chance. "And then we

must insist," said the clergyman. "Five pounds." Mrs. Cave took it on
herself to apologise for her husband, explaining that he was sometimes "a
little odd," and as the two customers left, the couple prepared for a free
discussion of the incident in all its bearings.
Mrs. Cave talked to her husband with singular directness. The poor little
man, quivering with emotion, muddled himself between his stories,
maintaining on the one hand that he had another customer in view, and on
the other asserting that the crystal was honestly worth ten guineas. "Why
did you ask five pounds?" said his wife. "Do let me manage my business
my own way!" said Mr. Cave.
Mr. Cave had living with him a step-daughter and a step-son, and at
supper that night the transaction was re-discussed. None of them had a high
opinion of Mr. Cave's business methods, and this action seemed a
culminating folly.
"It's my opinion he's refused that crystal before," said the step-son, a
loose-limbed lout of eighteen.
"But Five Pounds!" said the step-daughter, an argumentative young
woman of six-and-twenty.
Mr. Cave's answers were wretched; he could only mumble weak
assertions that he knew his own business best. They drove him from his
half-eaten supper into the shop, to close it for the night, his ears aflame and
tears of vexation behind his spectacles. Why had he left the crystal in the
window so long? The folly of it! That was the trouble closest in his mind.
For a time he could see no way of evading sale.
After supper his step-daughter and step-son smartened themselves up and
went out and his wife retired upstairs to reflect upon the business aspects of
the crystal, over a little sugar and lemon and so forth in hot water. Mr. Cave
went into the shop, and stayed there until late, ostensibly to make
ornamental rockeries for gold-fish cases, but really for a private purpose
that will be better explained later. The next day Mrs. Cave found that the
crystal had been removed from the window, and was lying behind some
second-hand books on angling. She replaced it in a conspicuous position.
But she did not argue further about it, as a nervous headache disinclined her

from debate. Mr. Cave was always disinclined. The day passed
disagreeably. Mr. Cave was, if anything, more absent-minded than usual,
and uncommonly irritable withal. In the afternoon, when his wife was
taking her customary sleep, he removed the crystal from the window again.
The next day Mr. Cave had to deliver a consignment of dog-fish at one of
the hospital schools, where they were needed for dissection. In his absence
Mrs. Cave's mind reverted to the topic of the crystal, and the methods of
expenditure suitable to a windfall of five pounds. She had already devised
some very agreeable expedients, among others a dress of green silk for
herself and a trip to Richmond, when a jangling of the front door bell
summoned her into the shop. The customer was an examination coach who
came to complain of the non-delivery of certain frogs asked for the previous
day. Mrs. Cave did not approve of this particular branch of Mr. Cave's
business, and the gentleman, who had called in a somewhat aggressive
mood, retired after a brief exchange of words—entirely civil, so far as he
was concerned. Mrs. Cave's eye then naturally turned to the window; for the
sight of the crystal was an assurance of the five pounds and of her dreams.
What was her surprise to find it gone!
She went to the place behind the locker on the counter, where she had
discovered it the day before. It was not there; and she immediately began an
eager search about the shop.
When Mr. Cave returned from his business with the dogfish, about a
quarter to two in the afternoon, he found the shop in some confusion, and
his wife, extremely exasperated and on her knees behind the counter,
routing among his taxidermic material. Her face came up hot and angry
over the counter, as the jangling bell announced his return, and she
forthwith accused him of "hiding it."
"Hid what?" asked Mr. Cave.
"The crystal!"
At that Mr. Cave, apparently much surprised, rushed to the window. "Isn't
it here?" he said. "Great Heavens! what has become of it?"
Just then Mr. Cave's step-son re-entered the shop from, the inner room—
he had come home a minute or so before Mr. Cave—and he was

blaspheming freely. He was apprenticed to a second-hand furniture dealer
down the road, but he had his meals at home, and he was naturally annoyed
to find no dinner ready.
But when he heard of the loss of the crystal, he forgot his meal, and his
anger was diverted from his mother to his step-father. Their first idea, of
course, was that he had hidden it. But Mr. Cave stoutly denied all
knowledge of its fate, freely offering his bedabbled affidavit in the matter—
and at last was worked up to the point of accusing, first, his wife and then
his stepson of having taken it with a view to a private sale. So began an
exceedingly acrimonious and emotional discussion, which ended for Mrs.
Cave in a peculiar nervous condition midway between hysterics and amuck,
and caused the step-son to be half-an-hour late at the furniture
establishment in the afternoon. Mr. Cave took refuge from his wife's
emotions in the shop.
In the evening the matter was resumed, with less passion and in a judicial
spirit, under the presidency of the step-daughter. The supper passed
unhappily and culminated in a painful scene. Mr. Cave gave way at last to
extreme exasperation, and went out banging the front door violently. The
rest of the family, having discussed him with the freedom his absence
warranted, hunted the house from garret to cellar, hoping to light upon the
crystal.
The next day the two customers called again. They were received by Mrs.
Cave almost in tears. It transpired that no one could imagine all that she had
stood from Cave at various times in her married pilgrimage. ... She also
gave a garbled account of the disappearance. The clergyman and the
Oriental laughed silently at one another, and said it was very extraordinary.
As Mrs. Cave seemed disposed to give them the complete history of her life
they made to leave the shop. Thereupon Mrs. Cave, still clinging to hope,
asked for the clergyman's address, so that, if she could get anything out of
Cave, she might communicate it. The address was duly given, but
apparently was afterwards mislaid. Mrs. Cave can remember nothing about
it.
In the evening of that day the Caves seem to have exhausted their
emotions, and Mr. Cave, who had been out in the afternoon, supped in a

gloomy isolation that contrasted pleasantly with the impassioned
controversy of the previous days. For some time matters were very badly
strained in the Cave household, but neither crystal nor customer reappeared.
Now, without mincing the matter, we must admit that Mr. Cave was a
liar. He knew perfectly well where the crystal was. It was in the rooms of
Mr. Jacoby Wace, Assistant Demonstrator at St. Catherine's Hospital,
Westbourne Street. It stood on the sideboard partially covered by a black
velvet cloth, and beside a decanter of American whisky. It is from Mr.
Wace, indeed, that the particulars upon which this narrative is based were
derived. Cave had taken off the thing to the hospital hidden in the dog-fish
sack, and there had pressed the young investigator to keep it for him. Mr.
Wace was a little dubious at first. His relationship to Cave was peculiar. He
had a taste for singular characters, and he had more than once invited the
old man to smoke and drink in his rooms, and to unfold his rather amusing
views of life in general and of his wife in particular. Mr. Wace had
encountered Mrs. Cave, too, on occasions when Mr. Cave was not at home
to attend to him. He knew the constant interference to which Cave was
subjected, and having weighed the story judicially, he decided to give the
crystal a refuge. Mr. Cave promised to explain the reasons for his
remarkable affection for the crystal more fully on a later occasion, but he
spoke distinctly of seeing visions therein. He called on Mr. Wace the same
evening.
He told a complicated story. The crystal he said had come into his
possession with other oddments at the forced sale of another curiosity
dealer's effects, and not knowing what its value might be, he had ticketed it
at ten shillings. It had hung upon his hands at that price for some months,
and he was thinking of "reducing the figure," when he made a singular
discovery.
At that time his health was very bad—and it must be borne in mind that,
throughout all this experience, his physical condition was one of ebb—and
he was in considerable distress by reason of the negligence, the positive ill-
treatment even, he received from his wife and step-children. His wife was
vain, extravagant, unfeeling, and had a growing taste for private drinking;
his step-daughter was mean and over-reaching; and his step-son had
conceived a violent dislike for him, and lost no chance of showing it. The

requirements of his business pressed heavily upon him, and Mr. Wace does
not think that he was altogether free from occasional intemperance. He had
begun life in a comfortable position, he was a man of fair education, and he
suffered, for weeks at a stretch, from melancholia and insomnia. Afraid to
disturb his family, he would slip quietly from his wife's side, when his
thoughts became intolerable, and wander about the house. And about three
o'clock one morning, late in August, chance directed him into the shop.
The dirty little place was impenetrably black except in one spot, where he
perceived an unusual glow of light. Approaching this, he discovered it to be
the crystal egg, which was standing on the corner of the counter towards the
window. A thin ray smote through a crack in the shutters, impinged upon
the object, and seemed as it were to fill its entire interior.
It occurred to Mr. Cave that this was not in accordance with the laws of
optics as he had known them in his younger days. He could understand the
rays being refracted by the crystal and coming to a focus in its interior, but
this diffusion jarred with his physical conceptions. He approached the
crystal nearly, peering into it and round it, with a transient revival of the
scientific curiosity that in his youth had determined his choice of a calling.
He was surprised to find the light not steady, but writhing within the
substance of the egg, as though that object was a hollow sphere of some
luminous vapour. In moving about to get different points of view, he
suddenly found that he had come between it and the ray, and that the crystal
none the less remained luminous. Greatly astonished, he lifted it out of the
light ray and carried it to the darkest part of the shop. It remained bright for
some four or five minutes, when it slowly faded and went out. He placed it
in the thin streak of daylight, and its luminousness was almost immediately
restored.
So far, at least, Mr. Wace was able to verify the remarkable story of Mr.
Cave. He has himself repeatedly held this crystal in a ray of light (which
had to be of a less diameter than one millimetre). And in a perfect darkness,
such as could be produced by velvet wrapping, the crystal did undoubtedly
appear very faintly phosphorescent. It would seem, however, that the
luminousness was of some exceptional sort, and not equally visible to all
eyes; for Mr. Harbinger—whose name will be familiar to the scientific
reader in connection with the Pasteur Institute—was quite unable to see any

light whatever. And Mr. Wace's own capacity for its appreciation was out of
comparison inferior to that of Mr. Cave's. Even with Mr. Cave the power
varied very considerably: his vision was most vivid during states of extreme
weakness and fatigue.
Now, from the outset, this light in the crystal exercised a curious
fascination upon Mr. Cave. And it says more for his loneliness of soul than
a volume of pathetic writing could do, that he told no human being of his
curious observations. He seems to have been living in such an atmosphere
of petty spite that to admit the existence of a pleasure would have been to
risk the loss of it. He found that as the dawn advanced, and the amount of
diffused light increased, the crystal became to all appearance non-luminous.
And for some time he was unable to see anything in it, except at night-time,
in dark corners of the shop.
But the use of an old velvet cloth, which he used as a background for a
collection of minerals, occurred to him, and by doubling this, and putting it
over his head and hands, he was able to get a sight of the luminous
movement within the crystal even in the day-time. He was very cautious
lest he should be thus discovered by his wife, and he practised this
occupation only in the afternoons, while she was asleep upstairs, and then
circumspectly in a hollow under the counter. And one day, turning the
crystal about in his hands, he saw something. It came and went like a flash,
but it gave him the impression that the object had for a moment opened to
him the view of a wide and spacious and strange country; and turning it
about, he did, just as the light faded, see the same vision again.
Now it would be tedious and unnecessary to state all the phases of Mr.
Cave's discovery from this point. Suffice that the effect was this: the crystal,
being peered into at an angle of about 137 degrees from the direction of the
illuminating ray, gave a clear and consistent picture of a wide and peculiar
country-side. It was not dream-like at all: it produced a definite impression
of reality, and the better the light the more real and solid it seemed. It was a
moving picture: that is to say, certain objects moved in it, but slowly in an
orderly manner like real things, and, according as the direction of the
lighting and vision changed, the picture changed also. It must, indeed, have
been like looking through an oval glass at a view, and turning the glass
about to get at different aspects.

Mr. Cave's statements, Mr. Wace assures me, were extremely
circumstantial, and entirely free from any of that emotional quality that
taints hallucinatory impressions. But it must be remembered that all the
efforts of Mr. Wace to see any similar clarity in the faint opalescence of the
crystal were wholly unsuccessful, try as he would. The difference in
intensity of the impressions received by the two men was very great, and it
is quite conceivable that what was a view to Mr. Cave was a mere blurred
nebulosity to Mr. Wace.
The view, as Mr. Cave described it, was invariably of an extensive plain,
and he seemed always to be looking at it from a considerable height, as if
from a tower or a mast. To the east and to the west the plain was bounded at
a remote distance by vast reddish cliffs, which reminded him of those he
had seen in some picture; but what the picture was Mr. Wace was unable to
ascertain. These cliffs passed north and south—he could tell the points of
the compass by the stars that were visible of a night—receding in an almost
illimitable perspective and fading into the mists of the distance before they
met. He was nearer the eastern set of cliffs; on the occasion of his first
vision the sun was rising over them, and black against the sunlight and pale
against their shadow appeared a multitude of soaring forms that Mr. Cave
regarded as birds. A vast range of buildings spread below him; he seemed to
be looking down upon them; and as they approached the blurred and
refracted edge of the picture they became indistinct. There were also trees
curious in shape, and in colouring a deep mossy green and an exquisite
grey, beside a wide and shining canal. And something great and brilliantly
coloured flew across the picture. But the first time Mr. Cave saw these
pictures he saw only in flashes, his hands shook, his head moved, the vision
came and went, and grew foggy and indistinct. And at first he had the
greatest difficulty in finding the picture again once the direction of it was
lost.
His next clear vision, which came about a week after the first, the interval
having yielded nothing but tantalising glimpses and some useful
experience, showed him the view down the length of the valley. The view
was different, but he had a curious persuasion, which his subsequent
observations abundantly confirmed, that he was regarding the strange world
from exactly the same spot, although he was looking in a different direction.
The long façade of the great building, whose roof he had looked down upon

before, was now receding in perspective. He recognised the roof. In the
front of the façade was a terrace of massive proportions and extraordinary
length, and down the middle of the terrace, at certain intervals, stood huge
but very graceful masts, bearing small shiny objects which reflected the
setting sun. The import of these small objects did not occur to Mr. Cave
until some time after, as he was describing the scene to Mr. Wace. The
terrace overhung a thicket of the most luxuriant and graceful vegetation,
and beyond this was a wide grassy lawn on which certain broad creatures,
in form like beetles but enormously larger, reposed. Beyond this again was
a richly decorated causeway of pinkish stone; and beyond that, and lined
with dense red weeds, and passing up the valley exactly parallel with the
distant cliffs, was a broad and mirror-like expanse of water. The air seemed
full of squadrons of great birds, manoeuvring in stately curves; and across
the river was a multitude of splendid buildings, richly coloured and
glittering with metallic tracery and facets, among a forest of moss-like and
lichenous trees. And suddenly something flapped repeatedly across the
vision, like the fluttering of a jewelled fan or the beating of a wing, and a
face, or rather the upper part of a face with very large eyes, came as it were
close to his own and as if on the other side of the crystal. Mr. Cave was so
startled and so impressed by the absolute reality of these eyes that he drew
his head back from the crystal to look behind it. He had become so
absorbed in watching that he was quite surprised to find himself in the cool
darkness of his little shop, with its familiar odour of methyl, mustiness, and
decay. And as he blinked about him, the glowing crystal faded and went
out.
Such were the first general impressions of Mr. Cave. The story is
curiously direct and circumstantial. From the outset, when the valley first
flashed momentarily on his senses, his imagination was strangely affected,
and as he began to appreciate the details of the scene he saw, his wonder
rose to the point of a passion. He went about his business listless and
distraught, thinking only of the time when he should be able to return to his
watching. And then a few weeks after his first sight of the valley came the
two customers, the stress and excitement of their offer, and the narrow
escape of the crystal from sale, as I have already told.
Now, while the thing was Mr. Cave's secret, it remained a mere wonder, a
thing to creep to covertly and peep at, as a child might peep upon a

forbidden garden. But Mr. Wace has, for a young scientific investigator, a
particularly lucid and consecutive habit of mind. Directly the crystal and its
story came to him, and he had satisfied himself, by seeing the
phosphorescence with his own eyes, that there really was a certain evidence
for Mr. Cave's statements, he proceeded to develop the matter
systematically. Mr. Cave was only too eager to come and feast his eyes on
this wonderland he saw, and he came every night from half-past eight until
half-past ten, and sometimes, in Mr. Wace's absence, during the day. On
Sunday afternoons, also, he came. From the outset Mr. Wace made copious
notes, and it was due to his scientific method that the relation between the
direction from which the initiating ray entered the crystal and the
orientation of the picture were proved. And, by covering the crystal in a box
perforated only with a small aperture to admit the exciting ray, and by
substituting black holland for his buff blinds, he greatly improved the
conditions of the observations; so that in a little while they were able to
survey the valley in any direction they desired.
So having cleared the way, we may give a brief account of this visionary
world within the crystal. The things were in all cases seen by Mr. Cave, and
the method of working was invariably for him to watch the crystal and
report what he saw, while Mr. Wace (who as a science student had learnt the
trick of writing in the dark) wrote a brief note of his report. When the
crystal faded, it was put into its box in the proper position and the electric
light turned on. Mr. Wace asked questions, and suggested observations to
clear up difficult points. Nothing, indeed, could have been less visionary
and more matter-of-fact.
The attention of Mr. Cave had been speedily directed to the bird-like
creatures he had seen so abundantly present in each of his earlier visions.
His first impression was soon corrected, and he considered for a time that
they might represent a diurnal species of bat. Then he thought, grotesquely
enough, that they might be cherubs. Their heads were round and curiously
human, and it was the eyes of one of them that had so startled him on his
second observation. They had broad, silvery wings, not feathered, but
glistening almost as brilliantly as new-killed fish and with the same subtle
play of colour, and these wings were not built on the plan of bird-wing or
bat, Mr. Wace learned, but supported by curved ribs radiating from the
body. (A sort of butterfly wing with curved ribs seems best to express their

appearance.) The body was small, but fitted with two bunches of prehensile
organs, like long tentacles, immediately under the mouth. Incredible as it
appeared to Mr. Wace, the persuasion at last became irresistible that it was
these creatures which owned the great quasi-human buildings and the
magnificent garden that made the broad valley so splendid. And Mr. Cave
perceived that the buildings, with other peculiarities, had no doors, but that
the great circular windows, which opened freely, gave the creatures egress
and entrance. They would alight upon their tentacles, fold their wings to a
smallness almost rod-like, and hop into the interior. But among them was a
multitude of smaller-winged creatures, like great dragon-flies and moths
and flying beetles, and across the greensward brilliantly-coloured gigantic
ground-beetles crawled lazily to and fro. Moreover, on the causeways and
terraces, large-headed creatures similar to the greater winged flies, but
wingless, were visible, hopping busily upon their hand-like tangle of
tentacles.
Allusion has already been made to the glittering objects upon masts that
stood upon the terrace of the nearer building. It dawned upon Mr. Cave,
after regarding one of these masts very fixedly on one particularly vivid day
that the glittering object there was a crystal exactly like that into which he
peered. And a still more careful scrutiny convinced him that each one in a
vista of nearly twenty carried a similar object.
Occasionally one of the large flying creatures would flutter up to one,
and folding its wings and coiling a number of its tentacles about the mast,
would regard the crystal fixedly for a space,—sometimes for as long as
fifteen minutes. And a series of observations, made at the suggestion of Mr.
Wace, convinced both watchers that, so far as this visionary world was
concerned, the crystal into which they peered actually stood at the summit
of the end-most mast on the terrace, and that on one occasion at least one of
these inhabitants of this other world had looked into Mr. Cave's face while
he was making these observations.
So much for the essential facts of this very singular story. Unless we
dismiss it all as the ingenious fabrication of Mr. Wace, we have to believe
one of two things: either that Mr. Cave's crystal was in two worlds at once,
and that while it was carried about in one, it remained stationary in the
other, which seems altogether absurd; or else that it had some peculiar

relation of sympathy with another and exactly similar crystal in this other
world, so that what was seen in the interior of the one in this world was,
under suitable conditions, visible to an observer in the corresponding crystal
in the other world; and vice versa. At present, indeed, we do not know of
any way in which two crystals could so come en rapport, but nowadays we
know enough to understand that the thing is not altogether impossible. This
view of the crystals as en rapport was the supposition that occurred to Mr.
Wace, and to me at least it seems extremely plausible...
And where was this other world? On this, also, the alert intelligence of
Mr. Wace speedily threw light. After sunset, the sky darkened rapidly—
there was a very brief twilight interval indeed—and the stars shone out.
They were recognisably the same as those we see, arranged in the same
constellations. Mr. Cave recognised the Bear, the Pleiades, Aldebaran, and
Sirius; so that the other world must be somewhere in the solar system, and,
at the utmost, only a few hundreds of millions of miles from our own.
Following up this clue, Mr. Wace learned that the midnight sky was a darker
blue even than our midwinter sky, and that the sun seemed a little smaller.
And there were two small moons! "like our moon but smaller, and quite
differently marked," one of which moved so rapidly that its motion was
clearly visible as one regarded it. These moons were never high in the sky,
but vanished as they rose: that is, every time they revolved they were
eclipsed because they were so near their primary planet. And all this
answers quite completely, although Mr. Cave did not know it, to what must
be the condition of things on Mars.
Indeed, it seems an exceedingly plausible conclusion that peering into
this crystal Mr. Cave did actually see the planet Mars and its inhabitants.
And if that be the case, then the evening star that shone so brilliantly in the
sky of that distant vision was neither more nor less than our own familiar
earth.
For a time the Martians—if they were Martians—do not seem to have
known of Mr. Cave's inspection. Once or twice one would come to peer,
and go away very shortly to some other mast, as though the vision was
unsatisfactory. During this time Mr. Cave was able to watch the proceedings
of these winged people without being disturbed by their attentions, and
although his report is necessarily vague and fragmentary, it is nevertheless

very suggestive. Imagine the impression of humanity a Martian observer
would get who, after a difficult process of preparation and with
considerable fatigue to the eyes, was able to peer at London from the
steeple of St. Martin's Church for stretches, at longest, of four minutes at a
time. Mr. Cave was unable to ascertain if the winged Martians were the
same as the Martians who hopped about the causeways and terraces, and if
the latter could put on wings at will. He several times saw certain clumsy
bipeds, dimly suggestive of apes, white and partially translucent, feeding
among certain of the lichenous trees, and once some of these fled before
one of the hopping, round-headed Martians. The latter caught one in its
tentacles, and then the picture faded suddenly and left Mr. Cave most
tantalisingly in the dark. On another occasion a vast thing, that Mr. Cave
thought at first was some gigantic insect, appeared advancing along the
causeway beside the canal with extraordinary rapidity. As this drew nearer
Mr. Cave perceived that it was a mechanism of shining metals and of
extraordinary complexity. And then, when he looked again, it had passed
out of sight.
After a time Mr. Wace aspired to attract the attention of the Martians, and
the next time that the strange eyes of one of them appeared close to the
crystal Mr. Cave cried out and sprang away, and they immediately turned
on the light and began to gesticulate in a manner suggestive of signalling.
But when at last Mr. Cave examined the crystal again the Martian had
departed.
Thus far these observations had progressed in early November, and then
Mr. Cave, feeling that the suspicions of his family about the crystal were
allayed, began to take it to and fro with him in order that, as occasion arose
in the daytime or night, he might comfort himself with what was fast
becoming the most real thing in his existence.
In December Mr. Wace's work in connection with a forthcoming
examination became heavy, the sittings were reluctantly suspended for a
week, and for ten or eleven days—he is not quite sure which—he saw
nothing of Cave. He then grew anxious to resume these investigations, and,
the stress of his seasonal labours being abated, he went down to Seven
Dials. At the corner he noticed a shutter before a bird fancier's window, and
then another at a cobbler's. Mr. Cave's shop was closed.

He rapped and the door was opened by the step-son in black. He at once
called Mrs. Cave, who was, Mr. Wace could not but observe, in cheap but
ample widow's weeds of the most imposing pattern. Without any very great
surprise Mr. Wace learnt that Cave was dead and already buried. She was in
tears, and her voice was a little thick. She had just returned from Highgate.
Her mind seemed occupied with her own prospects and the honourable
details of the obsequies, but Mr. Wace was at last able to learn the
particulars of Cave's death. He had been found dead in his shop in the early
morning, the day after his last visit to Mr. Wace, and the crystal had been
clasped in his stone-cold hands. His face was smiling, said Mrs. Cave, and
the velvet cloth from the minerals lay on the floor at his feet. He must have
been dead five or six hours when he was found.
This came as a great shock to Wace, and he began to reproach himself
bitterly for having neglected the plain symptoms of the old man's ill-health.
But his chief thought was of the crystal. He approached that topic in a
gingerly manner, because he knew Mrs. Cave's peculiarities. He was
dumfounded to learn that it was sold.
Mrs. Cave's first impulse, directly Cave's body had been taken upstairs,
had been to write to the mad clergyman who had offered five pounds for the
crystal, informing him of its recovery; but after a violent hunt, in which her
daughter joined her, they were convinced of the loss of his address. As they
were without the means required to mourn and bury Cave in the elaborate
style the dignity of an old Seven Dials inhabitant demands, they had
appealed to a friendly fellow-tradesman in Great Portland Street. He had
very kindly taken over a portion of the stock at a valuation. The valuation
was his own, and the crystal egg was included in one of the lots. Mr. Wace,
after a few suitable condolences, a little off-handedly proffered perhaps,
hurried at once to Great Portland Street. But there he learned that the crystal
egg had already been sold to a tall, dark man in grey. And there the material
facts in this curious, and to me at least very suggestive, story come abruptly
to an end. The Great Portland Street dealer did not know who the tall dark
man in grey was, nor had he observed him with sufficient attention to
describe him minutely. He did not even know which way this person had
gone after leaving the shop. For a time Mr. Wace remained in the shop,
trying the dealer's patience with hopeless questions, venting his own
exasperation. And at last, realising abruptly that the whole thing had passed

out of his hands, had vanished like a vision of the night, he returned to his
own rooms, a little astonished to find the notes he had made still tangible
and visible upon, his untidy table.
His annoyance and disappointment were naturally very great. He made a
second call (equally ineffectual) upon the Great Portland Street dealer, and
he resorted to advertisements in such periodicals as were lively to come into
the hands of a bric-a-brac collector. He also wrote letters to The Daily
Chronicle and Nature, but both those periodicals, suspecting a hoax, asked
him to reconsider his action before they printed, and he was advised that
such a strange story, unfortunately so bare of supporting evidence, might
imperil his reputation as an investigator. Moreover, the calls of his proper
work were urgent. So that after a month or so, save for an occasional
reminder to certain dealers, he had reluctantly to abandon the quest for the
crystal egg, and from that day to this it remains undiscovered. Occasionally,
however, he tells me, and I can quite believe him, he has bursts of zeal, in
which he abandons his more urgent occupation and resumes the search.
Whether or not it will remain lost for ever, with the material and origin of
it, are things equally speculative at the present time. If the present purchaser
is a collector, one would have expected the enquiries of Mr. Wace to have
reached him through the dealers. He has been able to discover Mr. Cave's
clergyman and "Oriental"—no other than the Rev. James Parker and the
young Prince of Bosso-Kuni in Java. I am obliged to them for certain
particulars. The object of the Prince was simply curiosity—and
extravagance. He was so eager to buy because Cave was so oddly reluctant
to sell. It is just as possible that the buyer in the second instance was simply
a casual purchaser and not a collector at all, and the crystal egg, for all I
know, may at the present moment be within a mile of me, decorating a
drawing-room or serving as a paper-weight—its remarkable functions all
unknown. Indeed, it is partly with the idea of such a possibility that I have
thrown this narrative into a form that will give it a chance of being read by
the ordinary consumer of fiction.
My own ideas in the matter are practically identical with those of Mr.
Wace. I believe the crystal on the mast in Mars and the crystal egg of Mr.
Cave's to be in some physical, but at present quite inexplicable, way en
rapport, and we both believe further that the terrestrial crystal must have

been—possibly at some remote date—sent hither from that planet, in order
to give the Martians a near view of our affairs. Possibly the fellows to the
crystals on the other masts are also on our globe. No theory of hallucination
suffices for the facts.

XX. — THE STAR.
It was on the first day of the new year that the announcement was made,
almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the motion of the
planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that wheel about the sun,
had become very erratic. Ogilvy had already called attention to a suspected
retardation in its velocity in December. Such a piece of news was scarcely
calculated to interest a world the greater portion of whose inhabitants were
unaware of the existence of the planet Neptune, nor outside the
astronomical profession did the subsequent discovery of a faint remote
speck of light in the region of the perturbed planet cause any very great
excitement. Scientific people, however, found the intelligence remarkable
enough, even before it became known that the new body was rapidly
growing larger and brighter, that its motion was quite different from the
orderly progress of the planets, and that the deflection of Neptune and its
satellite was becoming now of an unprecedented kind.
Few people without a training in science can realise the huge isolation of
the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids,
and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost defeats
the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as
human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank
emptiness, for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallest
estimate of the distance to be traversed before the very nearest of the stars is
attained. And, saving a few comets more unsubstantial than the thinnest
flame, no matter had ever to human knowledge crossed this gulf of space
until early in the twentieth century this strange wanderer appeared. A vast
mass of matter it was, bulky, heavy, rushing without warning out of the
black mystery of the sky into the radiance of the sun. By the second day it
was clearly visible to any decent instrument, as a speck with a barely
sensible diameter, in the constellation Leo near Regulus. In a little while an
opera glass could attain it.
On the third day of the new year the newspaper readers of two
hemispheres were made aware for the first time of the real importance of

this unusual apparition in the heavens. "A Planetary Collision," one London
paper headed the news, and proclaimed Duchaine's opinion that this strange
new planet would probably collide with Neptune. The leader-writers
enlarged upon the topic. So that in most of the capitals of the world, on
January 3rd, there was an expectation, however vague, of some imminent
phenomenon in the sky; and as the night followed the sunset round the
globe, thousands of men turned their eyes skyward to see—the old familiar
stars just as they had always been.
Until it was dawn in London and Pollux setting and the stars overhead
grown pale. The Winter's dawn it was, a sickly filtering accumulation of
daylight, and the light of gas and candles shone yellow in the windows to
show where people were astir. But the yawning policeman saw the thing,
the busy crowds in the markets stopped agape, workmen going to their
work betimes, milkmen, the drivers of news-carts, dissipation going home
jaded and pale, homeless wanderers, sentinels on their beats, and, in the
country, labourers trudging afield, poachers slinking home, all over the
dusky quickening country it could be seen—and out at sea by seamen
watching for the day—a great white star, come suddenly into the westward
sky!
Brighter it was than any star in our skies; brighter than the evening star at
its brightest. It still glowed out white and large, no mere twinkling spot of
light, but a small, round, clear shining disc, an hour after the day had come.
And where science has not reached, men stared and feared, telling one
another of the wars and pestilences that are foreshadowed by these fiery
signs in the Heavens. Sturdy Boers, dusky Hottentots, Gold Coast negroes,
Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, stood in the warmth of the sunrise
watching the setting of this strange new star.
And in a hundred observatories there had been suppressed excitement,
rising almost to shouting pitch, as the two remote bodies had rushed
together, and a hurrying to and fro, to gather photographic apparatus and
spectroscope, and this appliance and that, to record this novel, astonishing
sight, the destruction of a world. For it was a world, a sister planet of our
earth, far greater than our earth indeed, that had so suddenly flashed into
flaming death. Neptune it was had been struck, fairly and squarely, by the
strange planet from outer space, and the heat of the concussion had

incontinently turned two solid globes into one vast mass of incandescence.
Round the world that day, two hours before the dawn, went the pallid great
white star, fading only as it sank westward and the sun mounted above it.
Everywhere men marvelled at it, but of all those who saw it none could
have marvelled more than those sailors, habitual watchers of the stars, who
far away at sea had heard nothing of its advent and saw it now rise like a
pigmy moon and climb zenithward and hang overhead and sink westward
with the passing of the night.
And when next it rose over Europe everywhere were crowds of watchers
on hilly slopes, on house-roofs, in open spaces, staring eastward for the
rising of the great new star. It rose with a white glow in front of it, like the
glare of a white fire, and those who had seen it come into existence the
night before cried out at the sight of it. "It is larger," they cried. "It is
brighter!" And indeed the moon, a quarter full and sinking in the west, was
in its apparent size beyond comparison, but scarcely in all its breadth had it
as much brightness now as the little circle of the strange new star.
"It is brighter!" cried the people clustering in the streets. But in the dim
observatories the watchers held their breath and peered at one another. "It is
nearer!" they said. "Nearer!"
And voice after voice repeated, "It is nearer," and the clicking telegraph
took that up, and it trembled along telephone wires, and in a thousand cities
grimy compositors fingered the type. "It is nearer." Men writing in offices,
struck with a strange realisation, flung down their pens, men talking in a
thousand places suddenly came upon a grotesque possibility in those words,
"It is nearer." It hurried along awakening streets, it was shouted down the
frost-stilled ways of quiet villages, men who had read these things from the
throbbing tape stood in yellow-lit doorways shouting the news to the
passers-by. "It is nearer," Pretty women, flushed and glittering, heard the
news told jestingly between the dances, and feigned an intelligent interest
they did not feel. "Nearer! Indeed. How curious! How very, very clever
people must be to find out things like that!"
Lonely tramps faring through the wintry night murmured those words to
comfort themselves—looking skyward. "It has need to be nearer, for the

night's as cold as charity. Don't seem much warmth from it if it is nearer, all
the same."
"What is a new star to me?" cried the weeping woman, kneeling beside
her dead.
The schoolboy, rising early for his examination work, puzzled it out for
himself—with the great white star shining broad and bright through the
frost-flowers of his window. "Centrifugal, centripetal," he said, with his
chin on his fist. "Stop a planet in its flight, rob it of its centrifugal force,
what then? Centripetal has it, and down it falls into the sun! And this—!
"Do we come in the way? I wonder—"
The light of that day went the way of its brethren, and with the later
watches of the frosty darkness rose the strange star again. And it was now
so bright that the waxing moon seemed but a pale yellow ghost of itself,
hanging huge in the sunset. In a South African city a great man had married,
and the streets were alight to welcome his return with his bride. "Even the
skies have illuminated," said the flatterer. Under Capricorn, two negro
lovers, daring the wild beasts and evil spirits for love of one another,
crouched together in a cane brake where the fire-flies hovered. "That is our
star," they whispered, and felt strangely comforted by the sweet brilliance
of its light.
The master mathematician sat in his private room and pushed the papers
from him. His calculations were already finished. In a small white phial
there still remained a little of the drug that had kept him awake and active
for four long nights. Each day, serene, explicit, patient as ever, he had given
his lecture to his students, and then had come back at once to this
momentous calculation. His face was grave, a little drawn and hectic from
his drugged activity. For some time he seemed lost in thought. Then he
went to the window, and the blind went up with a click. Half-way up the
sky, over the clustering roofs, chimneys, and steeples of the city, hung the
star.
He looked at it as one might look into the eyes of a brave enemy. "You
may kill me," he said after a silence. "But I can hold you—and all the

universe for that matter—in the grip of this small brain. I would not change.
Even now."
He looked at the little phial. "There will be no need of sleep again," he
said. The next day at noon, punctual to the minute, he entered his lecture
theatre, put his hat on the end of the table as his habit was, and carefully
selected a large piece of chalk. It was a joke among his students that he
could not lecture without that piece of chalk to fumble in his fingers, and
once he had been stricken to impotence by their hiding his supply. He came
and looked under his grey eyebrows at the rising tiers of young fresh faces,
and spoke with his accustomed studied commonness of phrasing.
"Circumstances have arisen—circumstances beyond my control," he said,
and paused, "which will debar me from completing the course I had
designed. It would seem, gentlemen, if I may put the thing clearly and
briefly, that—Man has lived in vain."
The students glanced at one another. Had they heard aright? Mad? Raised
eyebrows and grinning lips there were, but one or two faces remained intent
upon his calm grey-fringed face. "It will be interesting," he was saying, "to
devote this morning to an exposition, so far as I can make it clear to you, of
the calculations that have led me to this conclusion. Let us assume——"
He turned towards the blackboard, meditating a diagram in the way that
was usual to him. "What was that about 'lived in vain'?" whispered one
student to another. "Listen," said the other, nodding towards the lecturer.
And presently they began to understand.

That night the star rose later, for its proper eastward motion had carried it
some way across Leo towards Virgo, and its brightness was so great that the
sky became a luminous blue as it rose, and every star was hidden in its turn,
save only Jupiter near the zenith, Capella, Aldebaran, Sirius, and the
pointers of the Bear. It was very white and beautiful. In many parts of the
world that night a pallid halo encircled it about. It was perceptibly larger; in
the clear refractive sky of the tropics it seemed as if it were nearly a quarter
the size of the moon. The frost was still on the ground in England, but the
world was as brightly lit as if it were midsummer moonlight. One could see

to read quite ordinary print by that cold, clear light, and in the cities the
lamps burnt yellow and wan.
And everywhere the world was awake that night, and throughout
Christendom a sombre murmur hung in the keen air over the country-side
like the belling of bees in the heather, and this murmurous tumult grew to a
clangour in the cities. It was the tolling of the bells in a million belfry
towers and steeples, summoning the people to sleep no more, to sin no
more, but to gather in their churches and pray. And overhead, growing
larger and brighter, as the earth rolled on its way and the night passed, rose
the dazzling star.
And the streets and houses were alight in all the cities, the shipyards
glared, and whatever roads led to high country were lit and crowded all
night long. And in all the seas about the civilized lands, ships with
throbbing engines, and ships with bellying sails, crowded with men and
living creatures, were standing out to ocean and the north. For already the
warning of the master mathematician had been telegraphed all over the
world and translated into a hundred tongues. The new planet and Neptune,
locked in a fiery embrace, were whirling headlong, ever faster and faster
towards the sun. Already every second this blazing mass flew a hundred
miles, and every second its terrific velocity increased. As it flew now,
indeed, it must pass a hundred million of miles, wide of the earth and
scarcely affect it. But near its destined path, as yet only slightly perturbed,
spun the mighty planet Jupiter and his moons sweeping splendid round the
sun. Every moment now the attraction between the fiery star and the
greatest of the planets grew stronger. And the result of that attraction?
Inevitably Jupiter would be deflected from its orbit into an elliptical path,
and the burning star, swung by his attraction wide of its sunward rush,
would "describe a curved path," and perhaps collide with, and certainly pass
very close to, our earth. "Earthquakes, volcanic outbreaks, cyclones, sea
waves, floods, and a steady rise in temperature to I know not what limit"—
so prophesied the master mathematician.
And overhead, to carry out his words, lonely and cold and livid blazed
the star of the coming doom.

To many who stared at it that night until their eyes ached it seemed that it
was visibly approaching. And that night, too, the weather changed, and the
frost that had gripped all Central Europe and France and England softened
towards a thaw.
But you must not imagine, because I have spoken of people praying
through the night and people going aboard ships and people fleeing towards
mountainous country, that the whole world was already in a terror because
of the star. As a matter of fact, use and wont still ruled the world, and save
for the talk of idle moments and the splendour of the night, nine human
beings out of ten were still busy at their common occupations. In all the
cities the shops, save one here and there, opened and closed at their proper
hours, the doctor and the undertaker plied their trades, the workers gathered
in the factories, soldiers drilled, scholars studied, lovers sought one another,
thieves lurked and fled, politicians planned their schemes. The presses of
the newspapers roared through the nights, and many a priest of this church
and that would not open his holy building to further what he considered a
foolish panic. The newspapers insisted on the lesson of the year 1000—for
then, too, people had anticipated the end. The star was no star—mere gas—
a comet; and were it a star it could not possibly strike the earth. There was
no precedent for such a thing. Common-sense was sturdy everywhere,
scornful, jesting, a little inclined to persecute the obdurate fearful. That
night, at seven-fifteen by Greenwich time, the star would be at its nearest to
Jupiter. Then the world would see the turn things would take. The master
mathematician's grim warnings were treated by many as so much mere
elaborate self-advertisement. Common-sense at last, a little heated by
argument, signified its unalterable convictions by going to bed. So, too,
barbarism and savagery, already tired of the novelty, went about their
nightly business, and, save for a howling dog here and there, the beast
world left the star unheeded.
And yet, when at last the watchers in the European States saw the star
rise, an hour later, it is true, but no larger than it had been the night before,
there were still plenty awake to laugh at the master mathematician—to take
the danger as if it had passed.
But hereafter the laughter ceased. The star grew—it grew with a terrible
steadiness hour after hour, a little larger each hour, a little nearer the

midnight zenith, and brighter and brighter, until it had turned night into a
second day. Had it come straight to the earth instead of in a curved path,
had it lost no velocity to Jupiter, it must have leapt the intervening gulf in a
day; but as it was, it took five days altogether to come by our planet. The
next night it had become a third the size of the moon before it set to English
eyes, and the thaw was assured. It rose over America near the size of the
moon, but blinding white to look at, and hot; and a breath of hot wind blew
now with its rising and gathering strength, and in Virginia, and Brazil, and
down the St. Lawrence valley, it shone intermittently through a driving reek
of thunder-clouds, flickering violet lightning, and hail unprecedented. In
Manitoba was a thaw and devastating floods. And upon all the mountains of
the earth the snow and ice began to melt that night, and all the rivers
coming out of high country flowed thick and turbid, and soon—in their
upper reaches— with swirling trees and the bodies of beasts and men. They
rose steadily, steadily in the ghostly brilliance, and came trickling over their
banks at last, behind the flying population of their valleys.
And along the coast of Argentina and up the South Atlantic the tides were
higher than had ever been in the memory of man, and the storms drove the
waters in many cases scores of miles inland, drowning whole cities. And so
great grew the heat during the night that the rising of the sun was like the
coming of a shadow. The earthquakes began and grew until all down
America from the Arctic Circle to Cape Horn, hillsides were sliding,
fissures were opening, and houses and walls crumbling to destruction. The
whole side of Cotopaxi slipped out in one vast convulsion, and a tumult of
lava poured out so high and broad and swift and liquid that in one day it
reached the sea.
So the star, with the wan moon in its wake, marched across the Pacific,
trailed the thunder-storms like the hem of a robe, and the growing tidal
wave that toiled behind it, frothing and eager, poured over island and island
and swept them clear of men: until that wave came at last—in a blinding
light and with the breath of a furnace, swift and terrible it came—a wall of
water, fifty feet high, roaring hungrily, upon the long coasts of Asia, and
swept inland across the plains of China. For a space the star, hotter now and
larger and brighter than the sun in its strength, showed with pitiless
brilliance the wide and populous country; towns and villages with their
pagodas and trees, roads, wide cultivated fields, millions of sleepless people

staring in helpless terror at the incandescent sky; and then, low and
growing, came the murmur of the flood. And thus it was with millions of
men that night—a flight nowhither, with limbs heavy with heat and breath
fierce and scant, and the flood like a wall swift and white behind. And then
death.
China was lit glowing white, but over Japan and Java and all the islands
of Eastern Asia the great star was a ball of dull red fire because of the steam
and smoke and ashes the volcanoes were spouting forth to salute its coming.
Above was the lava, hot gases and ash, and below the seething floods, and
the whole earth swayed and rumbled with the earthquake shocks. Soon the
immemorial snows of Thibet and the Himalaya were melting and pouring
down by ten million deepening converging channels upon the plains of
Burmah and Hindostan. The tangled summits of the Indian jungles were
aflame in a thousand places, and below the hurrying waters around the
stems were dark objects that still struggled feebly and reflected the blood-
red tongues of fire. And in a rudderless confusion a multitude of men and
women fled down the broad river-ways to that one last hope of men—the
open sea.
Larger grew the star, and larger, hotter, and brighter with a terrible
swiftness now. The tropical ocean had lost its phosphorescence, and the
whirling steam rose in ghostly wreaths from the black waves that plunged
incessantly, speckled with storm-tossed ships.
And then came a wonder. It seemed to those who in Europe watched for
the rising of the star that the world must have ceased its rotation. In a
thousand open spaces of down and upland the people who had fled thither
from the floods and the falling houses and sliding slopes of hill watched for
that rising in vain. Hour followed hour through a terrible suspense, and the
star rose not. Once again men set their eyes upon the old constellations they
had counted lost to them for ever. In England it was hot and clear overhead,
though the ground quivered perpetually, but in the tropics, Sirius and
Capella and Aldebaran showed through a veil of steam. And when at last
the great star rose near ten hours late, the sun rose close upon it, and in the
centre of its white heart was a disc of black.

Over Asia it was the star had begun to fall behind the movement of the
sky, and then suddenly, as it hung over India, its light had been veiled. All
the plain of India from the mouth of the Indus to the mouths of the Ganges
was a shallow waste of shining water that night, out of which rose temples
and palaces, mounds and hills, black with people. Every minaret was a
clustering mass of people, who fell one by one into the turbid waters, as
heat and terror overcame them. The whole land seemed a-wailing, and
suddenly there swept a shadow across that furnace of despair, and a breath
of cold wind, and a gathering of clouds, out of the cooling air. Men looking
up, near blinded, at the star, saw that a black disc was creeping across the
light. It was the moon, coming between the star and the earth. And even as
men cried to God at this respite, out of the East with a strange inexplicable
swiftness sprang the sun. And then star, sun, and moon rushed together
across the heavens.
So it was that presently to the European watchers star and sun rose close
upon each other, drove headlong for a space and then slower, and at last
came to rest, star and sun merged into one glare of flame at the zenith of the
sky. The moon no longer eclipsed the star but was lost to sight in the
brilliance of the sky. And though those who were still alive regarded it for
the most part with that dull stupidity that hunger, fatigue, heat and despair
engender, there were still men who could perceive the meaning of these
signs. Star and earth had been at their nearest, had swung about one another,
and the star had passed. Already it was receding, swifter and swifter, in the
last stage of its headlong journey downward into the sun.
And then the clouds gathered, blotting out the vision of the sky, the
thunder and lightning wove a garment round the world; all over the earth
was such a downpour of rain as men had never before seen, and where the
volcanoes flared red against the cloud canopy there descended torrents of
mud. Everywhere the waters were pouring off the land, leaving mud-silted
ruins, and the earth littered like a storm-worn beach with all that had
floated, and the dead bodies of the men and brutes, its children. For days the
water streamed off the land, sweeping away soil and trees and houses in the
way, and piling huge dykes and scooping out Titanic gullies over the
country-side. Those were the days of darkness that followed the star and the
heat. All through them, and for many weeks and months, the earthquakes
continued.

But the star had passed, and men, hunger-driven and gathering courage
only slowly, might creep back to their ruined cities, buried granaries, and
sodden fields. Such few ships as had escaped the storms of that time came
stunned and shattered and sounding their way cautiously through the new
marks and shoals of once familiar ports. And as the storms subsided men
perceived that everywhere the days were hotter than of yore, and the sun
larger, and the moon, shrunk to a third of its former size, took now
fourscore days between its new and new.
But of the new brotherhood that grew presently among men, of the
saving of laws and books and machines, of the strange change that had
come over Iceland and Greenland and the shores of Baffin's Bay, so that the
sailors coming there presently found them green and gracious, and could
scarce believe their eyes, this story does not tell. Nor of the movement of
mankind, now that the earth was hotter, northward and southward towards
the poles of the earth. It concerns itself only with the coming and the
passing of the star.
The Martian astronomers—for there are astronomers on Mars, although
they are very different beings from men—were naturally profoundly
interested by these things. They saw them from their own standpoint of
course. "Considering the mass and temperature of the missile that was flung
through our solar system into the sun," one wrote, "it is astonishing what a
little damage the earth, which it missed so narrowly, has sustained. All the
familiar continental markings and the masses of the seas remain intact, and
indeed the only difference seems to be a shrinkage of the white
discolouration (supposed to be frozen water) round either pole." Which only
shows how small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem at a distance
of a few million miles.

XXI. — THE MAN WHO COULD WORK
MIRACLES.
A PANTOUM IN PROSE.

It is doubtful whether the gift was innate. For my own part, I think it
came to him suddenly. Indeed, until he was thirty he was a sceptic, and did
not believe in miraculous powers. And here, since it is the most convenient
place, I must mention that he was a little man, and had eyes of a hot brown,
very erect red hair, a moustache with ends that he twisted up, and freckles.
His name was George McWhirter Fotheringay—not the sort of name by any
means to lead to any expectation of miracles—and he was clerk at
Gomshott's. He was greatly addicted to assertive argument. It was while he
was asserting the impossibility of miracles that he had his first intimation of
his extraordinary powers. This particular argument was being held in the
bar of the Long Dragon, and Toddy Beamish was conducting the opposition
by a monotonous but effective "So you say," that drove Mr. Fotheringay to
the very limit of his patience.
There were present, besides these two, a very dusty cyclist, landlord Cox,
and Miss Maybridge, the perfectly respectable and rather portly barmaid of
the Dragon. Miss Maybridge was standing with her back to Mr.
Fotheringay, washing glasses; the others were watching him, more or less
amused by the present ineffectiveness of the assertive method. Goaded by
the Torres Vedras tactics of Mr. Beamish, Mr. Fotheringay determined to
make an unusual rhetorical effort. "Looky here, Mr. Beamish," said Mr.
Fotheringay. "Let us clearly understand what a miracle is. It's something
contrariwise to the course of nature, done by power of will, something what
couldn't happen without being specially willed."
"So you say," said Mr. Beamish, repulsing him.
Mr. Fotheringay appealed to the cyclist, who had hitherto been a silent
auditor, and received his assent—given with a hesitating cough and a glance
at Mr. Beamish. The landlord would express no opinion, and Mr.

Fotheringay, returning to Mr. Beamish, received the unexpected concession
of a qualified assent to his definition of a miracle.
"For instance," said Mr. Fotheringay, greatly encouraged. "Here would be
a miracle. That lamp, in the natural course of nature, couldn't burn like that
upsy-down, could it, Beamish?"
"You say it couldn't," said Beamish.
"And you?" said Fotheringay. "You don't mean to say—eh?"
"No," said Beamish reluctantly. "No, it couldn't."
"Very well," said Mr. Fotheringay. "Then here comes someone, as it
might be me, along here, and stands as it might be here, and says to that
lamp, as I might do, collecting all my will—Turn upsy-down without
breaking, and go on burning steady, and—Hullo!"
It was enough to make anyone say "Hullo!" The impossible, the
incredible, was visible to them all. The lamp hung inverted in the air,
burning quietly with its flame pointing down. It was as solid, as
indisputable as ever a lamp was, the prosaic common lamp of the Long
Dragon bar.
Mr. Fotheringay stood with an extended forefinger and the knitted brows
of one anticipating a catastrophic smash. The cyclist, who was sitting next
the lamp, ducked and jumped across the bar. Everybody jumped, more or
less. Miss Maybridge turned and screamed. For nearly three seconds the
lamp remained still. A faint cry of mental distress came from Mr.
Fotheringay. "I can't keep it up," he said, "any longer." He staggered back,
and the inverted lamp suddenly flared, fell against the corner of the bar,
bounced aside, smashed upon the floor, and went out.
It was lucky it had a metal receiver, or the whole place would have been
in a blaze. Mr. Cox was the first to speak, and his remark, shorn of needless
excrescences, was to the effect that Fotheringay was a fool. Fotheringay
was beyond disputing even so fundamental a proposition as that! He was
astonished beyond measure at the thing that had occurred. The subsequent
conversation threw absolutely no light on the matter so far as Fotheringay
was concerned; the general opinion not only followed Mr. Cox very closely