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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Terror, by Arthur Machen
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Terror
+       A Mystery
+
+Author: Arthur Machen
+
+Release Date: March 20, 2011 [EBook #35617]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TERROR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dave Haren and Marc D'Hooghe at
+http://www.freeliterature.org (From images generously made
+available by the Internet Archive
+
+
+
+
+
+THE TERROR
+
+_A MYSTERY_
+
+BY
+
+ARTHUR MACHEN
+
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE BOWMEN"
+
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+ROBERT M. MCBRIDE & COMPANY
+
+UNION SQUARE, NORTH
+
+1917
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    I _The Coming of the Terror_
+
+   II _Death in the Village_
+
+  III _The Doctor's Theory_
+
+   IV _The Spread of the Terror_
+
+    V _The Incident of the Unknown Tree_
+
+   VI _Mr. Remnant's Z Ray_
+
+  VII _The Case of the Hidden Germans_
+
+ VIII _What Mr. Merritt Found_
+
+   IX _The Light on the Water_
+
+    X _The Child and the Moth_
+
+   XI _At Treff Loyne Farm_
+
+  XII _The Letter of Wrath_
+
+ XIII _The Last Words of Mr. Secretan_
+
+  XIV _The End of the Terror_
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+_The Coming of the Terror_
+
+
+After two years we are turning once more to the morning's news with a
+sense of appetite and glad expectation. There were thrills at the
+beginning of the war; the thrill of horror and of a doom that seemed at
+once incredible and certain; this was when Namur fell and the German
+host swelled like a flood over the French fields, and drew very near to
+the walls of Paris. Then we felt the thrill of exultation when the good
+news came that the awful tide had been turned back, that Paris and the
+world were safe; for awhile at all events.
+
+Then for days we hoped for more news as good as this or better. Has Von
+Kluck been surrounded? Not to-day, but perhaps he will be surrounded
+to-morrow. But the days became weeks, the weeks drew out to months; the
+battle in the West seemed frozen. Now and again things were done that
+seemed hopeful, with promise of events still better. But Neuve Chapelle
+and Loos dwindled into disappointments as their tale was told fully; the
+lines in the West remained, for all practical purposes of victory,
+immobile. Nothing seemed to happen; there was nothing to read save the
+record of operations that were clearly trifling and insignificant.
+People speculated as to the reason of this inaction; the hopeful said
+that Joffre had a plan, that he was "nibbling," others declared that we
+were short of munitions, others again that the new levies were not yet
+ripe for battle. So the months went by, and almost two years of war had
+been completed before the motionless English line began to stir and
+quiver as if it awoke from a long sleep, and began to roll onward,
+overwhelming the enemy.
+
+The secret of the long inaction of the British Armies has been well
+kept. On the one hand it was rigorously protected by the censorship,
+which severe, and sometimes severe to the point of absurdity--"the
+captains and the ... depart," for instance--became in this particular
+matter ferocious. As soon as the real significance of that which was
+happening, or beginning to happen, was perceived by the authorities, an
+underlined circular was issued to the newspaper proprietors of Great
+Britain and Ireland. It warned each proprietor that he might impart the
+contents of this circular to one other person only, such person being
+the responsible editor of his paper, who was to keep the communication
+secret under the severest penalties. The circular forbade any mention of
+certain events that had taken place, that might take place; it forbade
+any kind of allusion to these events or any hint of their existence, or
+of the possibility of their existence, not only in the Press, but in
+any form whatever. The subject was not to be alluded to in conversation,
+it was not to be hinted at, however obscurely, in letters; the very
+existence of the circular, its subject apart, was to be a dead secret.
+
+These measures were successful. A wealthy newspaper proprietor of the
+North, warmed a little at the end of the Throwsters' Feast (which was
+held as usual, it will be remembered), ventured to say to the man next
+to him: "How awful it would be, wouldn't it, if...." His words were
+repeated, as proof, one regrets to say, that it was time for "old
+Arnold" to "pull himself together"; and he was fined a thousand pounds.
+Then, there was the case of an obscure weekly paper published in the
+county town of an agricultural district in Wales. The _Meiros Observer_
+(we will call it) was issued from a stationer's back premises, and
+filled its four pages with accounts of local flower shows, fancy fairs
+at vicarages, reports of parish councils, and rare bathing fatalities.
+It also issued a visitors' list, which has been known to contain six
+names.
+
+This enlightened organ printed a paragraph, which nobody noticed, which
+was very like paragraphs that small country newspapers have long been in
+the habit of printing, which could hardly give so much as a hint to any
+one--to any one, that is, who was not fully instructed in the secret. As
+a matter of fact, this piece of intelligence got into the paper because
+the proprietor, who was also the editor, incautiously left the last
+processes of this particular issue to the staff, who was the
+Lord-High-Every-thing-Else of the establishment; and the staff put in a
+bit of gossip he had heard in the market to fill up two inches on the
+back page. But the result was that the _Meiros Observer_ ceased to
+appear, owing to "untoward circumstances" as the proprietor said; and he
+would say no more. No more, that is, by way of explanation, but a great
+deal more by way of execration of "damned, prying busybodies."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now a censorship that is sufficiently minute and utterly remorseless can
+do amazing things in the way of hiding ... what it wants to hide. Before
+the war, one would have thought otherwise; one would have said that,
+censor or no censor, the fact of the murder at X or the fact of the bank
+robbery at Y would certainly become known; if not through the Press, at
+all events through rumor and the passage of the news from mouth to
+mouth. And this would be true--of England three hundred years ago, and
+of savage tribelands of to-day. But we have grown of late to such a
+reverence for the printed word and such a reliance on it, that the old
+faculty of disseminating news by word of mouth has become atrophied.
+Forbid the Press to mention the fact that Jones has been murdered, and
+it is marvelous how few people will hear of it, and of those who hear
+how few will credit the story that they have heard. You meet a man in
+the train who remarks that he has been told something about a murder in
+Southwark; there is all the difference in the world between the
+impression you receive from such a chance communication and that given
+by half a dozen lines of print with name, and street and date and all
+the facts of the case. People in trains repeat all sorts of tales, many
+of them false; newspapers do not print accounts of murders that have not
+been committed.
+
+Then another consideration that has made for secrecy. I may have seemed
+to say that the old office of rumor no longer exists; I shall be
+reminded of the strange legend of "the Russians" and the mythology of
+the "Angels of Mons." But let me point out, in the first place, that
+both these absurdities depended on the papers for their wide
+dissemination. If there had been no newspapers or magazines Russians and
+Angels would have made but a brief, vague appearance of the most
+shadowy kind--a few would have heard of them, fewer still would have
+believed in them, they would have been gossiped about for a bare week or
+two, and so they would have vanished away.
+
+And, then, again, the very fact of these vain rumors and fantastic tales
+having been so widely believed for a time was fatal to the credit of any
+stray mutterings that may have got abroad. People had been taken in
+twice; they had seen how grave persons, men of credit, had preached and
+lectured about the shining forms that had saved the British Army at
+Mons, or had testified to the trains, packed with gray-coated
+Muscovites, rushing through the land at dead of night: and now there was
+a hint of something more amazing than either of the discredited legends.
+But this time there was no word of confirmation to be found in daily
+paper, or weekly review, or parish magazine, and so the few that heard
+either laughed, or, being serious, went home and jotted down notes for
+essays on "War-time Psychology: Collective Delusions."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I followed neither of these courses. For before the secret circular had
+been issued my curiosity had somehow been aroused by certain paragraphs
+concerning a "Fatal Accident to Well-known Airman." The propeller of the
+airplane had been shattered, apparently by a collision with a flight of
+pigeons; the blades had been broken and the machine had fallen like lead
+to the earth. And soon after I had seen this account, I heard of some
+very odd circumstances relating to an explosion in a great munition
+factory in the Midlands. I thought I saw the possibility of a connection
+between two very different events.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It has been pointed out to me by friends who have been good enough to
+read this record, that certain phrases I have used may give the
+impression that I ascribe all the delays of the war on the Western front
+to the extraordinary circumstances which occasioned the issue of the
+Secret Circular. Of course this is not the case, there were many reasons
+for the immobility of our lines from October 1914 to July 1916. These
+causes have been evident enough and have been openly discussed and
+deplored. But behind them was something of infinitely greater moment. We
+lacked men, but men were pouring into the new army; we were short of
+shells, but when the shortage was proclaimed the nation set itself to
+mend this matter with all its energy. We could undertake to supply the
+defects of our army both in men and munitions--_if_ the new and
+incredible danger could be overcome. It has been overcome; rather,
+perhaps, it has ceased to exist; and the secret may now be told.
+
+I have said my attention was attracted by an account of the death of a
+well-known airman. I have not the habit of preserving cuttings, I am
+sorry to say, so that I cannot be precise as to the date of this event.
+To the best of my belief it was either towards the end of May or the
+beginning of June 1915. The newspaper paragraph announcing the death of
+Flight-Lieutenant Western-Reynolds was brief enough; accidents, and
+fatal accidents, to the men who are storming the air for us are,
+unfortunately, by no means so rare as to demand an elaborated notice.
+But the manner in which Western-Reynolds met his death struck me as
+extraordinary, inasmuch as it revealed a new danger in the element that
+we have lately conquered. He was brought down, as I said, by a flight of
+birds; of pigeons, as appeared by what was found on the bloodstained and
+shattered blades of the propeller. An eye-witness of the accident, a
+fellow-officer, described how Western-Reynolds set out from the
+aerodrome on a fine afternoon, there being hardly any wind. He was
+going to France; he had made the journey to and fro half a dozen times
+or more, and felt perfectly secure and at ease.
+
+"'Wester' rose to a great height at once, and we could scarcely see the
+machine. I was turning to go when one of the fellows called out, 'I say!
+What's this?' He pointed up, and we saw what looked like a black cloud
+coming from the south at a tremendous rate. I saw at once it wasn't a
+cloud; it came with a swirl and a rush quite different from any cloud
+I've ever seen. But for a second I couldn't make out exactly what it
+was. It altered its shape and turned into a great crescent, and wheeled
+and veered about as if it was looking for something. The man who had
+called out had got his glasses, and was staring for all he was worth.
+Then he shouted that it was a tremendous flight of birds, 'thousands of
+them.' They went on wheeling and beating about high up in the air, and
+we were watching them, thinking it was interesting, but not supposing
+that they would make any difference to 'Wester,' who was just about out
+of sight. His machine was just a speck. Then the two arms of the
+crescent drew in as quick as lightning, and these thousands of birds
+shot in a solid mass right up there across the sky, and flew away
+somewhere about nor'-nor'-by-west. Then Henley, the man with the
+glasses, called out, 'He's down!' and started running, and I went after
+him. We got a car and as we were going along Henley told me that he'd
+seen the machine drop dead, as if it came out of that cloud of birds. He
+thought then that they must have mucked up the propeller somehow. That
+turned out to be the case. We found the propeller blades all broken and
+covered with blood and pigeon feathers, and carcasses of the birds had
+got wedged in between the blades, and were sticking to them."
+
+This was the story that the young airman told one evening in a small
+company. He did not speak "in confidence," so I have no hesitation in
+reproducing what he said. Naturally, I did not take a verbatim note of
+his conversation, but I have something of a knack of remembering talk
+that interests me, and I think my reproduction is very near to the tale
+that I heard. And let it be noted that the flying man told his story
+without any sense or indication of a sense that the incredible, or all
+but the incredible, had happened. So far as he knew, he said, it was the
+first accident of the kind. Airmen in France had been bothered once or
+twice by birds--he thought they were eagles--flying viciously at them,
+but poor old "Wester" had been the first man to come up against a flight
+of some thousands of pigeons.
+
+"And perhaps I shall be the next," he added, "but why look for trouble?
+Anyhow, I'm going to see _Toodle-oo_ to-morrow afternoon."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, I heard the story, as one hears all the varied marvels and
+terrors of the air; as one heard some years ago of "air pockets,"
+strange gulfs or voids in the atmosphere into which airmen fell with
+great peril; or as one heard of the experience of the airman who flew
+over the Cumberland mountains in the burning summer of 1911, and as he
+swam far above the heights was suddenly and vehemently blown upwards,
+the hot air from the rocks striking his plane as if it had been a blast
+from a furnace chimney. We have just begun to navigate a strange region;
+we must expect to encounter strange adventures, strange perils. And here
+a new chapter in the chronicles of these perils and adventures had been
+opened by the death of Western-Reynolds; and no doubt invention and
+contrivance would presently hit on some way of countering the new
+danger.
+
+It was, I think, about a week or ten days after the airman's death that
+my business called me to a northern town, the name of which, perhaps,
+had better remain unknown. My mission was to inquire into certain
+charges of extravagance which had been laid against the working people,
+that is, the munition workers of this especial town. It was said that
+the men who used to earn £2 10s. a week were now getting from seven to
+eight pounds, that "bits of girls" were being paid two pounds instead of
+seven or eight shillings, and that, in consequence, there was an orgy of
+foolish extravagance. The girls, I was told, were eating chocolates at
+four, five, and six shillings a pound, the women were ordering
+thirty-pound pianos which they couldn't play, and the men bought gold
+chains at ten and twenty guineas apiece.
+
+I dived into the town in question and found, as usual, that there was a
+mixture of truth and exaggeration in the stories that I had heard.
+Gramophones, for example: they cannot be called in strictness
+necessaries, but they were undoubtedly finding a ready sale, even in the
+more expensive brands. And I thought that there were a great many very
+spick and span perambulators to be seen on the pavement; smart
+perambulators, painted in tender shades of color and expensively fitted.
+
+"And how can you be surprised if people will have a bit of a fling?" a
+worker said to me. "We're seeing money for the first time in our lives,
+and it's bright. And we work hard for it, and we risk our lives to get
+it. You've heard of explosion yonder?"
+
+He mentioned certain works on the outskirts of the town. Of course,
+neither the name of the works nor of the town had been printed; there
+had been a brief notice of "Explosion at Munition Works in the Northern
+District: Many Fatalities." The working man told me about it, and added
+some dreadful details.
+
+"They wouldn't let their folks see bodies; screwed them up in coffins as
+they found them in shop. The gas had done it."
+
+"Turned their faces black, you mean?"
+
+"Nay. They were all as if they had been bitten to pieces."
+
+This was a strange gas.
+
+I asked the man in the northern town all sorts of questions about the
+extraordinary explosion of which he had spoken to me. But he had very
+little more to say. As I have noted already, secrets that may not be
+printed are often deeply kept; last summer there were very few people
+outside high official circles who knew anything about the "Tanks," of
+which we have all been talking lately, though these strange instruments
+of war were being exercised and tested in a park not far from London. So
+the man who told me of the explosion in the munition factory was most
+likely genuine in his profession that he knew nothing more of the
+disaster. I found out that he was a smelter employed at a furnace on the
+other side of the town to the ruined factory; he didn't know even what
+they had been making there; some very dangerous high explosive, he
+supposed. His information was really nothing more than a bit of
+gruesome gossip, which he had heard probably at third or fourth or fifth
+hand. The horrible detail of faces "as if they had been bitten to
+pieces" had made its violent impression on him, that was all.
+
+I gave him up and took a tram to the district of the disaster; a sort of
+industrial suburb, five miles from the center of the town. When I asked
+for the factory, I was told that it was no good my going to it as there
+was nobody there. But I found it; a raw and hideous shed with a walled
+yard about it, and a shut gate. I looked for signs of destruction, but
+there was nothing. The roof was quite undamaged; and again it struck me
+that this had been a strange accident. There had been an explosion of
+sufficient violence to kill workpeople in the building, but the building
+itself showed no wounds or scars.
+
+A man came out of the gate and locked it behind him. I began to ask him
+some sort of question, or rather, I began to "open" for a question with
+"A terrible business here, they tell me," or some such phrase of
+convention. I got no farther. The man asked me if I saw a policeman
+walking down the street. I said I did, and I was given the choice of
+getting about my business forthwith or of being instantly given in
+charge as a spy. "Th'ast better be gone and quick about it," was, I
+think, his final advice, and I took it.
+
+Well, I had come literally up against a brick wall. Thinking the problem
+over, I could only suppose that the smelter or his informant had twisted
+the phrases of the story. The smelter had said the dead men's faces were
+"bitten to pieces"; this might be an unconscious perversion of "eaten
+away." That phrase might describe well enough the effect of strong
+acids, and, for all I knew of the processes of munition-making, such
+acids might be used and might explode with horrible results in some
+perilous stage of their admixture.
+
+It was a day or two later that the accident to the airman,
+Western-Reynolds, came into my mind. For one of those instants which are
+far shorter than any measure of time there flashed out the possibility
+of a link between the two disasters. But here was a wild impossibility,
+and I drove it away. And yet I think that the thought, mad as it seemed,
+never left me; it was the secret light that at last guided me through a
+somber grove of enigmas.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was about this time, so far as the date can be fixed, that a whole
+district, one might say a whole county, was visited by a series of
+extraordinary and terrible calamities, which were the more terrible
+inasmuch as they continued for some time to be inscrutable mysteries. It
+is, indeed, doubtful whether these awful events do not still remain
+mysteries to many of those concerned; for before the inhabitants of
+this part of the country had time to join one link of evidence to
+another the circular was issued, and thenceforth no one knew how to
+distinguish undoubted fact from wild and extravagant surmise.
+
+The district in question is in the far west of Wales; I shall call it,
+for convenience, Meirion. In it there is one seaside town of some repute
+with holiday-makers for five or six weeks in the summer, and dotted
+about the county there are three or four small old towns that seem
+drooping in a slow decay, sleepy and gray with age and forgetfulness.
+They remind me of what I have read of towns in the west of Ireland.
+Grass grows between the uneven stones of the pavements, the signs above
+the shop windows decline, half the letters of these signs are missing,
+here and there a house has been pulled down, or has been allowed to
+slide into ruin, and wild greenery springs up through the fallen stones,
+and there is silence in all the streets. And, it is to be noted, these
+are not places that were once magnificent. The Celts have never had the
+art of building, and so far as I can see, such towns as Towy and Merthyr
+Tegveth and Meiros must have been always much as they are now, clusters
+of poorish, meanly-built houses, ill-kept and down at heel.
+
+And these few towns are thinly scattered over a wild country where north
+is divided from south by a wilder mountain range. One of these places is
+sixteen miles from any station; the others are doubtfully and deviously
+connected by single-line railways served by rare trains that pause and
+stagger and hesitate on their slow journey up mountain passes, or stop
+for half an hour or more at lonely sheds called stations, situated in
+the midst of desolate marshes. A few years ago I traveled with an
+Irishman on one of these queer lines, and he looked to right and saw the
+bog with its yellow and blue grasses and stagnant pools, and he looked
+to left and saw a ragged hillside, set with gray stone walls. "I can
+hardly believe," he said, "that I'm not still in the wilds of Ireland."
+
+Here, then, one sees a wild and divided and scattered region a land of
+outland hills and secret and hidden valleys. I know white farms on this
+coast which must be separate by two hours of hard, rough walking from
+any other habitation, which are invisible from any other house. And
+inland, again, the farms are often ringed about by thick groves of ash,
+planted by men of old days to shelter their roof-trees from rude winds
+of the mountain and stormy winds of the sea; so that these places, too,
+are hidden away, to be surmised only by the wood smoke that rises from
+the green surrounding leaves. A Londoner must see them to believe in
+them; and even then he can scarcely credit their utter isolation.
+
+Such, then in the main is Meirion, and on this land in the early summer
+of last year terror descended--a terror without shape, such as no man
+there had ever known.
+
+It began with the tale of a little child who wandered out into the lanes
+to pick flowers one sunny afternoon, and never came back to the cottage
+on the hill.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+_Death in the Village_
+
+
+The child who was lost came from a lonely cottage that stands on the
+slope of a steep hillside called the Allt, or the height. The land about
+it is wild and ragged; here the growth of gorse and bracken, here a
+marshy hollow of reeds and rushes, marking the course of the stream from
+some hidden well, here thickets of dense and tangled undergrowth, the
+outposts of the wood. Down through this broken and uneven ground a path
+leads to the lane at the bottom of the valley; then the land rises again
+and swells up to the cliffs over the sea, about a quarter of a mile
+away. The little girl, Gertrude Morgan, asked her mother if she might go
+down to the lane and pick the purple flowers--these were orchids--that
+grew there, and her mother gave her leave, telling her she must be sure
+to be back by tea-time, as there was apple-tart for tea.
+
+She never came back. It was supposed that she must have crossed the road
+and gone to the cliff's edge, possibly in order to pick the sea-pinks
+that were then in full blossom. She must have slipped, they said, and
+fallen into the sea, two hundred feet below. And, it may be said at
+once, that there was no doubt some truth in this conjecture, though it
+stopped very far short of the whole truth. The child's body must have
+been carried out by the tide, for it was never found.
+
+The conjecture of a false step or of a fatal slide on the slippery turf
+that slopes down to the rocks was accepted as being the only explanation
+possible. People thought the accident a strange one because, as a rule,
+country children living by the cliffs and the sea become wary at an
+early age, and Gertrude Morgan was almost ten years old. Still, as the
+neighbors said, "that's how it must have happened, and it's a great
+pity, to be sure." But this would not do when in a week's time a strong
+young laborer failed to come to his cottage after the day's work. His
+body was found on the rocks six or seven miles from the cliffs where the
+child was supposed to have fallen; he was going home by a path that he
+had used every night of his life for eight or nine years, that he used
+of dark nights in perfect security, knowing every inch of it. The police
+asked if he drank, but he was a teetotaler; if he were subject to fits,
+but he wasn't. And he was not murdered for his wealth, since
+agricultural laborers are not wealthy. It was only possible again to
+talk of slippery turf and a false step; but people began to be
+frightened. Then a woman was found with her neck broken at the bottom of
+a disused quarry near Llanfihangel, in the middle of the county. The
+"false step" theory was eliminated here, for the quarry was guarded with
+a natural hedge of gorse bushes. One would have to struggle and fight
+through sharp thorns to destruction in such a place as this; and indeed
+the gorse bushes were broken as if some one had rushed furiously through
+them, just above the place where the woman's body was found. And this
+was strange: there was a dead sheep lying beside her in the pit, as if
+the woman and the sheep together had been chased over the brim of the
+quarry. But chased by whom, or by what? And then there was a new form of
+terror.
+
+This was in the region of the marshes under the mountain. A man and his
+son, a lad of fourteen or fifteen, set out early one morning to work and
+never reached the farm where they were bound. Their way skirted the
+marsh, but it was broad, firm and well metalled, and it had been raised
+about two feet above the bog. But when search was made in the evening of
+the same day Phillips and his son were found dead in the marsh, covered
+with black slime and pondweed. And they lay some ten yards from the
+path, which, it would seem, they must have left deliberately. It was
+useless of course, to look for tracks in the black ooze, for if one
+threw a big stone into it a few seconds removed all marks of the
+disturbance. The men who found the two bodies beat about the verges and
+purlieus of the marsh in hope of finding some trace of the murderers;
+they went to and fro over the rising ground where the black cattle were
+grazing, they searched the alder thickets by the brook; but they
+discovered nothing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Most horrible of all these horrors, perhaps, was the affair of the
+Highway, a lonely and unfrequented by-road that winds for many miles on
+high and lonely land. Here, a mile from any other dwelling, stands a
+cottage on the edge of a dark wood. It was inhabited by a laborer named
+Williams, his wife, and their three children. One hot summer's evening,
+a man who had been doing a day's gardening at a rectory three or four
+miles away, passed the cottage, and stopped for a few minutes to chat
+with Williams, the laborer, who was pottering about his garden, while
+the children were playing on the path by the door. The two talked of
+their neighbors and of the potatoes till Mrs. Williams appeared at the
+doorway and said supper was ready, and Williams turned to go into the
+house. This was about eight o'clock, and in the ordinary course the
+family would have their supper and be in bed by nine, or by half-past
+nine at latest. At ten o'clock that night the local doctor was driving
+home along the Highway. His horse shied violently and then stopped dead
+just opposite the gate to the cottage. The doctor got down, frightened
+at what he saw; and there on the roadway lay Williams, his wife, and the
+three children, stone dead, all of them. Their skulls were battered in
+as if by some heavy iron instrument; their faces were beaten into a
+pulp.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+_The Doctors Theory_
+
+
+It is not easy to make any picture of the horror that lay dark on the
+hearts of the people of Meirion. It was no longer possible to believe or
+to pretend to believe that these men and women and children had met
+their deaths through strange accidents. The little girl and the young
+laborer might have slipped and fallen over the cliffs, but the woman who
+lay dead with the dead sheep at the bottom of the quarry, the two men
+who had been lured into the ooze of the marsh, the family who were found
+murdered on the Highway before their own cottage door; in these cases
+there could be no room for the supposition of accident. It seemed as if
+it were impossible to frame any conjecture or outline of a conjecture
+that would account for these hideous and, as it seemed, utterly
+purposeless crimes. For a time people said that there must be a madman
+at large, a sort of country variant of Jack the Ripper, some horrible
+pervert who was possessed by the passion of death, who prowled darkling
+about that lonely land, hiding in woods and in wild places, always
+watching and seeking for the victims of his desire.
+
+Indeed, Dr. Lewis, who found poor Williams, his wife and children
+miserably slaughtered on the Highway, was convinced at first that the
+presence of a concealed madman in the countryside offered the only
+possible solution to the difficulty.
+
+"I felt sure," he said to me afterwards, "that the Williams's had been
+killed by a homicidal maniac. It was the nature of the poor creatures'
+injuries that convinced me that this was the case. Some years ago
+thirty-seven or thirty-eight years ago as a matter of fact--I had
+something to do with a case which on the face of it had a strong
+likeness to the Highway murder. At that time I had a practice at Usk, in
+Monmouthshire. A whole family living in a cottage by the roadside were
+murdered one evening; it was called, I think, the Llangibby murder; the
+cottage was near the village of that name. The murderer was caught in
+Newport; he was a Spanish sailor, named Garcia, and it appeared that he
+had killed father, mother, and the three children for the sake of the
+brass works of an old Dutch clock, which were found on him when he was
+arrested.
+
+"Garcia had been serving a month's imprisonment in Usk Jail for some
+small theft, and on his release he set out to walk to Newport, nine or
+ten miles away; no doubt to get another ship. He passed the cottage and
+saw the man working in his garden. Garcia stabbed him with his sailor's
+knife. The wife rushed out; he stabbed her. Then he went into the
+cottage and stabbed the three children, tried to set the place on fire,
+and made off with the clockworks. That looked like the deed of a madman,
+but Garcia wasn't mad--they hanged him, I may say--he was merely a man
+of a very low type, a degenerate who hadn't the slightest value for
+human life. I am not sure, but I think he came from one of the Spanish
+islands, where the people are said to be degenerates, very likely from
+too much inter-breeding.
+
+"But my point is that Garcia stabbed to kill and did kill, with one blow
+in each case. There was no senseless hacking and slashing. Now those
+poor people on the Highway had their heads smashed to pieces by what
+must have been a storm of blows. Any one of them would have been fatal,
+but the murderer must have gone on raining blows with his iron hammer on
+people who were already stone dead. And _that_ sort of thing is the work
+of a madman, and nothing but a madman. That's how I argued the matter
+out to myself just after the event.
+
+"I was utterly wrong, monstrously wrong. But who could have suspected
+the truth?"
+
+Thus Dr. Lewis, and I quote him, or the substance of him, as
+representative of most of the educated opinion of the district at the
+beginnings of the terror. People seized on this theory largely because
+it offered at least the comfort of an explanation, and any explanation,
+even the poorest, is better than an intolerable and terrible mystery.
+Besides, Dr. Lewis's theory was plausible; it explained the lack of
+purpose that seemed to characterize the murders. And yet--there were
+difficulties even from the first. It was hardly possible that a strange
+madman should be able to keep hidden in a countryside where any stranger
+is instantly noted and noticed; sooner or later he would be seen as he
+prowled along the lanes or across the wild places. Indeed, a drunken,
+cheerful, and altogether harmless tramp was arrested by a farmer and his
+man in the fact and act of sleeping off beer under a hedge; but the
+vagrant was able to prove complete and undoubted alibis, and was soon
+allowed to go on his wandering way.
+
+Then another theory, or rather a variant of Dr. Lewis's theory, was
+started. This was to the effect that the person responsible for the
+outrages was, indeed, a madman; but a madman only at intervals. It was
+one of the members of the Porth Club, a certain Mr. Remnant, who was
+supposed to have originated this more subtle explanation. Mr. Remnant
+was a middle-aged man, who, having nothing particular to do, read a
+great many books by way of conquering the hours. He talked to the
+club--doctors, retired colonels, parsons, lawyers--about "personality,"
+quoted various psychological textbooks in support of his contention that
+personality was sometimes fluid and unstable, went back to "Dr. Jekyll
+and Mr. Hyde" as good evidence of this proposition, and laid stress on
+Dr. Jekyll's speculation that the human soul, so far from being one and
+indivisible, might, possibly turn out to be a mere polity, a state in
+which dwelt many strange and incongruous citizens, whose characters were
+not merely unknown but altogether unsurmised by that form of
+consciousness which so rashly assumed that it was not only the president
+of the republic but also its sole citizen.
+
+"The long and the short of it is," Mr. Remnant concluded, "that any one
+of us may be the murderer, though he hasn't the faintest notion of the
+fact. Take Llewelyn there."
+
+Mr. Payne Llewelyn was an elderly lawyer, a rural Tulkinghorn. He was
+the hereditary solicitor to the Morgans of Pentwyn. This does not sound
+anything tremendous to the Saxons of London; but the style is far more
+than noble to the Celts of West Wales; it is immemorial; Teilo Sant was
+of the collaterals of the first known chief of the race. And Mr. Payne
+Llewelyn did his best to look like the legal adviser of this ancient
+house. He was weighty, he was cautious, he was sound, he was secure. I
+have compared him to Mr. Tulkinghorn of Lincoln's Inn Fields; but Mr.
+Llewelyn would most certainly never have dreamed of employing his
+leisure in peering into the cupboards where the family skeletons were
+hidden. Supposing such cupboards to have existed, Mr. Payne Llewelyn
+would have risked large out-of-pocket expenses to furnish them with
+double, triple, impregnable locks. He was a new man, an _advena_,
+certainly; for he was partly of the Conquest, being descended on one
+side from Sir Payne Turberville; but he meant to stand by the old stock.
+
+"Take Llewelyn now," said Mr. Remnant. "Look here, Llewelyn, can you
+produce evidence to show where you were on the night those people were
+murdered on the Highway? I thought not."
+
+Mr. Llewelyn, an elderly man, as I have said, hesitated before speaking.
+
+"I thought not," Remnant went on. "Now I say that it is perfectly
+possible that Llewelyn may be dealing death throughout Meirion, although
+in his present personality he may not have the faintest suspicion that
+there is another Llewelyn within him, a Llewelyn who follows murder as a
+fine art."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Payne Llewelyn did not at all relish Mr. Remnant's suggestion that
+he might well be a secret murderer, ravening for blood, remorseless as a
+wild beast. He thought the phrase about his following murder as a fine
+art was both nonsensical and in the worst taste, and his opinion was not
+changed when Remnant pointed out that it was used by De Quincey in the
+title of one of his most famous essays.
+
+"If you had allowed me to speak," he said with some coldness of manner,
+"I would have told you that on Tuesday last, the night on which those
+unfortunate people were murdered on the Highway I was staying at the
+Angel Hotel, Cardiff. I had business in Cardiff, and I was detained
+till Wednesday afternoon."
+
+Having given this satisfactory alibi, Mr. Payne Llewelyn left the club,
+and did not go near it for the rest of the week.
+
+Remnant explained to those who stayed in the smoking room that, of
+course, he had merely used Mr. Llewelyn as a concrete example of his
+theory, which, he persisted, had the support of a considerable body of
+evidence.
+
+"There are several cases of double personality on record," he declared.
+"And I say again that it is quite possible that these murders may have
+been committed by one of us in his secondary personality. Why, I may be
+the murderer in my Remnant B. state, though Remnant A. knows nothing
+whatever about it, and is perfectly convinced that he could not kill a
+fowl, much less a whole family. Isn't it so, Lewis?"
+
+Dr. Lewis said it was so, in theory, but he thought not in fact.
+
+"Most of the cases of double or multiple personality that have been
+investigated," he said, "have been in connection with the very dubious
+experiments of hypnotism, or the still more dubious experiments of
+spiritualism. All that sort of thing, in my opinion, is like tinkering
+with the works of a clock--amateur tinkering, I mean. You fumble about
+with the wheels and cogs and bits of mechanism that you don't really
+know anything about; and then you find your clock going backwards or
+striking 240 at tea-time. And I believe it's just the same thing with
+these psychical research experiments; the secondary personality is very
+likely the result of the tinkering and fumbling with a very delicate
+apparatus that we know nothing about. Mind, I can't say that it's
+impossible for one of us to be the Highway murderer in his B. state, as
+Remnant puts it. But I think it's extremely improbable. Probability is
+the guide of life, you know, Remnant," said Dr. Lewis, smiling at that
+gentleman, as if to say that he also had done a little reading in his
+day. "And it follows" therefore, that improbability is also the guide of
+life. When you get a very high degree of probability, that is, you are
+justified in taking it as a certainty; and on the other hand, if a
+supposition is highly improbable, you are justified in treating it as an
+impossible one. That is, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a
+thousand."
+
+"How about the thousandth case?" said Remnant. "Supposing these
+extraordinary crimes constitute the thousandth case?"
+
+The doctor smiled and shrugged his shoulders, being tired of the
+subject. But for some little time highly respectable members of Porth
+society would look suspiciously at one another wondering whether, after
+all, there mightn't be "something in it." However, both Mr. Remnant's
+somewhat crazy theory and Dr. Lewis's plausible theory became untenable
+when two more victims of an awful and mysterious death were offered up
+in, sacrifice, for a man was found dead in the Llanfihangel quarry,
+where the woman had been discovered. And on the same day a girl of
+fifteen was found broken on the jagged rocks under the cliffs near
+Porth. Now, it appeared that these two deaths must have occurred at
+about the same time, within an hour of one another, certainly; and the
+distance between the quarry and the cliffs by Black Rock is certainly
+twenty miles.
+
+"A motor could do it," one man said.
+
+But it was pointed out that there was no high road between the two
+places; indeed, it might be said that there was no road at all between
+them. There was a network of deep, narrow, and tortuous lands that
+wandered into one another at all manner of queer angles for, say,
+seventeen miles; this in the middle, as it were, between Black Rock and
+the quarry at Llanfihangel. But to get to the high land of the cliffs
+one had to take a path that went through two miles of fields; and the
+quarry lay a mile away from the nearest by-road in the midst of gorse
+and bracken and broken land. And, finally, there was no track of
+motor-car or motor-bicycle in the lanes which must have been followed to
+pass from one place to the other.
+
+"What about an airplane, then?" said the man of the motor-car theory.
+Well, there was certainly an aerodrome not far from one of the two
+places of death; but somehow, nobody believed that the Flying Corps
+harbored a homicidal maniac. It seemed clear, therefore, that there must
+be more than one person concerned in the terror of Meirion. And Dr.
+Lewis himself abandoned his own theory.
+
+"As I said to Remnant at the Club," he remarked, "improbability is the
+guide of life. I can't believe that there are a pack of madmen or even
+two madmen at large in the country. I give it up."
+
+And now a fresh circumstance or set of circumstances became manifest to
+confound judgment and to awaken new and wild surmises. For at about
+this time people realized that none of the dreadful events that were
+happening all about them was so much as mentioned in the Press. I have
+already spoken of the fate of the _Meiros Observer._ This paper was
+suppressed by the authorities because it had inserted a brief paragraph
+about some person who had been "found dead under mysterious
+circumstances"; I think that paragraph referred to the first death of
+Llanfihangel quarry. Thenceforth, horror followed on horror, but no word
+was printed in any of the local journals. The curious went to the
+newspaper offices--there were two left in the county--but found nothing
+save a firm refusal to discuss the matter. And the Cardiff papers were
+drawn and found blank; and the London Press was apparently ignorant of
+the fact that crimes that had no parallel were terrorizing a whole
+countryside. Everybody wondered what could have happened, what was
+happening; and then it was whispered that the coroner would allow no
+inquiry to be made as to these deaths of darkness.
+
+"In consequence of instructions received from the Home Office," one
+coroner was understood to have said, "I have to tell the jury that their
+business will be to hear the medical evidence and to bring in a verdict
+immediately in accordance with that evidence. I shall disallow all
+questions."
+
+One jury protested. The foreman refused to bring in any verdict at all.
+
+"Very good," said the coroner. "Then I beg to inform you, Mr. Foreman
+and gentlemen of the jury, that under the Defense of the Realm Act, I
+have power to supersede your functions, and to enter a verdict according
+to the evidence which has been laid before the Court as if it had been
+the verdict of you all."
+
+The foreman and jury collapsed and accepted what they could not avoid.
+But the rumors that got abroad of all this, added to the known fact
+that the terror was ignored in the Press, no doubt by official command,
+increased the panic that was now; arising, and gave it a new direction.
+Clearly, people reasoned, these Government restrictions and prohibitions
+could only refer to the war, to some great danger in connection with the
+war. And that being so, it followed that the outrages which must be kept
+so secret were the work of the enemy, that is of concealed German
+agents.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+_The Spread of the Terror_
+
+
+It is time, I think, for me to make one point clear. I began this
+history with certain references to an extraordinary accident to an
+airman whose machine fell to the ground after collision with a huge
+flock of pigeons; and then to an explosion in a northern munition
+factory, an explosion, as I noted, of a very singular kind. Then I
+deserted the neighborhood of London, and the northern district, and
+dwelt on a mysterious and terrible series of events which occurred in
+the summer of 1915 in a Welsh county, which I have named, for
+convenience, Meirion.
+
+Well, let it be understood at once that all this detail that I have
+given about the occurrences in Meirion does not imply that the county
+in the far west was alone or especially afflicted by the terror that was
+over the land. They tell me that in the villages about Dartmoor the
+stout Devonshire hearts sank as men's hearts used to sink in the time of
+plague and pestilence. There was horror, too, about the Norfolk Broads,
+and far up by Perth no one would venture on the path that leads by Scone
+to the wooded heights above the Tay. And in the industrial districts: I
+met a man by chance one day in an odd London corner who spoke with
+horror of what a friend had told him.
+
+"'Ask no questions, Ned,' he says to me, 'but I tell yow a' was in
+Bairnigan t'other day, and a' met a pal who'd seen three hundred coffins
+going out of a works not far from there.'"
+
+And then the ship that hovered outside the mouth of the Thames with all
+sails set and beat to and fro in the wind, and never answered any hail,
+and showed no light! The forts shot at her and brought down one of the
+masts, but she went suddenly about with a change of wind under what sail
+still stood, and then veered down Channel, and drove ashore at last on
+the sandbanks and pinewoods of Arcachon, and not a man alive on her, but
+only rattling heaps of bones! That last voyage of the _Semiramis_ would
+be something horribly worth telling; but I only heard it at a distance
+as a yarn, and only believed it because it squared with other things
+that I knew for certain.
+
+This, then, is my point; I have written of the terror as it fell on
+Meirion, simply because I have had opportunities of getting close there
+to what really happened. Third or fourth or fifth hand in the other
+places; but round about Porth and Merthyr Tegveth I have spoken with
+people who have seen the tracks of the terror with their own eyes.
+
+Well, I have said that the people of that far western county realized,
+not only that death was abroad in their quiet lanes and on their
+peaceful hills, but that for some reason it was to be kept all secret.
+Newspapers might not print any news of it, the very juries summoned to
+investigate it were allowed to investigate nothing. And so they
+concluded that this veil of secrecy must somehow be connected with the
+war; and from this position it was not a long way to a further
+inference: that the murderers of innocent men and women and children
+were either Germans or agents of Germany. It would be just like the
+Huns, everybody agreed, to think out such a devilish scheme as this; and
+they always thought out their schemes beforehand. They hoped to seize
+Paris in a few weeks, but when they were beaten on the Marne they had
+their trenches on the Aisne ready to fall back on: it had all been
+prepared years before the war. And so, no doubt, they had devised this
+terrible plan against England in case they could not beat us in open
+fight: there were people ready, very likely, all over the country, who
+were prepared to murder and destroy everywhere as soon as they got the
+word. In this way the Germans intended to sow terror throughout England
+and fill our hearts with panic and dismay, hoping so to weaken their
+enemy at home that he would lose all heart over the war abroad. It was
+the Zeppelin notion, in another form; they were committing these
+horrible and mysterious outrages thinking that we should be frightened
+out of our wits.
+
+It all seemed plausible enough; Germany had by this time perpetrated so
+many horrors and had so excelled in devilish ingenuities that no
+abomination seemed too abominable to be probable, or too ingeniously
+wicked to be beyond the tortuous malice of the Hun. But then came the
+questions as to who the agents of this terrible design were, as to where
+they lived, as to how they contrived to move unseen from field to field,
+from lane to lane. All sorts of fantastic attempts were made to answer
+these questions; but it was felt that they remained unanswered. Some
+suggested that the murderers landed from submarines, or flew from hiding
+places on the West Coast of Ireland, coming and going by night; but
+there were seen to be flagrant impossibilities in both these
+suggestions. Everybody agreed that the evil work was no doubt the work
+of Germany; but nobody could begin to guess how it was done. Somebody at
+the Club asked Remnant for his theory.
+
+"My theory," said that ingenious person, "is that human progress is
+simply a long march from one inconceivable to another. Look at that
+airship of ours that came over Porth yesterday: ten years ago that would
+have been an inconceivable sight. Take the steam engine, stake printing,
+take the theory of gravitation: they were all inconceivable till
+somebody thought of them. So it is, no doubt, with this infernal dodgery
+that we're talking about: the Huns have found it out, and we haven't;
+and there you are. We can't conceive how these poor people have been
+murdered, because the method's inconceivable to us."
+
+The club listened with some awe to this high argument. After Remnant had
+gone, one member said:
+
+"Wonderful man, that." "Yes," said Dr. Lewis. "He was asked whether he
+knew something. And his reply really amounted to 'No, I don't,' But I
+have never heard it better put."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was, I suppose, at about this time when the people were puzzling
+their heads as to the secret methods used by the Germans or their agents
+to accomplish their crimes that a very singular circumstance became
+known to a few of the Porth people. It related to the murder of the
+Williams family on the Highway in front of their cottage door. I do not
+know that I have made it plain that the old Roman road called the
+Highway follows the course of a long, steep hill that goes steadily
+westward till it slants down and droops towards the sea. On either side
+of the road the ground falls away, here into deep shadowy woods, here to
+high pastures, now and again into a field of corn, but for the most part
+into the wild and broken land that is characteristic of Arfon. The
+fields are long and narrow, stretching up the steep hillside; they fall
+into sudden dips and hollows, a well springs up in the midst of one and
+a grove of ash and thorn bends over it, shading it; and beneath it the
+ground is thick with reeds and rushes. And then may come on either side
+of such a field territories glistening with the deep growth of bracken,
+and rough with gorse and rugged with thickets of blackthorn, green
+lichen hanging strangely from the branches; such are the lands on either
+side of the Highway.
+
+Now on the lower slopes of it, beneath the Williams's cottage, some
+three or four fields down the hill, there is a military camp. The place
+has been used as a camp for many years, and lately the site has been
+extended and huts have been erected. But a considerable number of the
+men were under canvas here in the summer of 1915.
+
+On the night of the Highway murder this camp, as it appeared afterwards,
+was the scene of the extraordinary panic of the horses.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A good many men in the camp were asleep in their tents soon after 9:30,
+when the Last Post was sounded. They woke up in panic. There was a
+thundering sound on the steep hillside above them, and down upon the
+tents came half a dozen horses, mad with fright, trampling the canvas,
+trampling the men, bruising dozens of them and killing two.
+
+Everything was in wild confusion, men groaning and screaming in the
+darkness, struggling with the canvas and the twisted ropes, shouting
+out, some of them, raw lads enough, that the Germans had landed, others
+wiping the blood from their eyes, a few, roused suddenly from heavy
+sleep, hitting out at one another, officers coming up at the double
+roaring out orders to the sergeants, a party of soldiers who were just
+returning to camp from the village seized with fright at what they could
+scarcely see or distinguish, at the wildness of the shouting and cursing
+and groaning that they could not understand, bolting out of the camp
+again and racing for their lives back to the village: everything in the
+maddest confusion of wild disorder.
+
+Some of the men had seen the horses galloping down the hill as if terror
+itself was driving them. They scattered off into the darkness, and
+somehow or another found their way back in the night to their pasture
+above the camp. They were grazing there peacefully in the morning, and
+the only sign of the panic of the night before was the mud they had
+scattered all over themselves as they pelted through a patch of wet
+ground. The farmer said they were as quiet a lot as any in Meirion; he
+could make nothing of it.
+
+"Indeed," he said, "I believe they must have seen the devil himself to
+be in such a fright as that: save the people!"
+
+Now all this was kept as quiet as might be at the time when it happened;
+it became known to the men of the Porth Club in the days when they were
+discussing the difficult question of the German outrages, as the murders
+were commonly called. And this wild stampede of the farm horses was held
+by some to be evidence of the extraordinary and unheard of character of
+the dreadful agency that was at work. One of the members of the club had
+been told by an officer who was in the camp at the time of the panic
+that the horses that came charging down were in a perfect fury of
+fright, that he had never seen horses in such a state, and so there was
+endless speculation as to the nature of the sight or the sound that had
+driven half a dozen quiet beasts into raging madness.
+
+Then, in the middle of this talk, two or three other incidents, quite as
+odd and incomprehensible, came to be known, borne on chance trickles of
+gossip that came into the towns from outland farms, or were carried by
+cottagers tramping into Porth on market day with a fowl or two and eggs
+and garden stuff; scraps and fragments of talk gathered by servants from
+the country folk and repeated--to their mistresses. And in such ways it
+came out that up at Plas Newydd there had been a terrible business over
+swarming the bees; they had turned as wild as wasps and much more
+savage. They had come about the people who were taking the swarms like a
+cloud. They settled on one man's face so that you could not see the
+flesh for the bees crawling all over it, and they had stung him so badly
+that the doctor did not know whether he would get over it, and they had
+chased a girl who had come out to see the swarming, and settled on her
+and stung her to death. Then they had gone off to a brake below the
+farm and got into a hollow tree there, and it was not safe to go near
+it, for they would come out at you by day or by night.
+
+And much the same thing had happened, it seemed, at three or four farms
+and cottages where bees were kept. And there were stories, hardly so
+clear or so credible, of sheep dogs, mild and trusted beasts, turning as
+savage as wolves and injuring the farm boys in a horrible manner--in one
+case it was said with fatal results. It was certainly true that old Mrs.
+Owen's favorite Brahma-Dorking cock had gone mad; she came into Porth
+one Saturday morning with her face and her neck all bound up and
+plastered. She had gone out to her bit of a field to feed the poultry
+the night before, and the bird had flown at her and attacked her most
+savagely, inflicting some very nasty wounds before she could beat it
+off.
+
+"There was a stake handy, lucky for me," she said, "and I did beat him
+and beat him till the life was out of him. But what is come to the
+world, whatever?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now Remnant, the man of theories, was also a man of extreme leisure. It
+was understood that he had succeeded to ample means when he was quite a
+young man, and after tasting the savors of the law, as it were, for half
+a dozen terms at the board of the Middle Temple, he had decided that it
+would be senseless to bother himself with passing examinations for a
+profession which he had not the faintest intention of practising. So he
+turned a deaf ear to the call of "Manger" ringing through the Temple
+Courts, and set himself out to potter amiably through the world. He had
+pottered all over Europe, he had looked at Africa, and had even put his
+head in at the door of the East, on a trip which included the Greek
+isles and Constantinople. Now getting into the middle fifties, he had
+settled at Porth for the sake, as he said, of the Gulf Stream and the
+fuchsia hedges, and pottered over his books and his theories and the
+local gossip. He was no more brutal than the general public, which
+revels in the details of mysterious crime; but it must be said that the
+terror, black though it was, was a boon to him. He peered and
+investigated and poked about with the relish of a man to whose life a
+new zest has been added. He listened attentively to the strange tales of
+bees and dogs and poultry that came into Porth with the country baskets
+of butter, rabbits, and green peas; and he evolved at last a most
+extraordinary theory.
+
+Full of this discovery, as he thought it, he went one night to see Dr.
+Lewis and take his view of the matter.
+
+"I want to talk to you," said Remnant to the doctor, "about what I have
+called provisionally, the Z Ray."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+_The Incident of the Unknown Tree_
+
+
+Dr. Lewis, smiling indulgently, and quite prepared for some monstrous
+piece of theorizing, led Remnant into the room that overlooked the
+terraced garden and the sea.
+
+The doctor's house, though it was only a ten minutes' walk from the
+center of the town, seemed remote from all other habitations. The drive
+to it from the road came through a deep grove of trees and a dense
+shrubbery, trees were about the house on either side, mingling with
+neighboring groves, and below, the garden fell down, terrace by green
+terrace, to wild growth, a twisted path amongst red rocks, and at last
+to the yellow sand of a little cove. The room to which the doctor took
+Remnant looked over these terraces and across the water to the dim
+boundaries of the bay. It had French windows that were thrown wide open,
+and the two men sat in the soft light of the lamp--this was before the
+days of severe lighting regulations in the Far West--and enjoyed the
+sweet odors and the sweet vision of the summer evening. Then Remnant
+began:
+
+"I suppose, Lewis, you've heard these extraordinary stories of bees and
+dogs and things that have been going about lately?"
+
+"Certainly I have heard them. I was called in at Plas Newydd, and
+treated Thomas Trevor, who's only just out of danger, by the way. I
+certified for the poor child, Mary Trevor. She was dying when I got to
+the place. There was no doubt she was stung to death by bees, and I
+believe there were other very similar cases at Llantarnam and Morwen;
+none fatal, I think. What about them?"
+
+"Well: then there are the stories of good-tempered old sheepdogs
+turning wicked and 'savaging' children?"
+
+"Quite so. I haven't seen any of these cases professionally; but I
+believe the stories are accurate enough."
+
+"And the old woman assaulted by her own poultry?"
+
+"That's perfectly true. Her daughter put some stuff of their own
+concoction on her face and neck, and then she came to me. The wounds
+seemed going all right, so I told her to continue the treatment,
+whatever it might be."
+
+"Very good," said Mr. Remnant. He spoke now with an italic
+impressiveness. "_Don't you see the link between all this and the
+horrible things that have been happening about here for the last
+month?_"
+
+Lewis stared at Remnant in amazement. He lifted his red eyebrows and
+lowered them in a kind of scowl. His speech showed traces of his native
+accent.
+
+"Great burning!" he exclaimed. "What on earth are you getting at now?
+It is madness. Do you mean to tell me that you think there is some
+connection between a swarm or two of bees that have turned nasty, a
+cross dog, and a wicked old barn-door cock and these poor people that
+have been pitched over the cliffs and hammered to death on the road?
+There's no sense in it, you know."
+
+"I am strongly inclined to believe that there is a great deal of sense
+in it," replied Remnant, with extreme calmness. "Look here, Lewis, I saw
+you grinning the other day at the club when I was telling the fellows
+that in my opinion all these outrages had been committed, certainly by
+the Germans, but by some method of which we have no conception. But what
+I meant to say when I talked about inconceivables was just this: that
+the Williams's and the rest of them have been killed in some way that's
+not in theory at all, not in our theory, at all events, some way we've
+not contemplated, not thought of for an instant. Do you see my point?"
+
+"Well, in a sort of way. You mean there's an absolute originality in the
+method? I suppose that is so. But what next?"
+
+Remnant seemed to hesitate, partly from a sense of the portentous nature
+of what he was about to say, partly from a sort of half-unwillingness to
+part with so profound a secret.
+
+"Well," he said, "you will allow that we have two sets of phenomena of a
+very extraordinary kind occurring at the same time. Don't you think that
+it's only reasonable to connect the two sets with one another."
+
+"So the philosopher of Tenterden steeple and the Goodwin Sands thought,
+certainly," said Lewis. "But what is the connection? Those poor folks on
+the Highway weren't stung by bees or worried by a dog. And horses don't
+throw people over cliffs or stifle them in marshes."
+
+"No; I never meant to suggest anything so absurd. It is evident to me
+that in all these cases of animals turning suddenly savage the cause has
+been terror, panic, fear. The horses that went charging into the camp
+were mad with fright, we know. And I say that in the other instances we
+have been discussing the cause was the same. The creatures were exposed
+to an infection of fear, and a frightened beast or bird or insect uses
+its weapons, whatever they may be. If, for example, there had been
+anybody with those horses when they took their panic they would have
+lashed out at him with their heels."
+
+"Yes, I dare say that that is so. Well."
+
+"Well; my belief is that the Germans have made an extraordinary
+discovery. I have called it the Z Ray. You know that the ether is merely
+an hypothesis; we have to suppose that it's there to account for the
+passage of the Marconi current from one place to another. Now, suppose
+that there is a psychic ether as well as a material ether, suppose that
+it is possible to direct irresistible impulses across this medium,
+suppose that these impulses are towards murder or suicide; then I think
+that you have an explanation of the terrible series of events that have
+been happening in Meirion for the last few weeks. And it is quite clear
+to my mind that the horses and the other creatures have been exposed to
+this Z Ray, and that it has produced on them the effect of terror, with
+ferocity as the result of terror. Now what do you say to that?
+Telepathy, you know, is well established; so is hypnotic suggestion. You
+have only to look in the Encyclopædia Britannica' to see that, and
+suggestion is so strong in some cases as to be an irresistible
+imperative. Now don't you feel that putting telepathy and suggestion
+together, as it were, you have more than the elements of what I call the
+Z Ray? I feel myself that I have more to go on in making my hypothesis
+than the inventor of the steam engine had in making his hypothesis when
+he saw the lid of the kettle bobbing up and down. What do you say?"
+
+Dr. Lewis made no answer. He was watching the growth of a new, unknown
+tree in his garden.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The doctor made no answer to Remnant's question. For one thing, Remnant
+was profuse in his eloquence--he has been rigidly condensed in this
+history--and Lewis was tired of the sound of his voice. For another
+thing, he found the Z Ray theory almost too extravagant to be bearable,
+wild enough to tear patience to tatters. And then as the tedious
+argument continued Lewis became conscious that there was something
+strange about the night.
+
+It was a dark summer night. The moon was old and faint, above the
+Dragon's Head across the bay, and the air was very still. It was so
+still that Lewis had noted that not a leaf stirred on the very tip of a
+high tree that stood out against the sky; and yet he knew that he was
+listening to some sound that he could not determine or define. It was
+not the wind in the leaves, it was not the gentle wash of the water of
+the sea against the rocks; that latter sound he could distinguish quite
+easily. But there was something else. It was scarcely a sound; it was as
+if the air itself trembled and fluttered, as the air trembles in a
+church when they open the great pedal pipes of the organ.
+
+The doctor listened intently. It was not an illusion, the sound was not
+in his own head, as he had suspected for a moment; but for the life of
+him he could not make out whence it came or what it was. He gazed down
+into the night over the terraces of his garden, now sweet with the scent
+of the flowers of the night; tried to peer over the tree-tops across the
+sea towards the Dragon's Head. It struck him suddenly that this strange
+fluttering vibration of the air might be the noise of a distant
+aeroplane or airship; there was not the usual droning hum, but this
+sound might be caused by a new type of engine. A new type of engine?
+Possibly it was an enemy airship; their range, it had been said, was
+getting longer; and Lewis was just going to call Remnant's attention to
+the sound, to its possible cause, and to the possible danger that might
+be hovering over them, when he saw something that caught his breath and
+his heart with wild amazement and a touch of terror.
+
+He had been staring upward into the sky, and, about to speak to Remnant,
+he had let his eyes drop for an instant. He looked down towards the
+trees in the garden, and saw with utter astonishment that one had
+changed its shape in the few hours that had passed since the setting of
+the sun. There was a thick grove of ilexes bordering the lowest terrace,
+and above them rose one tall pine, spreading its head of sparse, dark
+branches dark against the sky.
+
+As Lewis glanced down over the terraces he saw that the tall pine tree
+was no longer there. In its place there rose above the ilexes what might
+have been a greater ilex; there was the blackness of a dense growth of
+foliage rising like a broad and far-spreading and rounded cloud over the
+lesser trees.
+
+Here, then was a sight wholly incredible, impossible. It is doubtful
+whether the process of the human mind in such a case has ever been
+analyzed and registered; it is doubtful whether it ever can be
+registered. It is hardly fair to bring in the mathematician, since he
+deals with absolute truth (so far as mortality can conceive absolute
+truth); but how would a mathematician feel if he were suddenly
+confronted with a two-sided triangle? I suppose he would instantly
+become a raging madman; and Lewis, staring wide-eyed and wild-eyed at a
+dark and spreading tree which his own experience informed him was not
+there, felt for an instant that shock which should affront us all when
+we first realize the intolerable antinomy of Achilles and the Tortoise.
+Common sense tells us that Achilles will flash past the tortoise almost
+with the speed of the lightning; the inflexible truth of mathematics
+assures us that till the earth boils and the heavens cease to endure the
+Tortoise must still be in advance; and thereupon we should, in common
+decency, go mad. We do not go mad, because, by special grace, we are
+certified that, in the final: court of appeal, all science is a lie,
+even the highest science of all; and so we simply grin at Achilles and
+the Tortoise, as we grin at Darwin, deride Huxley, and laugh at Herbert
+Spencer.
+
+Dr. Lewis did not grin. He glared into the dimness of the night, at the
+great spreading tree that he knew could not be there. And as he gazed he
+saw that what at first appeared the dense blackness of foliage was
+fretted and starred with wonderful appearances of lights and colors.
+
+Afterwards he said to me: "I remember thinking to myself: 'Look here, I
+am not delirious; my temperature is perfectly normal. I am not drunk; I
+only had a pint of Graves with my dinner, over three hours ago. I have
+not eaten any poisonous fungus; I have not taken _Anhelonium Lewinii_
+experimentally. So, now then! What is happening?'"
+
+The night had gloomed over; clouds obscured the faint moon and the misty
+stars. Lewis rose, with some kind of warning and inhibiting gesture to
+Remnant, who, he was conscious was gaping at him in astonishment. He
+walked to the open French window, and took a pace forward on to the path
+outside, and looked, very intently, at the dark shape of the tree, down
+below the sloping garden, above the washing of the waves. He shaded the
+light of the lamp behind him by holding his hands on each side of his
+eyes.
+
+The mass of the tree--the tree that couldn't be there--stood out against
+the sky, but not so clearly, now that the clouds had rolled up. Its
+edges, the limits of its leafage, were not so distinct. Lewis thought
+that he could detect some sort of quivering movement in it; though the
+air was at a dead calm. It was a night on which one might hold up a
+lighted match and watch it burn without any wavering or inclination of
+the flame.
+
+"You know," said Lewis, "how a bit of burnt paper will sometimes hang
+over the coals before it goes up the chimney, and little worms of fire
+will shoot through it. It was like that, if you should be standing some
+distance away. Just threads and hairs of yellow light I saw, and specks
+and sparks of fire, and then a twinkling of a ruby no bigger than a pin
+point, and a green wandering in the black, as if an emerald were
+crawling, and then little veins of deep blue. 'Woe is me!' I said to
+myself in Welsh, 'What is all this color and burning?'
+
+"And, then, at that very moment there came a thundering rap at the door
+of the room inside, and there was my man telling me that I was wanted
+directly up at the Garth, as old Mr. Trevor Williams had been taken very
+bad. I knew his heart was not worth much, so I had to go off directly,
+and leave Remnant to make what he could of it all."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+_Mr. Remnant's Z Ray _
+
+
+Dr. Lewis was kept some time at the Garth. It was past twelve when he
+got back to his house.
+
+He went quickly to the room that overlooked the garden and the sea and
+threw open the French window and peered into the darkness. There, dim
+indeed against the dim sky but unmistakable, was the tall pine with its
+sparse branches, high above the dense growth of the ilex trees. The
+strange boughs which had amazed him had vanished; there was no
+appearance now of colors or of fires.
+
+He drew his chair up to the open window and sat there gazing and
+wondering far into the night, till brightness came upon the sea and sky,
+and the forms of the trees in the garden grew clear and evident. He
+went up to his bed at last filled with a great perplexity, still asking
+questions to which there was no answer.
+
+The doctor did not say anything about the strange tree to Remnant. When
+they next met, Lewis said that he had thought there was a man hiding
+amongst the bushes--this in explanation of that warning gesture he had
+used, and of his going out into the garden and staring into the night.
+He concealed the truth because he dreaded the Remnant doctrine that
+would undoubtedly be produced; indeed, he hoped that he had heard the
+last of the theory of the Z Ray. But Remnant firmly reopened this
+subject.
+
+"We were interrupted just as I was putting my case to you," he said.
+"And to sum it all up, it amounts to this: that the Huns have made one
+of the great leaps of science. They are sending 'suggestions' (which
+amount to irresistible commands) over here, and the persons affected are
+seized with suicidal or homicidal mania. The people who were killed by
+falling over the cliffs or into the quarry probably committed suicide;
+and so with the man and boy who were found in the bog. As to the Highway
+case, you remember that Thomas Evans said that he stopped and talked to
+Williams on the night of the murder. In my opinion Evans was the
+murderer. He came under the influence of the Ray, became a homicidal
+maniac in an instant, snatched Williams's spade from his hand and killed
+him and the others."
+
+"The bodies were found by me on the road."
+
+"It is possible that the first impact of the Ray produces violent
+nervous excitement, which would manifest itself externally. Williams
+might have called to his wife to come and see what was the matter with
+Evans. The children would naturally follow their mother. It seems to me
+simple. And as for the animals--the horses, dogs, and so forth, they as
+I say, were no doubt panic stricken by the Ray, and hence driven to
+frenzy."
+
+"Why should Evans have murdered Williams instead of Williams murdering
+Evans? Why should the impact of the Ray affect one and not the other?"
+
+"Why does one man react violently to a certain drug, while it makes no
+impression on another man? Why is A able to drink a bottle of whisky and
+remain sober, while B is turned into something very like a lunatic after
+he has drunk three glasses?"
+
+"It is a question of idiosyncrasy," said the doctor.
+
+"Is idiosyncrasy Greek for 'I don't know'?" asked Remnant.
+
+"Not at all," said Lewis, smiling blandly. "I mean that in some
+diatheses whisky--as you have mentioned whisky--appears not to be
+pathogenic, or at all events not immediately pathogenic. In other cases,
+as you very justly observed, there seems to be a very marked cachexia
+associated with the exhibition of the spirit in question, even in
+comparatively small doses."
+
+Under this cloud of professional verbiage Lewis escaped from the Club
+and from Remnant. He did not want to hear any more about that Dreadful
+Ray, because he felt sure that the Ray was all nonsense. But asking
+himself why he felt this certitude in the matter he had to confess that
+he didn't know. An aeroplane, he reflected, was all nonsense before it
+was made; and he remembered talking in the early nineties to a friend of
+his about the newly discovered X Rays. The friend laughed incredulously,
+evidently didn't believe a word of it, till Lewis told him that there
+was an article on the subject in the current number of the _Saturday
+Review_; whereupon the unbeliever said, "Oh, is that so? Oh, really. I
+_see_," and was converted on the X Ray faith on the spot. Lewis,
+remembering this talk, marveled at the strange processes of the human
+mind, its illogical and yet all-compelling _ergos_, and wondered
+whether he himself was only waiting for an article on the Z Ray in the
+_Saturday Review_ to become a devout believer in the doctrine of
+Remnant.
+
+But he wondered with far more fervor as to the extraordinary thing he
+had seen in his own garden with his own eyes. The tree that changed all
+its shape for an hour or two of the night, the growth of strange boughs,
+the apparition of secret fires among them, the sparkling of emerald and
+ruby lights: how could one fail to be afraid with great amazement at the
+thought of such a mystery?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dr. Lewis's thoughts were distracted from the incredible adventure of
+the tree by the visit of his sister and her husband. Mr. and Mrs.
+Merritt lived in a well-known manufacturing town of the Midlands, which
+was now, of course, a center of munition work. On the day of their
+arrival at Porth, Mrs. Merritt, who was tired after the long, hot
+journey, went to bed early, and Merritt and Lewis went into the room by
+the garden for their talk and tobacco. They spoke of the year that had
+passed since their last meeting, of the weary dragging of the war, of
+friends that had perished in it, of the hopelessness of an early ending
+of all this misery. Lewis said nothing of the terror that was on the
+land. One does not greet a tired man who is come to a quiet, sunny place
+for relief from black smoke and work and worry with a tale of horror.
+Indeed, the doctor saw that his brother-in-law looked far from well. And
+he seemed "jumpy"; there was an occasional twitch of his mouth that
+Lewis did not like at all.
+
+"Well," said the doctor, after an interval of silence and port wine, "I
+am glad to see you here again. Porth always suits you. I don't think
+you're looking quite up to your usual form. But three weeks of Meirion
+air will do wonders."
+
+"Well, I hope it will," said the other. "I am not up to the mark.
+Things are not going well at Midlingham."
+
+"Business is all right, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes. Business is all right. But there are other things that are all
+wrong. We are living under a reign of terror. It comes to that."
+
+"What on earth do you mean?"
+
+"Well, I suppose I may tell you what I know. It's not much. I didn't
+dare write it. But do you know that at every one of the munition works
+in Midlingham and all about it there's a guard of soldiers with drawn
+bayonets and loaded rifles day and night? Men with bombs, too. And
+machine-guns at the big factories."
+
+"German spies?"
+
+"You don't want Lewis guns to fight spies with. Nor bombs. Nor a platoon
+of men. I woke up last night. It was the machine-gun at Benington's Army
+Motor Works. Firing like fury. And then bang! bang! bang! That was the
+hand bombs."
+
+"But what against?"
+
+"Nobody knows."
+
+"Nobody knows what is happening," Merritt repeated, and he went on to
+describe the bewilderment and terror that hung like a cloud over the
+great industrial city in the Midlands, how the feeling of concealment,
+of some intolerable secret danger that must not be named, was worst of
+all.
+
+"A young fellow I know," he said, "was on short leave the other day from
+the front, and he spent it with his people at Belmont--that's about
+four miles out of Midlingham, you know. 'Thank God,' he said to me, 'I
+am going back to-morrow. It's no good saying that the Wipers salient is
+nice, because it isn't. But it's a damned sight better than this. At the
+front you know what you're up against anyhow.' At Midlingham everybody
+has the feeling that we're up against something awful and we don't know
+what; it's that that makes people inclined to whisper. There's terror
+in the air."
+
+Merritt made a sort of picture of the great town cowering in its fear of
+an unknown danger.
+
+"People are afraid to go about alone at nights in the outskirts. They
+make up parties at the stations to go home together if it's anything
+like dark, or if there are any lonely bits on their way."
+
+"But why? I don't understand. What are they afraid of?"
+
+"Well, I told you about my being awakened up the other night with the
+machine-guns at the motor works rattling away, and the bombs exploding
+and making the most terrible noise. That sort of thing alarms one, you
+know. It's only natural."
+
+"Indeed, it must be very terrifying. You mean, then, there is a general
+nervousness about, a vague sort of apprehension that makes people
+inclined to herd together?"
+
+"There's that, and there's more. People have gone out that have never
+come back. There were a couple of men in the train to Holme, arguing
+about the quickest way to get to Northend, a sort of outlying part of
+Holme where they both lived. They argued all the way out of Midlingham,
+one saying that the high road was the quickest though it was the longest
+way. 'It's the quickest going because it's the cleanest going,' he
+said."
+
+"The other chap fancied a short cut across the fields, by the canal.
+'It's half the distance,' he kept on. 'Yes, if you don't lose your way,'
+said the other. Well, it appears they put an even half-crown on it, and
+each was to try his own way when they got out of the train. It was
+arranged that they were to meet at the 'Wagon' in Northend. 'I shall be
+at the "Wagon" first,' said the man who believed in the short cut, and
+with that he climbed over the stile and made off across the fields. It
+wasn't late enough to be really dark, and a lot of them thought he
+might win the stakes. But he never turned up at the Wagon--or anywhere
+else for the matter of that."
+
+"What happened to him?"
+
+"He was found lying on his back in the middle of a field--some way from
+the path. He was dead. The doctors said he'd-been suffocated. Nobody
+knows how. Then there have been other cases. We whisper about them at
+Midlingham, but we're afraid to speak out."
+
+Lewis was ruminating all this profoundly. Terror in Meirion and terror
+far away in the heart of England; but at Midlingham, so far as he could
+gather from these stories of soldiers on guard, of crackling
+machine-guns, it was a case of an organized attack on the munitioning of
+the army. He felt that he did not know enough to warrant his deciding
+that the terror of Meirion and of Stratfordshire were one.
+
+Then Merritt began again:
+
+"There's a queer story going about, when the door's shut and the
+curtain's drawn, that is, as to a place right out in the country over
+the other side of Midlingham; on the opposite side to Dunwich. They've
+built one of the new factories out there, a great red brick town of
+sheds they tell me it is, with a tremendous chimney. It's not been
+finished more than a month or six weeks. They plumped it down right in
+the middle of the fields, by the line, and they're building huts for the
+workers as fast as they can but up to the present the men are billeted
+all about, up and down the line.
+
+"About two hundred yards from this place there's an old footpath,
+leading from the station and the main road up to a small hamlet on the
+hillside. Part of the way this path goes by a pretty large wood, most of
+it thick undergrowth. I should think there must be twenty acres of wood,
+more or less. As it happens, I used this path once long ago; and I can
+tell you it's a black place of nights.
+
+"A man had to go this way one night. He got along all right till he
+came to the wood. And then he said his heart dropped out of his body. It
+was awful to hear the noises in that wood. Thousands of men were in it,
+he swears that. It was full of rustling, and pattering of feet trying to
+go dainty, and the crack of dead boughs lying on the ground as some one
+trod on them, and swishing of the grass, and some sort of chattering
+speech going on, that sounded, so he said, as if the dead sat in their
+bones and talked! He ran for his life, anyhow; across fields, over
+hedges, through brooks. He must have run, by his tale, ten miles out of
+his way before he got home to his wife, and beat at the door, and broke
+in, and bolted it behind him.".
+
+"There is something rather alarming about any wood at night," said Dr.
+Lewis.
+
+Merritt shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"People say that the Germans have landed, and that they are hiding in
+underground places all over the country."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+_The Case of the Hidden Germans_
+
+
+Lewis gasped for a moment, silent in contemplation of the magnificence
+of rumor. The Germans already landed, hiding underground, striking by
+night, secretly, terribly, at the power of England! Here was a
+conception which made the myth of "The Russians" a paltry fable; before
+which the Legend of Mons was an ineffectual thing.
+
+It was monstrous. And yet--
+
+He looked steadily at Merritt; a square-headed, black-haired, solid sort
+of man. He had symptoms of nerves about him for the moment, certainly,
+but one could not wonder at that, whether the tales he told were true,
+or whether he merely believed them to be true. Lewis had known his
+brother-in-law for twenty years or more, and had always found him a
+sure man in his own small world. "But then," said the doctor to himself,
+"those men, if they once get out of the ring of that little world of
+theirs, they are lost. Those are the men that believed in Madame
+Blavatsky."
+
+"Well," he said, "what do you think yourself? The Germans landed and
+hiding somewhere about the country: there's something extravagant in the
+notion, isn't there?"
+
+"I don't know what to think. You can't get over the facts. There are the
+soldiers with their rifles and their guns at the works all over
+Stratfordshire, and those guns go off. I told you I'd heard them. Then
+who are the soldiers shooting at? That's what we ask ourselves at
+Midlingham."
+
+"Quite so; I quite understand. It's an extraordinary state of things."
+
+"It's more than extraordinary; it's an awful state of things. It's
+terror in the dark, and there's nothing worse than that. As that young
+fellow I was telling you about said, 'At the front you do know what
+you're up against.'"
+
+"And people really believe that a number of Germans have somehow got
+over to England and have hid themselves underground?"
+
+"People say they've got a new kind of poison-gas. Some think that they
+dig underground places and make the gas there, and lead it by secret
+pipes into the shops; others say that they throw gas bombs into the
+factories. It must be worse than anything they've used in France, from
+what the authorities say."
+
+"The authorities? Do _they_ admit that there are Germans in hiding about
+Midlingham?"
+
+"No. They call it 'explosions.' But we know it isn't explosions. We know
+in the Midlands what an explosion sounds like and looks like. And we
+know that the people killed in these 'explosions' are put into their
+coffins in the works. Their own relations are not allowed to see them."
+
+"And so you believe in the German theory?"
+
+"If I do, it's because one must believe in something. Some say they've
+seen the gas. I heard that a man living in Dunwich saw it one night like
+a black cloud with sparks of fire in it floating over the tops of the
+trees by Dunwich Common."
+
+The light of an ineffable amazement came into Lewis's eyes. The night of
+Remnant's visit, the trembling vibration of the air, the dark tree that
+had grown in his garden since the setting of the sun, the strange
+leafage that was starred with burning, with emerald and ruby fires, and
+all vanished away when he returned from his visit to the Garth; and such
+a leafage had appeared as a burning cloud far in the heart of England:
+what intolerable mystery, what tremendous doom was signified in this?
+But one thing was clear and certain: that the terror of Meirion was
+also the terror of the Midlands.
+
+Lewis made up his mind most firmly that if possible all this should be
+kept from his brother-in-law. Merritt had come to Porth as to a city of
+refuge from the horrors of Midlingham; if it could be managed he should
+be spared the knowledge that the cloud of terror had gone before him and
+hung black over the western land. Lewis passed the port and said in an
+even voice:
+
+"Very strange, indeed; a black cloud with sparks of fire?"
+
+"I can't answer for it, you know; it's only a rumor."
+
+"Just so; and you think or you're inclined to think that this and all
+the rest you've told me is to be put down to the hidden Germans?"
+
+"As I say; because one must think something.
+
+"I quite see your point. No doubt, if it's true, it's the most awful
+blow that has ever been dealt at any nation in the whole history of
+man. The enemy established in our vitals! But is it possible, after all?
+How could it have been worked?"
+
+Merritt told Lewis how it had been worked, or rather, how people said it
+had been worked. The idea, he said, was that this was a part, and a most
+important part, of the great German plot to destroy England and the
+British Empire.
+
+The scheme had been prepared years ago, some thought soon after the
+Franco-Prussian War. Moltke had seen that the invasion of England (in
+the ordinary sense of the term invasion) presented very great
+difficulties. The matter was constantly in discussion in the inner
+military and high political circles, and the general trend of opinion in
+these quarters was that at the best, the invasion of England would
+involve Germany in the gravest difficulties, and leave France in the
+position of the _tertius gaudens_. This was the state of affairs when a
+very high Prussian personage was approached by the Swedish professor,
+Huvelius.
+
+Thus Merritt, and here I would say in parenthesis that this Huvelius was
+by all accounts an extraordinary man. Considered personally and apart
+from his writings he would appear to have been a most amiable
+individual. He was richer than the generality of Swedes, certainly far
+richer than the average university professor in Sweden. But his shabby,
+green frock-coat, and his battered, furry hat were notorious in the
+university town where he lived. No one laughed, because it was well
+known that Professor Huvelius spent every penny of his private means and
+a large portion of his official stipend on works of kindness and
+charity. He hid his head in a garret, some one said, in order that
+others might be able to swell on the first floor. It was told of him
+that he restricted himself to a diet of dry bread and coffee for a month
+in order that a poor woman of the streets, dying of consumption, might
+enjoy luxuries in hospital.
+
+And this was the man who wrote the treatise "De Facinore Humano"; to
+prove the infinite corruption of the human race.
+
+Oddly enough, Professor Huvelius wrote the most cynical book in the
+world--Hobbes preaches rosy sentimentalism in comparison--with the very
+highest motives. He held that a very large part of human misery,
+misadventure, and sorrow was due to the false convention that the heart
+of man was naturally and in the main well disposed and kindly, if not
+exactly righteous. "Murderers, thieves, assassins, violators, and all
+the host of the abominable," he says in one passage, "are created by the
+false pretense and foolish credence of human virtue. A lion in a cage is
+a fierce beast, indeed; but what will he be if we declare him to be a
+lamb and open the doors of his den? Who will be guilty of the deaths of
+the men, women and children whom he will surely devour, save those who
+unlocked the cage?" And he goes on to show that kings and the rulers of
+the peoples could decrease the sum of human misery to a vast extent by
+acting on the doctrine of human wickedness. "War," he declares, "which
+is one of the worst of evils, will always continue to exist. But a wise
+king will desire a brief war rather than a lengthy one, a short evil
+rather than a long evil. And this not from the benignity of his heart
+towards his enemies, for we have seen that the human heart is naturally
+malignant, but because he desires to conquer, and to conquer easily,
+without a great expenditure of men or of treasure, knowing that if he
+can accomplish this feat his people will love him and his crown will be
+secure. So he will wage brief victorious wars, and not only spare his
+own nation, but the nation of the enemy, since in a short war the loss
+is less on both sides than in a long war. And so from evil will come
+good."
+
+And how, asks Huvelius, are such wars to be waged? The wise prince, he
+replies, will begin by assuming the enemy to be infinitely corruptible
+and infinitely stupid, since stupidity and corruption are the chief
+characteristics of man. So the prince will make himself friends in the
+very councils of his enemy, and also amongst the populace, bribing the
+wealthy by proffering to them the opportunity of still greater wealth,
+and winning the poor by swelling words. "For, contrary to the common
+opinion, it is the wealthy who are greedy of wealth; while the populace
+are to be gained by talking to them about liberty, their unknown god.
+And so much are they enchanted by the words liberty, freedom, and such
+like, that the wise can go to the poor, rob them of what little they
+have, dismiss them with a hearty kick, and win their hearts and their
+votes for ever, if only they will assure them that the treatment which
+they have received is called liberty."
+
+Guided by these principles, says Huvelius, the wise prince will entrench
+himself in the country that he desires to conquer; "nay, with but little
+trouble, he may actually and literally throw his garrisons into the
+heart of the enemy country before war has begun."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This is a long and tiresome parenthesis; but it is necessary as
+explaining the long tale which Merritt told his brother-in-law, he
+having received it from some magnate of the Midlands, who had traveled
+in Germany. It is probable that the story was suggested in the first
+place by the passage from Huvelius which I have just quoted.
+
+Merritt knew nothing of the real Huvelius, who was all but a saint; he
+thought of the Swedish professor as a monster of iniquity, "worse," as
+he said, "than Neech"--meaning, no doubt, Nietzsche.
+
+So he told the story of how Huvelius had sold his plan to the Germans; a
+plan for filling England with German soldiers. Land was to be bought in
+certain suitable and well-considered places, Englishmen were to be
+bought as the apparent owners of such land, and secret excavations were
+to be made, till the country was literally undermined. A subterranean
+Germany, in fact, was to be dug under selected districts of England;
+there were to be great caverns, underground cities, well drained, well
+ventilated, supplied with water, and in these places vast stores both of
+food and of munitions were to be accumulated, year after year, till "the
+Day" dawned. And then, warned in time, the secret garrison would leave
+shops, hotels, offices, villas, and vanish underground, ready to begin
+their work of bleeding England at the heart.
+
+"That's what Henson told me," said Merritt at the end of his long story.
+"Henson, head of the Buckley Iron and Steel Syndicate. He has been a lot
+in Germany."
+
+"Well," said Lewis, "of course, it may be so. If it is so, it is
+terrible beyond words."
+
+Indeed, he found something horribly plausible in the story. It was an
+extraordinary plan, of course; an unheard of scheme; but it did not seem
+impossible. It was the Trojan Horse on a gigantic scale; indeed, he
+reflected, the story of the horse with the warriors concealed within it
+which was dragged into the heart of Troy by the deluded Trojans
+themselves might be taken as a prophetic parable of what had happened to
+England--if Henson's theory were well founded. And this theory certainly
+squared with what one had heard of German preparations in Belgium and in
+France: emplacements for guns ready for the invader, German
+manufactories which were really German forts on Belgian soil, the
+caverns by the Aisne made ready for the cannon; indeed, Lewis thought he
+remembered something about suspicious concrete tennis-courts on the
+heights commanding London. But a German army hidden under English
+ground! It was a thought to chill the stoutest heart.
+
+And it seemed from that wonder of the burning tree, that the enemy
+mysteriously and terribly present at Midlingham, was present also in
+Meirion. Lewis, thinking of the country as he knew it, of its wild and
+desolate hillsides, its deep woods, its wastes and solitary places,
+could not but confess that no more fit region could be found for the
+deadly enterprise of secret men. Yet, he thought again, there was but
+little harm to be done in Meirion to the armies of England or to their
+munitionment. They were working for panic terror? Possibly that might be
+so; but the camp under the Highway? That should be their first object,
+and no harm had been done there.
+
+Lewis did not know that since the panic of the horses men had died
+terribly in that camp; that it was now a fortified place, with a deep,
+broad trench, a thick tangle of savage barbed wire about it, and a
+machine-gun planted at each corner.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+_What Mr. Merritt Found_
+
+
+Mr. Merritt began to pick up his health and spirits a good deal. For the
+first morning or two of his stay at the doctor's he contented himself
+with a very comfortable deck chair close to the house, where he sat
+under the shade of an old mulberry tree beside his wife and watched the
+bright sunshine on the green lawns, on the creamy crests of the waves,
+on the headlands of that glorious coast, purple even from afar with the
+imperial glow of the heather, on the white farmhouses gleaming in the
+sunlight, high over the sea, far from any turmoil, from any troubling of
+men.
+
+The sun was hot, but the wind breathed all the while gently,
+incessantly, from the east, and Merritt, who had come to this quiet
+place, not only from dismay, but from the stifling and oily airs of the
+smoky Midland town, said that that east wind, pure and clear and like
+well water from the rock, was new life to him. He ate a capital dinner,
+at the end of his first day at Porth and took rosy views. As to what
+they had been talking about the night before, he said to Lewis, no doubt
+there must be trouble of some sort, and perhaps bad trouble; still,
+Kitchener would soon put it all right.
+
+So things went on very well. Merritt began to stroll about the garden,
+which was full of the comfortable spaces, groves, and surprises that
+only country gardens know. To the right of one of the terraces he found
+an arbor or summer-house covered with white roses, and he was as pleased
+as if he had discovered the Pole. He spent a whole day there, smoking
+and lounging and reading a rubbishy sensational story, and declared that
+the Devonshire roses had taken many years off his age. Then on the
+other side of the garden there was a filbert grove that he had never
+explored on any of his former visits; and again there was a find. Deep
+in the shadow of the filberts was a bubbling well, issuing from rocks,
+and all manner of green, dewy ferns growing about it and above it, and
+an angelica springing beside it. Merritt knelt on his knees, and
+hollowed his hand and drank the well water. He said (over his port) that
+night that if all water were like the water of the filbert well the
+world would turn to teetotalism. It takes a townsman to relish the
+manifold and exquisite joys of the country.
+
+It was not till he began to venture abroad that Merritt found that
+something was lacking of the old rich peace that used to dwell in
+Meirion. He had a favorite walk which he never neglected, year after
+year. This walk led along the cliffs towards Meiros, and then one could
+turn inland and return to Porth by deep winding lanes that went over
+the Allt. So Merritt set out early one morning and got as far as a
+sentry-box at the foot of the path that led up to the cliff. There was a
+sentry pacing up and down in front of the box, and he called on Merritt
+to produce his pass, or to turn back to the main road. Merritt was a
+good deal put out, and asked the doctor about this strict guard. And the
+doctor was surprised.
+
+"I didn't know they had put their bar up there," he said. "I suppose
+it's wise. We are certainly in the far West here; still, the Germans
+might slip round and raid us and do a lot of damage just because Meirion
+is the last place we should expect them to go for."
+
+"But there are no fortifications, surely, on the cliff?"
+
+"Oh, no; I never heard of anything of the kind there."
+
+"Well, what's the point of forbidding the public to go on the cliff,
+then? I can quite understand putting a sentry on the top to keep a
+look-out for the enemy. What I don't understand is a sentry at the
+bottom who can't keep a look-out for anything, as he can't see the sea.
+And why warn the public off the cliffs? I couldn't facilitate a German
+landing by standing on Pengareg, even if I wanted to."
+
+"It is curious," the doctor agreed. "Some military reasons, I suppose."
+
+He let the matter drop, perhaps because the matter did not affect him.
+People who live in the country all the year round, country doctors
+certainly, are little given to desultory walking in search of the
+picturesque.
+
+Lewis had no suspicion that sentries whose object was equally obscure
+were being dotted all over the country. There was a sentry, for example,
+by the quarry at Llanfihangel, where the dead woman and the dead sheep
+had been found some weeks before. The path by the quarry was used a good
+deal, and its closing would have inconvenienced the people of the
+neighborhood very considerably. But the sentry had his box by the side
+of the track and had his orders to keep everybody strictly to the path,
+as if the quarry were a secret fort.
+
+It was not known till a month or two ago that one of these sentries was
+himself a victim of the terror. The men on duty at this place were given
+certain very strict orders, which from the nature of the case, must have
+seemed to them unreasonable. For old soldiers, orders are orders; but
+here was a young bank clerk, scarcely in training for a couple of
+months, who had not begun to appreciate the necessity of hard, literal
+obedience to an order which seemed to him meaningless. He found himself
+on a remote and lonely hillside, he had not the faintest notion that his
+every movement was watched; and he disobeyed a certain instruction that
+had been given him. The post was found deserted by the relief; the
+sentry's dead body was found at the bottom of the quarry.
+
+This by the way; but Mr. Merritt discovered again and again that things
+happened to hamper his walks and his wanderings. Two or three miles from
+Porth there is a great marsh made by the Afon river before it falls into
+the sea, and here Merritt had been accustomed to botanize mildly. He had
+learned pretty accurately the causeways of solid ground that lead
+through the sea of swamp and ooze and soft yielding soil, and he set out
+one hot afternoon determined to make a thorough exploration of the
+marsh, and this time to find that rare Bog Bean, that he felt sure, must
+grow somewhere in its wide extent.
+
+He got into the by-road that skirts the marsh, and to the gate which he
+had always used for entrance.
+
+There was the scene as he had known it always, the rich growth of reeds
+and flags and rushes, the mild black cattle grazing on the "islands" of
+firm turf, the scented procession of the meadowsweet, the royal glory
+of the loosestrife, flaming pennons, crimson and golden, of the giant
+dock.
+
+But they were bringing out a dead man's body through the gate.
+
+A laboring man was holding open the gate on the marsh. Merritt,
+horrified, spoke to him and asked who it was, and how it had happened.
+
+"They do say he was a visitor at Porth. Somehow he has been drowned in
+the marsh, whatever."
+
+"But it's perfectly safe. I've been all over it a dozen times."
+
+"Well, indeed, we did always think so. If you did slip by accident,
+like, and fall into the water, it was not so deep; it was easy enough to
+climb out again. And this gentleman was quite young, to look at him,
+poor man; and he has come to Meirion for his pleasure and holiday and
+found his death in it!"
+
+"Did he do it on purpose? Is it suicide?"
+
+"They say he had no reasons to do that."
+
+Here the sergeant of police in charge of the party interposed, according
+to orders, which he himself did not understand.
+
+"A terrible thing, sir, to be sure, and a sad pity; and I am sure this
+is not the sort of sight you have come to see down in Meirion this
+beautiful summer. So don't you think, sir, that it would be more
+pleasant like, if you would leave us to this sad business of ours? I
+have heard many gentlemen staying in Porth say that there is nothing to
+beat the view from the hill over there, not in the whole of Wales."
+
+Every one is polite in Meirion, but somehow Merritt understood that, in
+English, this speech meant "move on."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Merritt moved back to Porth--he was not in the humor for any idle,
+pleasurable strolling after so dreadful a meeting with death. He made
+some inquiries in the town about the dead man, but nothing seemed known
+of him. It was said that he had been on his honeymoon, that he had been
+staying at the Porth Castle Hotel; but the people of the hotel declared
+that they had never heard of such a person. Merritt got the local paper
+at the end of the week; there was not a word in it of any fatal accident
+in the marsh. He met the sergeant of police in the street. That officer
+touched his helmet with the utmost politeness and a "hope you are
+enjoying yourself, sir; indeed you do look a lot better already"; but as
+to the poor man who was found drowned or stifled in the marsh, he knew
+nothing.
+
+The next day Merritt made up his mind to go to the marsh to see whether
+he could find anything to account for so strange a death. What he found
+was a man with an armlet standing by the gate. The armlet had the
+letters "C.W." on it, which are understood to mean Coast Watcher. The
+Watcher "said he had strict instructions to keep everybody away from the
+marsh. Why? He didn't know, but some said that the river was changing
+its course since the new railway embankment was built, and the marsh had
+become dangerous to people who didn't know it thoroughly.
+
+"Indeed, sir," he added, "it is part of my orders not to set foot on the
+other side of that gate myself, not for one scrag-end of a minute."
+
+Merritt glanced over the gate incredulously. The marsh looked as it had
+always looked; there was plenty of sound, hard ground to walk on; he
+could see the track that he used to follow as firm as ever. He did not
+believe in the story of the changing course of the river, and Lewis said
+he had never heard of anything of the kind. But Merritt had put the
+question in the middle of general conversation; he had not led up to it
+from any discussion of the death in the marsh, and so the doctor was
+taken unawares. If he had known of the connection in Merritt's mind
+between the alleged changing of the Afon's course and the tragical
+event in the marsh, no doubt he would have confirmed the official
+explanation. He was, above all things, anxious to prevent his sister and
+her husband from finding out that the invisible hand of terror that
+ruled at Midlingham was ruling also in Meirion.
+
+Lewis himself had little doubt that the man who was found dead in the
+marsh had been struck down by the secret agency, whatever it was, that
+had already accomplished so much of evil; but it was a chief part of the
+terror that no one knew for certain that this or that particular event
+was to be ascribed to it. People do occasionally fall over cliffs
+through their own carelessness, and as the case of Garcia, the Spanish
+sailor, showed, cottagers and their wives and children are now and then
+the victims of savage and purposeless violence. Lewis had never wandered
+about the marsh himself; but Remnant had pottered round it and about it,
+and declared that the man who met his death there--his name was never
+known, in Porth at all events--must either have committed suicide by
+deliberately lying prone in the ooze and stifling himself, or else must
+have been held down in it. There were no details available, so it was
+clear that the authorities had classified this death with the others;
+still, the man might have committed suicide, or he might have had a
+sudden seizure and fallen in the slimy water face-downwards. And so on:
+it was possible to believe that case A _or_ B _or_ C was in the category
+of ordinary accidents or ordinary crimes. But it was not possible to
+believe that A _and_ B _and_ C were all in that category. And thus it
+was to the end, and thus it is now. We know that the terror reigned, and
+how it reigned, but there were many dreadful events ascribed to its rule
+about which there must always be room for doubt.
+
+For example, there was the case of the _Mary Ann_, the rowing-boat which
+came to grief in so strange a manner, almost under Merritt's eyes. In
+my opinion he was quite wrong in associating the sorry fate of the boat
+and her occupants with a system of signaling by flashlights which he
+detected or thought that he detected, on the afternoon in which the
+_Mary Ann_ was capsized. I believe his signaling theory to be all
+nonsense, in spite of the naturalized German governess who was lodging
+with her employers in the suspected house. But, on the other hand, there
+is no doubt in my own mind that the boat was overturned and those in it
+drowned by the work of the terror.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+_The Light on the Water_
+
+
+Let it be noted carefully that so far Merritt had not the slightest
+suspicion that the terror of Midlingham was quick over. Meirion. Lewis
+had watched and shepherded him carefully. He had let out no suspicion of
+what had happened in Meirion, and before taking his brother-in-law to
+the club he had passed round a hint among the members. He did not tell
+the truth about Midlingham--and here again is a point of interest, that
+as the terror deepened the general public cooperated voluntarily, and,
+one would say, almost subconsciously, with the authorities in concealing
+what they knew from one another--but he gave out a desirable portion of
+the truth: that his brother-in-law was "nervy," not by any means up to
+the mark, and that it was therefore desirable that he should be spared
+the knowledge of the intolerable and tragic mysteries which were being
+enacted all about them.
+
+"He knows about that poor fellow who was found in the marsh," said
+Lewis, "and he has a kind of vague suspicion that there is something out
+of the common about the case; but no more than that."
+
+"A clear case of suggested, or rather commanded suicide," said Remnant.
+"I regard it as a strong confirmation of my theory."
+
+"Perhaps so," said the doctor, dreading lest he might have to hear about
+the Z Ray all over again. "But please don't let anything out to him; I
+want him to get built up thoroughly before he goes back to Midlingham."
+
+
+Then, on the other hand, Merritt was as still as death about the doings
+of the Midlands; he hated to think of them, much more to speak of them;
+and thus, as I say, he and the men at the Porth Club kept their secrets
+from one another; and thus, from the beginning to the end of the terror,
+the links were not drawn together. In many cases, no doubt, A and B met
+every day and talked familiarly, it may be confidentially, on other
+matters of all sorts, each having in his possession half of the truth,
+which he concealed from the other. So the two halves were never put
+together to make a whole.
+
+Merritt, as the doctor guessed, had a kind of uneasy feeling--it
+scarcely amounted to a suspicion--as to the business of the marsh;
+chiefly because he thought the official talk about the railway
+embankment and the course of the river rank nonsense. But finding that
+nothing more happened, he let the matter drop from his mind, and settled
+himself down to enjoy his holiday.
+
+He found to his delight that there were no sentries or watchers to
+hinder him from the approach to Larnac Bay, a delicious cove, a place
+where the ashgrove and the green meadow and the glistening bracken
+sloped gently down to red rocks and firm yellow sands. Merritt
+remembered a rock that formed a comfortable seat, and here he
+established himself of a golden afternoon, and gazed at the blue of the
+sea and the crimson bastions and bays of the coast as it bent inward to
+Sarnau and swept out again southward to the odd-shaped promontory called
+the Dragon's Head. Merritt gazed on, amused by the antics of the
+porpoises who were tumbling and splashing and gamboling a little way out
+at sea, charmed by the pure and radiant air that was so different from
+the oily smoke that often stood for heaven at Midlingham, and charmed,
+too, by the white farmhouses dotted here and there on the heights of the
+curving coast.
+
+Then he noticed a little row-boat at about two hundred yards from the
+shore. There were two or three people aboard, he could not quite make
+out how many, and they seemed to be doing something with a line; they
+were no doubt fishing, and Merritt (who disliked fish) wondered how
+people could spoil such an afternoon, such a sea, such pellucid and
+radiant air by trying to catch white, flabby, offensive, evil-smelling
+creatures that would be excessively nasty when cooked. He puzzled over
+this problem and turned away from it to the contemplation of the crimson
+headlands. And then he says that he noticed that signaling was going on.
+Flashing lights of intense brilliance, he declares, were coming from one
+of those farms on the heights of the coast; it was as if white fire was
+spouting from it. Merritt was certain, as the light appeared and
+disappeared, that some message was being sent, and he regretted that he
+knew nothing of heliography. Three short flashes, a long and very
+brilliant flash, then two short flashes. Merritt fumbled in his pocket
+for pencil and paper so that he might record these signals, and,
+bringing his eyes down to the sea level, he became aware, with
+amazement and horror, that the boat had disappeared. All that he could
+see was some vague, dark object far to westward, running out with the
+tide.
+
+Now it is certain, unfortunately, that the _Mary Ann_ was capsized and
+that two schoolboys and the sailor in charge were drowned. The bones of
+the boat were found amongst the rocks far along the coast, and the three
+bodies were also washed ashore. The sailor could not swim at all, the
+boys only a little, and it needs an exceptionally fine swimmer to fight
+against the outward suck of the tide as it rushes past Pengareg Point.
+
+But I have no belief whatever in Merritt's theory. He held (and still
+holds, for all I know), that the flashes of light which he saw coming
+from Penyrhaul, the farmhouse oh the height, had some connection with
+the disaster to the _Mary Ann_. When it was ascertained that a family
+were spending their summer at the farm, and that the governess was a
+German, though a long naturalized German, Merritt could not see that
+there was anything left to argue about, though there might be many
+details to discover. But, in my opinion, all this was a mere mare's
+nest; the flashes of brilliant light were caused, no doubt, by the sun
+lighting up one window of the farmhouse after the other.
+
+Still, Merritt was convinced from the very first, even before the
+damning circumstance of the German governess was brought to light; and
+on the evening of the disaster, as Lewis and he sat together after
+dinner, he was endeavoring to put what he called the common sense of the
+matter to the doctor.
+
+"If you hear a shot," said Merritt, "and you see a man fall, you know
+pretty well what killed him."
+
+There was a flutter of wild wings in the room. A great moth beat to and
+fro and dashed itself madly against the ceiling, the walls, the glass
+bookcase. Then a sputtering sound, a momentary dimming of the lamp. The
+moth had succeeded in its mysterious quest.
+
+"Can you tell me," said Lewis as if he were answering Merritt, "why
+moths rush into the flame?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Lewis had put his question as to the strange habits of the common moth
+to Merritt with the deliberate intent of closing the debate on death by
+heliograph. The query was suggested, of course, by the incident of the
+moth in the lamp, and Lewis thought that he had said, "Oh, shut up!" in
+a somewhat elegant manner. And, in fact Merritt looked dignified,
+remained silent, and helped himself to port.
+
+That was the end that the doctor had desired. He had no doubt in his own
+mind that the affair of the _Mary Ann_ was but one more item in the long
+account of horrors that grew larger almost with every day; and he was
+in no humor to listen to wild and futile theories as to the manner in
+which the disaster had been accomplished. Here was a proof that the
+terror that was upon them was mighty not only on the land but on the
+waters; for Lewis could not see that the boat could have been attacked
+by any ordinary means of destruction. From Merritt's story, it must have
+been in shallow water. The shore of Larnac Bay shelves very gradually,
+and the Admiralty charts showed the depth of water two hundred yards out
+to be only two fathoms; this would be too shallow for a submarine. And
+it could not have been shelled, and it could not have been torpedoed;
+there was no explosion. The disaster might have been due to
+carelessness; boys, he considered, will play the fool anywhere, even in
+a boat; but he did not think so; the sailor would have stopped them.
+And, it may be mentioned, that the two boys were as a matter of fact
+extremely steady, sensible young fellows, not in the least likely to
+play foolish tricks of any kind.
+
+Lewis was immersed in these reflections, having successfully silenced
+his brother-in-law; he was trying in vain to find some clue to the
+horrible enigma. The Midlingham theory of a concealed German force,
+hiding in places under the earth, was extravagant enough, and yet it
+seemed the only solution that approached plausibility; but then again
+even a subterranean German host would hardly account for this wreckage
+of a boat, floating on a calm sea. And then what of the tree with the
+burning in it that had appeared in the garden there a few weeks ago, and
+the cloud with a burning in it that had shown over the trees of the
+Midland village?
+
+I think I have, already written something of the probable emotions of
+the mathematician confronted suddenly with an undoubted two-sided
+triangle. I said, if I remember, that he would be forced, in decency,
+to go mad; and I believe that Lewis was very near to this point. He felt
+himself confronted with an intolerable problem that most instantly
+demanded solution, and yet, with the same breath, as it were, denied the
+possibility of there being any solution. People were being killed in an
+inscrutable manner by some inscrutable means, day after day, and one
+asked "why" and "how"; and there seemed no answer. In the Midlands,
+where every kind of munitionment was manufactured, the explanation of
+German agency was plausible; and even if the subterranean notion was to
+be rejected as savoring altogether too much of the fairytale, or rather
+of the sensational romance, yet it was possible that the backbone of the
+theory was true; the Germans might have planted their agents in some way
+or another in the midst of our factories. But here in Meirion, what
+serious effect could be produced by the casual and indiscriminate
+slaughter of a couple of schoolboys in a boat, of a harmless
+holiday-maker in a marsh? The creation of an atmosphere of terror and
+dismay? It was possible, of course, but it hardly seemed tolerable, in
+spite of the enormities of Louvain and of the _Lusitania_.
+
+Into these meditations, and into the still dignified silence of Merritt
+broke the rap on the door of Lewis's man, and those words which harass
+the ease of the country doctor when he tries to take any ease: "You're
+wanted in the surgery, if you please, sir." Lewis bustled out, and
+appeared no more that night.
+
+The doctor had been summoned to a little hamlet on the outskirts of
+Porth, separated from it by half a mile or three-quarters of road. One
+dignifies, indeed, this settlement without a name in calling it a
+hamlet; it was a mere row of four cottages, built about a hundred years
+ago for the accommodation of the workers in a quarry long since
+disused. In one of these cottages the doctor found a father and mother
+weeping and crying out to "doctor bach, doctor bach," and two frightened
+children, and one little body, still and dead. It was the youngest of
+the three, little Johnnie, and he was dead.
+
+The doctor found that the child had been asphyxiated. He felt the
+clothes; they were dry; it was not a case of drowning. He looked at the
+neck; there was no mark of strangling. He asked the father how it had
+happened, and father and mother, weeping most lamentably, declared they
+had no knowledge of how their child had been killed: "unless it was the
+People that had done it." The Celtic fairies are still malignant. Lewis
+asked what had happened that evening; where had the child been?
+
+"Was he with his brother and sister? Don't they know anything about it?"
+
+Reduced into some sort of order from its original piteous confusion,
+this is the story that the doctor gathered.
+
+All three children had been well and happy through the day. They had
+walked in with the mother, Mrs. Roberts, to Porth on a marketing
+expedition in the afternoon; they had returned to the cottage, had had
+their tea, and afterwards played about on the road in front of the
+house. John Roberts had come home somewhat late from his work, and it
+was after dusk when the family sat down to supper. Supper over, the
+three children went out again to play with other children from the
+cottage next door, Mrs. Roberts telling them that they might have half
+an hour before going to bed.
+
+The two mothers came to the cottage gates at the same moment and called
+out to their children to come along and be quick about it. The two small
+families had been playing on the strip of turf across the road, just by
+the stile into the fields. The children ran across the road; all of
+them except Johnnie Roberts. His brother Willie said that just as their
+mother called them he heard Johnnie cry out:
+
+"Oh, what is that beautiful shiny thing over the stile?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+_The Child and the Moth_
+
+
+The little Roberts's ran across the road, up the path, and into the
+lighted room. Then they noticed that Johnnie had not followed them. Mrs.
+Roberts was doing something in the back kitchen, and Mr. Roberts had
+gone out to the shed to bring in some sticks for the next morning's
+fire. Mrs. Roberts heard the children run in and went on with her work.
+The children whispered to one another that Johnnie would "catch it" when
+their mother came out of the back room and found him missing; but they
+expected he would run in through the open door any minute. But six or
+seven, perhaps ten, minutes passed, and there was no Johnnie. Then the
+father and mother came into the kitchen together, and saw that their
+little boy was not there.
+
+They thought it was some small piece of mischief--that the two other
+children had hidden the boy somewhere in the room: in the big cupboard
+perhaps.
+
+"What have you done with him then?" said Mrs. Roberts. "Come out, you
+little rascal, directly in a minute."
+
+There was no little rascal to come out, and Margaret Roberts, the girl,
+said that Johnnie had not come across the road with them: he must be
+still playing all by himself by the hedge.
+
+"What did you let him stay like that for?" said Mrs. Roberts. "Can't I
+trust you for two minutes together? Indeed to goodness, you are all of
+you more trouble than you are worth." She went to the open door:
+
+"Johnnie! Come you in directly, or you will be sorry for it. Johnnie!"
+
+The poor woman called at the door. She went out to the gate and called
+there:
+
+"Come you, little Johnnie. Come you, bachgen, there's a good boy. I do
+see you hiding there."
+
+She thought he must be hiding in the shadow of the hedge, and that he
+would come running and laughing--"he was always such a happy little
+fellow"--to her across the road. But no little merry figure danced out
+of the gloom of the still, dark night; it was all silence.
+
+It was then, as the mother's heart began to chill, though she still
+called cheerfully to the missing child, that the elder boy told how
+Johnnie had said there was something beautiful by the stile: "and
+perhaps he did climb over, and he is running now about the meadow, and
+has lost his way."
+
+The father got his lantern then, and the whole family went crying and
+calling about the meadow, promising cakes and sweets and a fine toy to
+poor Johnnie if he would come to them.
+
+They found the little body, under the ashgrove in the middle of the
+field. He was quite still and dead, so still that a great moth had
+settled on his forehead, fluttering away when they lifted him up.
+
+Dr. Lewis heard this story. There was nothing to be done; little to be
+said to these most unhappy people.
+
+"Take care of the two that you have left to you," said the doctor as he
+went away. "Don't let them out of your sight if you can help it. It is
+dreadful times that we are living in."
+
+It is curious to record, that all through these dreadful times the
+simple little "season" went through its accustomed course at Porth. The
+war and its consequences had somewhat thinned the numbers of the summer
+visitors; still a very fair contingent of them occupied the hotels and
+boarding-houses and lodging-houses and bathed from the old-fashioned
+machines on one beach, or from the new-fashioned tents on the other, and
+sauntered in the sun, or lay stretched out in the shade under the trees
+that grow down almost to the water's edge. Porth never tolerated
+Ethiopians or shows of any kind on its sands, but "The Rockets" did very
+well during that summer in their garden entertainment, given in the
+castle grounds, and the fit-up companies that came to the Assembly Rooms
+are said to have paid their bills to a woman and to a man.
+
+Porth depends very largely on its midland and northern custom, custom of
+a prosperous, well-established sort. People who think Llandudno
+overcrowded and Colwyn Bay too raw and red and new, come year after year
+to the placid old town in the southwest and delight in its peace; and as
+I say, they enjoyed themselves much as usual there in the summer of
+1915. Now and then they became conscious, as Mr. Merritt became
+conscious, that they could not wander about quite in the old way; but
+they accepted sentries and coast-watchers and people who politely
+pointed out the advantages of seeing the view from this point rather
+than from that as very necessary consequences of the dreadful war that
+was being waged; nay, as a Manchester man said, after having been turned
+back from his favorite walk to Castell Coch, it was gratifying to think
+that they were so well looked after.
+
+"So far as I can see," he added, "there's nothing to prevent a submarine
+from standing out there by Ynys Sant and landing half a dozen men in a
+collapsible boat in any of these little coves. And pretty fools we
+should look, shouldn't we, with our throats cut on the sands; or carried
+back to Germany in the submarine?" He tipped the coast-watcher
+half-a-crown.
+
+"That's right, lad," he said, "you give us the tip."
+
+Now here was a strange thing. The north-countryman had his thoughts on
+elusive submarines and German raiders; the watcher had simply received
+instructions to keep people off the Castell Coch fields, without reason
+assigned. And there can be no doubt that the authorities themselves,
+while they marked out the fields as in the "terror zone," gave their
+orders in the dark and were themselves profoundly in the dark as to the
+manner of the slaughter that had been done there; for if they had
+understood what had happened, they would have understood also that their
+restrictions were useless.
+
+The Manchester man was warned off his walk about ten days after Johnnie
+Roberts's death. The Watcher had been placed at his post because, the
+night before, a young farmer had been found by his wife lying in the
+grass close to the Castle, with no scar on him, nor any mark of
+violence, but stone dead.
+
+The wife of the dead man, Joseph Cradock, finding her husband lying
+motionless on the dewy turf, went white and stricken up the path to the
+village and got two men who bore the body to the farm. Lewis was sent
+for, and knew, at once when he saw the dead man that he had perished in
+the way that the little Roberts boy had perished--whatever that awful
+way might be. Cradock had been asphyxiated; and here again there was no
+mark of a grip on the throat. It might have been a piece of work by
+Burke and Hare, the doctor reflected; a pitch plaster might have been
+clapped over the man's mouth and nostrils and held there.
+
+Then a thought struck him; his brother-in-law had talked of a new kind
+of poison gas that was said to be used against the munition workers in
+the Midlands: was it possible that the deaths of the man and the boy
+were due to some such instrument? He applied his tests but could find no
+trace of any gas having been employed. Carbonic acid gas? A man could
+not be killed with that in the open air; to be fatal that required a
+confined space, such a position as the bottom of a huge vat or of a
+well.
+
+He did not know how Cradock had been killed; he confessed it to himself.
+He had been suffocated; that was all he could say.
+
+It seemed that the man had gone out at about half-past nine to look
+after some beasts. The field in which they were was about five minutes'
+walk from the house. He told his wife he would be back in a quarter of
+an hour or twenty minutes. He did not return, and when he had been gone
+for three-quarters of an hour Mrs. Cradock went out to look for him. She
+went into the field where the beasts were, and everything seemed all
+right, but there was no trace of Cradock. She called out; there was no
+answer.
+
+Now the meadow in which the cattle were pastured is high ground; a hedge
+divides it from the fields which fall gently down to the castle and the
+sea. Mrs. Cradock hardly seemed able to say why, having failed to find
+her husband among his beasts, she turned to the path which led to
+Castell Coch. She said at first that she had thought that one of the
+oxen might have broken through the hedge and strayed, and that Cradock
+had perhaps gone after it. And then, correcting herself, she said:
+
+"There was that; and then there was something else that I could not make
+out at all. It seemed to me that the hedge did look different from
+usual. To be sure, things do look different at night, and there was a
+bit of sea mist about, but somehow it did look odd to me, and I said to
+myself, 'have I lost my way, then?'"
+
+She declared that the shape of the trees in the hedge appeared to have
+changed, and besides, it had a look "as if it was lighted up, somehow,"
+and so she went on towards the stile to see what all this could be, and
+when she came near everything was as usual. She looked over the stile
+and called and hoped to see her husband coming towards her or to hear
+his voice; but there was no answer, and glancing down the path she saw,
+or thought she saw, some sort of brightness on the ground, "a dim sort
+of light like a bunch of glow-worms in a hedge-bank.
+
+"And so I climbed over the stile and went down the path, and the light
+seemed to melt away; and there was my poor husband lying on his back,
+saying not a word to me when I spoke to him and touched him."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So for Lewis the terror blackened and became altogether intolerable, and
+others, he perceived, felt as he did. He did not know, he never asked
+whether the men at the club had heard of these deaths of the child and
+the young farmer; but no one spoke of them. Indeed, the change was
+evident; at the beginning of the terror men spoke of nothing else; now
+it had become all too awful for ingenious chatter or labored and
+grotesque theories. And Lewis had received a letter from his
+brother-in-law at Midlingham; it contained the sentence, "I am afraid
+Fanny's health has not greatly benefited by her visit to Porth; there
+are still several symptoms I don't at all like." And this told him, in a
+phraseology that the doctor and Merritt had agreed upon, that the terror
+remained heavy in the Midland town.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was soon after the death of Cradock that people began to tell strange
+tales of a sound that was to be heard of nights about the hills and
+valleys to the northward of Porth. A man who had missed the last train
+from Meiros and had been forced to tramp the ten miles between Meiros
+and Porth seems to have been the first to hear it. He said he had got to
+the top of the hill by Tredonoc, somewhere between half-past ten and
+eleven, when he first noticed an odd noise that he could not make out at
+all; it was like a shout, a long, drawn-out, dismal wail coming from a
+great way off, faint with distance. He stopped to listen, thinking at
+first that it might be owls hooting in the woods; but it was different,
+he said, from that: it was a long cry, and then there was silence and
+then it began over again. He could make nothing of it, and feeling
+frightened, he did not quite know of what, he walked on briskly and was
+glad to see the lights of Porth station.
+
+He told his wife of this dismal sound that night, and she told the
+neighbors, and most of them thought that it was "all fancy"--or drink,
+or the owls after all. But the night after, two or three people, who had
+been to some small merrymaking in a cottage just off the Meiros road,
+heard the sound as they were going home, soon after ten. They, too,
+described it as a long, wailing cry, indescribably dismal in the
+stillness of the autumn night; "like the ghost of a voice," said one;
+"as if it came up from the bottom of the earth," said another.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+_At Treff Loyne Farm_
+
+
+Let it be remembered, again and again, that, all the while that the
+terror lasted, there was no common stock of information as to the
+dreadful things that were being done. The press had not said one word
+upon it, there was no criterion by which the mass of the people could
+separate fact from mere vague rumor, no test by which ordinary
+misadventure or disaster could be distinguished from the achievements of
+the secret and awful force that was at work.
+
+And so with every event of the passing day. A harmless commercial
+traveler might show himself in the course of his business in the
+tumbledown main street of Meiros and find himself regarded with looks of
+fear and suspicion as a possible worker of murder, while it is likely
+enough that the true agents of the terror went quite unnoticed. And
+since the real nature of all this mystery of death was unknown, it
+followed easily that the signs and warnings and omens of it were all the
+more unknown. Here was horror, there was horror; but there was no links
+to join one horror with another; no common basis of knowledge from which
+the connection between this horror and that horror might be inferred.
+
+So there was no one who suspected at all that this dismal and hollow
+sound that was now heard of nights in the region to the north of Porth,
+had any relation at all to the case of the little girl who went out one
+afternoon to pick purple flowers and never returned, or to the case of
+the man whose body was taken out of the peaty slime of the marsh, or to
+the case of Cradock, dead in his fields, with a strange glimmering of
+light about his body, as his wife reported. And it is a question as to
+how far the rumor of this melancholy, nocturnal summons got abroad at
+all. Lewis heard of it, as a country doctor hears of most things,
+driving up and down the lanes, but he heard of it without much interest,
+with no sense that it was in any sort of relation to the terror. Remnant
+had been given the story of the hollow and echoing voice of the darkness
+in a colored and picturesque form; he employed a Tredonoc man to work in
+his garden once a week. The gardener had not heard the summons himself,
+but he knew a man who had done so.
+
+"Thomas Jenkins, Pentoppin, he did put his head out late last night to
+see what the weather was like, as he was cutting a field of corn the
+next day, and he did tell me that when he was with the Methodists in
+Cardigan he did never hear no singing eloquence in the chapels that was
+like to it. He did declare it was like a wailing of Judgment Day."
+
+Remnant considered the matter, and was inclined to think that the sound
+must be caused by a subterranean inlet of the sea; there might be, he
+supposed, an imperfect or half-opened or tortuous blow-hole in the
+Tredonoc woods, and the noise of the tide, surging up below, might very
+well produce that effect of a hollow wailing, far away. But neither he
+nor any one else paid much attention to the matter; save the few who
+heard the call at dead of night, as it echoed awfully over the black
+hills.
+
+The sound had been heard for three or perhaps four nights, when the
+people coming out of Tredonoc church after morning service on Sunday
+noticed that there was a big yellow sheepdog in the churchyard. The dog,
+it appeared, had been waiting for the congregation; for it at once
+attached itself to them, at first to the whole body, and then to a group
+of half a dozen who took the turning to the right. Two of these
+presently went off over the fields to their respective houses, and four
+strolled on in the leisurely Sunday-morning manner of the country, and
+these the dog followed, keeping to heel all the time. The men were
+talking hay, corn and markets and paid no attention to the animal, and
+so they strolled along the autumn lane till they came to a gate in the
+hedge, whence a roughly made farm road went through the fields, and
+dipped down into the woods and to Treff Loyne farm.
+
+Then the dog became like a possessed creature. He barked furiously. He
+ran up to one of the men and looked up at him, "as if he were begging
+for his life," as the man said, and then rushed to the gate and stood by
+it, wagging his tail and barking at intervals. The men stared and
+laughed.
+
+"Whose dog will that be?" said one of them.
+
+"It will be Thomas Griffith's, Treff Loyne," said another.
+
+"Well, then, why doesn't he go home? Go home then!" He went through the
+gesture of picking up a stone from the road and throwing it at the dog.
+"Go home, then! Over the gate with you."
+
+But the dog never stirred. He barked and whined and ran up to the men
+and then back to the gate. At last he came to one of them, and crawled
+and abased himself on the ground and then took hold of the man's coat
+and tried to pull him in the direction of the gate. The farmer shook the
+dog off, and the four went on their way; and the dog stood in the road
+and watched them and then put up its head and uttered a long and dismal
+howl that was despair.
+
+The four farmers thought nothing of it; sheepdogs in the country are
+dogs to look after sheep, and their whims and fancies are not studied.
+But the yellow dog--he was a kind of degenerate collie--haunted the
+Tredonoc lanes from that day. He came to a cottage door one night and
+scratched at it, and when it was opened lay down, and then, barking, ran
+to the garden gate and waited, entreating, as it seemed, the cottager
+to follow him. They drove him away and again he gave that long howl of
+anguish. It was almost as bad, they said, as the noise that they had
+heard a few nights before. And then it occurred to somebody, so far as I
+can make out with no particular reference to the odd conduct of the
+Treff Loyne sheepdog, that Thomas Griffith had not been seen for some
+time past. He had missed market day at Porth, he had not been at
+Tredonoc church, where he was a pretty regular attendant on Sunday; and
+then, as heads were put together, it appeared that nobody had seen any
+of the Griffith family for days and days.
+
+Now in a town, even in a small town, this process of putting heads
+together is a pretty quick business. In the country, especially in a
+countryside of wild lands and scattered and lonely farms and cottages,
+the affair takes time. Harvest was going on, everybody was busy in his
+own fields, and after the long day's hard work neither the farmer nor
+his men felt inclined to stroll about in search of news or gossip. A
+harvester at the day's end is ready for supper and sleep and for nothing
+else.
+
+And so it was late in that week when it was discovered that Thomas
+Griffith and all his house had vanished from this world.
+
+I have often been reproached for my curiosity over questions which are
+apparently of slight importance, or of no importance at all. I love to
+inquire, for instance, into the question of the visibility of a lighted
+candle at a distance. Suppose, that is, a candle lighted on a still,
+dark night in the country; what is the greatest distance at which you
+can see that there is a light at all? And then as to the human voice;
+what is its carrying distance, under good conditions, as a mere sound,
+apart from any matter of making out words that may be uttered?
+
+They are trivial questions, no doubt, but they have always interested
+me, and the latter point has its application to the strange business of
+Treff Loyne. That melancholy and hollow sound, that wailing summons that
+appalled the hearts of those who heard it was, indeed, a human voice,
+produced in a very exceptional manner; and it seems to have been heard
+at points varying from a mile and a half to two miles from the farm. I
+do not know whether this is anything extraordinary; I do not know
+whether the peculiar method of production was calculated to increase or
+to diminish the carrying power of the sound.
+
+Again and again I have laid emphasis in this story of the terror on the
+strange isolation of many of the farms and cottages in Meirion. I have
+done so in the effort to convince the townsman of something that he has
+never known. To the Londoner a house a quarter of a mile from the
+outlying suburban lamp, with no other dwelling within two hundred yards,
+is a lonely house, a place to fit with ghosts and mysteries and terrors.
+How can he understand then, the true loneliness of the white farmhouses
+of Meirion, dotted here and there, for the most part not even on the
+little lanes and deep winding byways, but set in the very heart of the
+fields, or alone on huge bastioned headlands facing the sea, and whether
+on the high verge of the sea or on the hills or in the hollows of the
+inner country, hidden from the sight of men, far from the sound of any
+common call. There is Penyrhaul, for example, the farm from which the
+foolish Merritt thought he saw signals of light being made: from seaward
+it is of course, widely visible; but from landward, owing partly to the
+curving and indented configuration of the bay, I doubt whether any other
+habitation views it from a nearer distance than three miles.
+
+And of all these hidden and remote places, I doubt if any is so deeply
+buried as Treff Loyne. I have little or no Welsh, I am sorry to say, but
+I suppose that the name is corrupted from Trellwyn, or Tref-y-llwyn,
+"the place in the grove," and, indeed, it lies in the very heart of
+dark, overhanging woods. A deep, narrow valley runs down from the high
+lands of the Allt, through these woods, through steep hillsides of
+bracken and gorse, right down to the great marsh, whence Merritt saw the
+dead man being carried. The valley lies away from any road, even from
+that by-road, little better than a bridlepath, where the four farmers,
+returning from church were perplexed by the strange antics of the
+sheepdog. One cannot say that the valley is overlooked, even from a
+distance, for so narrow is it that the ashgroves that rim it on either
+side seem to meet and shut it in. I, at all events, have never found any
+high place from which Treff Loyne is visible; though, looking down from
+the Allt, I have seen blue wood-smoke rising from its hidden chimneys.
+
+Such was the place, then, to which one September afternoon a party went
+up to discover what had happened to Griffith and his family. There were
+half a dozen farmers, a couple of policemen, and four soldiers,
+carrying their arms; those last had been lent by the officer commanding
+at the camp. Lewis, too, was of the party; he had heard by chance that
+no one knew what had become of Griffith and his family; and he was
+anxious about a young fellow, a painter, of his acquaintance, who had
+been lodging at Treff Loyne all the summer.
+
+They all met by the gate of Tredonoc churchyard, and tramped solemnly
+along the narrow lane; all of them, I think, with some vague discomfort
+of mind, with a certain shadowy fear, as of men who do not quite know
+what they may encounter. Lewis heard the corporal and the three soldiers
+arguing over their orders.
+
+"The Captain says to me," muttered the corporal, "'Don't hesitate to
+shoot if there's any trouble.' 'Shoot what, sir,' I says. 'The trouble,'
+says he, and that's all I could get out of him."
+
+The men grumbled in reply; Lewis thought he heard some obscure
+reference to ratpoison, and wondered what they were talking about.
+
+They came to the gate in the hedge, where the farm road led down to
+Treff Loyne. They followed this track, roughly made, with grass growing
+up between its loosely laid stones, down by the hedge from field to
+wood, till at last they came to the sudden walls of the valley, and the
+sheltering groves of the ash trees. Here the way curved down the steep
+hillside, and bent southward, and followed henceforward the hidden
+hollow of the valley, under the shadow of the trees.
+
+Here was the farm enclosure; the outlying walls of the yard and the
+barns and sheds and outhouses. One of the farmers threw open the gate
+and walked into the yard, and forthwith began bellowing at the top of
+his voice:
+
+"Thomas Griffith! Thomas Griffith! Where be you, Thomas Griffith?"
+
+The rest followed him. The corporal snapped out an order over his
+shoulder, and there was a rattling metallic noise as the men fixed their
+bayonets and became in an instant dreadful dealers out of death, in
+place of harmless fellows with a feeling for beer.
+
+"Thomas Griffith!" again bellowed the farmer.
+
+There was no answer to this summons. But they found poor Griffith lying
+on his face at the edge of the pond in the middle of the yard. There was
+a ghastly wound in his side, as if a sharp stake had been driven into
+his body.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+_The Letter of Wrath_
+
+
+It was a still September afternoon. No wind stirred in the hanging woods
+that were dark all about the ancient house of Treff Loyne; the only
+sound in the dim air was the lowing of the cattle; they had wandered, it
+seemed, from the fields and had come in by the gate of the farmyard and
+stood there melancholy, as if they mourned for their dead master. And
+the horses; four great, heavy, patient-looking beasts they were there
+too, and in the lower field the sheep were standing, as if they waited
+to be fed.
+
+"You would think they all knew there was something wrong," one of the
+soldiers muttered to another. A pale sun showed for a moment and
+glittered on their bayonets. They were standing about the body of poor,
+dead Griffith, with a certain grimness growing on their faces and
+hardening there. Their corporal snapped something at them again; they
+were quite ready. Lewis knelt down by the dead man and looked closely at
+the great gaping wound in his side.
+
+"He's been dead a long time," he said. "A week, two weeks, perhaps. He
+was killed by some sharp pointed weapon. How about the family? How many
+are there of them? I never attended them."
+
+"There was Griffith, and his wife, and his son Thomas and Mary Griffith,
+his daughter. And I do think there was a gentleman lodging with them
+this summer."
+
+That was from one of the farmers. They all looked at one another, this
+party of rescue, who knew nothing of the danger that had smitten this
+house of quiet people, nothing of the peril which had brought them to
+this pass of a farmyard with a dead man in it, and his beasts standing
+patiently about him, as if they waited for the farmer to rise up and
+give them their food. Then the party turned to the house. It was an old,
+sixteenth century building, with the singular round, "Flemish" chimney
+that is characteristic of Meirion. The walls were snowy with whitewash,
+the windows were deeply set and stone mullioned, and a solid,
+stone-tiled porch sheltered the doorway from any winds that might
+penetrate to the hollow of that hidden valley. The windows were shut
+tight. There was no sign of any life or movement about the place. The
+party of men looked at one another, and the churchwarden amongst the
+farmers, the sergeant of police, Lewis, and the corporal drew together.
+
+"What is it to goodness, doctor?" said the churchwarden.
+
+"I can tell you nothing at all--except that that poor man there has been
+pierced to the heart," said Lewis.
+
+"Do you think they are inside and they will shoot us?" said another
+farmer. He had no notion of what he meant by "they," and no one of them
+knew better than he. They did not know what the danger was, or where it
+might strike them, or whether it was from without or from within. They
+stared at the murdered man, and gazed dismally at one another.
+
+"Come!" said Lewis, "we must do something. We must get into the house
+and see what is wrong."
+
+"Yes, but suppose they are at us while we are getting in," said the
+sergeant. "Where shall we be then, Doctor Lewis?"
+
+The corporal put one of his men by the gate at the top of the farmyard,
+another at the gate by the bottom of the farmyard, and told them to
+challenge and shoot. The doctor and the rest opened the little gate of
+the front garden and went up to the porch and stood listening by the
+door. It was all dead silence. Lewis took an ash stick from one of the
+farmers and beat heavily three times on the old, black, oaken door
+studded with antique nails.
+
+He struck three thundering blows, and then they all waited. There was no
+answer from within. He beat again, and still silence. He shouted to the
+people within, but there was no answer. They all turned and looked at
+one another, that party of quest and rescue who knew not what they
+sought, what enemy they were to encounter. There was an iron ring on the
+door. Lewis turned it but the door stood fast; it was evidently barred
+and bolted. The sergeant of police called out to open, but again there
+was no answer.
+
+They consulted together. There was nothing for it but to blow the door
+open, and some one of them called in a loud voice to anybody that might
+be within to stand away from the door, or they would be killed. And at
+this very moment the yellow sheepdog came bounding up the yard from the
+woods and licked their hands and fawned on them and barked joyfully.
+
+"Indeed now," said one of the farmers; "he did know that there was
+something amiss. A pity it was, Thomas Williams, that we did not follow
+him when he implored us last Sunday."
+
+The corporal motioned the rest of the party back, and they stood looking
+fearfully about them at the entrance to the porch. The corporal
+disengaged his bayonet and shot into the keyhole, calling out once more
+before he fired. He shot and shot again; so heavy and firm was the
+ancient door, so stout its bolts and fastenings. At last he had to fire
+at the massive hinges, and then they all pushed together and the door
+lurched open and fell forward. The corporal raised his left hand and
+stepped back a few paces. He hailed his two men at the top and bottom of
+the farmyard. They were all right, they said. And so the party climbed
+and struggled over the fallen door into the passage, and into the
+kitchen of the farmhouse.
+
+Young Griffith was lying dead before the hearth, before a dead fire of
+white wood ashes. They went on towards the "parlor," and in the doorway
+of the room was the body of the artist, Secretan, as if he had fallen in
+trying to get to the kitchen. Upstairs the two women, Mrs. Griffith and
+her daughter, a girl of eighteen, were lying together on the bed in the
+big bedroom, clasped in each others' arms.
+
+They went about the house, searched the pantries, the back kitchen and
+the cellars; there was no life in it.
+
+"Look!" said Dr. Lewis, when they came back to the big kitchen, "look!
+It is as if they had been besieged. Do you see that piece of bacon, half
+gnawed through?"
+
+Then they found these pieces of bacon, cut from the sides on the kitchen
+wall, here and there about the house. There was no bread in the place,
+no milk, no water.
+
+"And," said one of the farmers, "they had the best water here in all
+Meirion. The well is down there in the wood; it is most famous water.
+The old people did use to call it Ffynnon Teilo; it was Saint Teilo's
+Well, they did say."
+
+"They must have died of thirst," said Lewis. "They have been dead for
+days and days."
+
+The group of men stood in the big kitchen and stared at one another, a
+dreadful perplexity in their eyes. The dead were all about them, within
+the house and without it; and it was in vain to ask why they had died
+thus. The old man had been killed with the piercing thrust of some sharp
+weapon; the rest had perished, it seemed probable, of thirst; but what
+possible enemy was this that besieged the farm and shut in its
+inhabitants? There was no answer.
+
+The sergeant of police spoke of getting a cart and taking the bodies
+into Porth, and Dr. Lewis went into the parlor that Secretan had used
+as a sitting-room, intending to gather any possessions or effects of the
+dead artist that he might find there. Half a dozen portfolios were piled
+up in one corner, there were some books on a side table, a fishing-rod
+and basket behind the door--that seemed all. No doubt there would be
+clothes and such matters upstairs, and Lewis was about to rejoin the
+rest of the party in the kitchen, when he looked down at some scattered
+papers lying with the books on the side table. On one of the sheets he
+read to his astonishment the words: "Dr. James Lewis, Porth." This was
+written in a staggering trembling scrawl, and examining the other leaves
+he saw that they were covered with writing.
+
+The table stood in a dark corner of the room, and Lewis gathered up the
+sheets of paper and took them to the window-ledge and began to read,
+amazed at certain phrases that had caught his eye. But the manuscript
+was in disorder; as if the dead man who had written it had not been
+equal to the task of gathering the leaves into their proper sequence; it
+was some time before the doctor had each page in its place. This was the
+statement that he read, with ever-growing wonder, while a couple of the
+farmers were harnessing one of the horses in the yard to a cart, and the
+others were bringing down the dead women.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I do not think that I can last much longer. We shared out the last
+drops of water a long time ago. I do not know how many days ago. We fall
+asleep and dream and walk about the house in our dreams, and I am often
+not sure whether I am awake or still dreaming, and so the days and
+nights are confused in my mind. I awoke not long ago, at least I suppose
+I awoke and found I was lying in the passage. I had a confused feeling
+that I had had an awful dream which seemed horribly real, and I thought
+for a moment what a relief it was to know that it wasn't true, whatever
+it might have been. I made up my mind to have a good long walk to
+freshen myself up, and then I looked round and found that I had been
+lying on the stones of the passage; and it all came back to me. There
+was no walk for me.
+
+"I have not seen Mrs. Griffith or her daughter for a long while. They
+said they were going upstairs to have a rest. I heard them moving about
+the room at first, now I can hear nothing. Young Griffith is lying in
+the kitchen, before the hearth. He was talking to himself about the
+harvest and the weather when I last went into the kitchen. He didn't
+seem to know I was there, as he went gabbling on in a low voice very
+fast, and then he began to call the dog, Tiger.
+
+"There seems no hope for any of us. We are in the dream of death...."
+
+Here the manuscript became unintelligible for half a dozen lines.
+Secretan had written the words "dream of death" three or four times
+over. He had begun a fresh word and had scratched it out and then
+followed strange, unmeaning characters, the script, as Lewis thought, of
+a terrible language. And then the writing became clear, clearer than it
+was at the beginning of the manuscript, and the sentences flowed more
+easily, as if the cloud on Secretan's mind had lifted for a while. There
+was a fresh start, as it were, and the writer began again, in ordinary
+letter-form:
+
+
+"DEAR LEWIS,
+
+"I hope you will excuse all this confusion and wandering. I intended to
+begin a proper letter to you, and now I find all that stuff that you
+have been reading--if this ever gets into your hands. I have not the
+energy even to tear it up. If you read it you will know to what a sad
+pass I had come when it was written. It looks like delirium or a bad
+dream, and even now, though my mind seems to have cleared up a good
+deal, I have to hold myself in tightly to be sure that the experiences
+of the last days in this awful place are true, real things, not a long
+nightmare from which I shall wake up presently and find myself in my
+rooms at Chelsea.
+
+"I have said of what I am writing, 'if it ever gets into your hands,'
+and I am not at all sure that it ever will. If what is happening here is
+happening everywhere else, then I suppose, the world is coming to an
+end. I cannot understand it, even now I can hardly believe it. I know
+that I dream such wild dreams and walk in such mad fancies that I have
+to look out and look about me to make sure that I am not still dreaming.
+
+"Do you remember that talk we had about two months ago when I dined with
+you? We got on, somehow or other, to space and time, and I think we
+agreed that as soon as one tried to reason about space and time one was
+landed in a maze of contradictions. You said something to the effect
+that it was very curious but this was just like a dream. 'A man will
+sometimes wake himself from his crazy dream,' you said, 'by realizing
+that he is thinking nonsense.' And we both wondered whether these
+contradictions that one can't avoid if one begins to think of time and
+space may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a dream, and
+the moon and the stars bits of nightmare. I have often thought over that
+lately. I kick at the walls as Dr. Johnson kicked at the stone, to make
+sure that the things about me are there. And then that other question
+gets into my mind--is the world really coming to an end, the world as we
+have always known it; and what on earth will this new world be like? I
+can't imagine it; it's a story like Noah's Ark and the Flood. People
+used to talk about the end of the world and fire, but no one ever
+thought of anything like this.
+
+"And then there's another thing that bothers me. Now and then I wonder
+whether we are not all mad together in this house. In spite of what I
+see and know, or, perhaps, I should say, because what I see and know is
+so impossible, I wonder whether we are not all suffering from a
+delusion. Perhaps we are our own gaolers, and we are really free to go
+out and live. Perhaps what we think we see is not there at all. I
+believe I have heard of whole families going mad together, and I may
+have come under the influence of the house, having lived in it for the
+last four months. I know there have been people who have been kept alive
+by their keepers forcing food down their throats, because they are quite
+sure that their throats are closed, so that they feel they are unable to
+swallow a morsel. I wonder now and then whether we are all like this in
+Treff Loyne; yet in my heart I feel sure that it is not so.
+
+"Still, I do not want to leave a madman's letter behind me, and so I
+will not tell you the full story of what I have seen, or believe I have
+seen. If I am a sane man you will be able to fill in the blanks for
+yourself from your own knowledge. If I am mad, burn the letter and say
+nothing about it. Or perhaps--and indeed, I am not quite sure--I may
+wake up and hear Mary Griffith calling to me in her cheerful sing-song
+that breakfast will be ready 'directly, in a minute,' and I shall enjoy
+it and walk over to Porth and tell you the queerest, most horrible dream
+that a man ever had, and ask what I had better take.
+
+"I think that it was on a Tuesday that we first noticed that there was
+something queer about, only at the time we didn't know that there was
+anything really queer in what we noticed. I had been out since nine
+o'clock in the morning trying to paint the marsh, and I found it a very
+tough job. I came home about five or six o'clock and found the family at
+Treff Loyne laughing at old Tiger, the sheepdog. He was making short
+runs from the farmyard to the door of the house, barking, with quick,
+short yelps. Mrs. Griffith and Miss Griffith were standing by the
+porch, and the dog would go to them, look in their faces, and then run
+up the farmyard to the gate, and then look back with that eager yelping
+bark, as if he were waiting for the women to follow him. Then, again and
+again, he ran up to them and tugged at their skirts as if he would pull
+them by main force away from the house.
+
+"Then the men came home from the fields and he repeated this
+performance. The dog was running all up and down the farmyard, in and
+out of the barn and sheds yelping, barking; and always with that eager
+run to the person he addressed, and running away directly, and looking
+back as, if to see whether we were following him. When the house door
+was shut and they all sat down to supper, he would give them no peace,
+till at last they turned him out of doors. And then he sat in the porch
+and scratched at the door with his claws, barking all the while. When
+the daughter brought in my meal, she said: 'We can't think what is come
+to old Tiger, and indeed, he has always been a good dog, too.'
+
+"The dog barked and yelped and whined and scratched at the door all
+through the evening. They let him in once, but he seemed to have become
+quite frantic. He ran up to one member of the family after another; his
+eyes were bloodshot and his mouth was foaming, and he tore at their
+clothes till they drove him out again into the darkness. Then he broke
+into a long, lamentable howl of anguish, and we heard no more of him."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+_The Last Words of Mr. Secretan_
+
+
+"I slept ill that night I awoke again and again from uneasy M dreams,
+and I seemed in my sleep to hear strange calls and noises and a sound of
+murmurs and beatings on the door. There were deep, hollow voices, too,
+that echoed in my sleep, and when I woke I could hear the autumn wind,
+mournful, on the hills above us. I started up once with a dreadful
+scream in my ears; but then the house was all still, and I fell again
+into uneasy sleep.
+
+"It was soon after dawn when I finally roused myself. The people in the
+house were talking to each other in high voices, arguing about something
+that I did not understand.
+
+"'It is those damned gipsies, I tell you,' said old Griffith.
+
+"'What would they do a thing like that for?' asked Mrs. Griffith. 'If it
+was stealing now--'"
+
+"'It is more likely that John Jenkins has done it out of spite,' said
+the son. 'He said that he would remember you when we did catch him
+poaching.'"
+
+"They seemed puzzled and angry, so far as I could make out, but not at
+all frightened. I got up and began to dress. I don't think I looked out
+of the window. The glass on my dressing-table is high and broad, and the
+window is small; one would have to poke one's head round the glass to
+see anything.
+
+"The voices were still arguing downstairs. I heard the old man say,
+'Well, here's for a beginning anyhow,' and then the door slammed.
+
+"A minute later the old man shouted, I think, to his son. Then there was
+a great noise which I will not describe more particularly, and a
+dreadful screaming and crying inside the house and a sound of rushing
+feet. They all cried out at once to each other. I heard the daughter
+crying, 'it is no good, mother, he is dead, indeed they have killed
+him,' and Mrs. Griffith screaming to the girl to let her go. And then
+one of them rushed out of the kitchen and shot the great bolts of oak
+across the door, just as something beat against it with a thundering
+crash.
+
+"I ran downstairs. I found them all in wild confusion, in an agony of
+grief and horror and amazement. They were like people who had seen
+something so awful that they had gone mad.
+
+"I went to the window looking out on the farmyard. I won't tell you all
+that I saw. But I saw poor old Griffith lying by the pond, with the
+blood pouring out of his side.
+
+"I wanted to go out to him and bring him in. But they told me that he
+must be stone dead, and such things also that it was quite plain that
+any one who went out of the house would not live more than a moment. We
+could not believe it, even as we gazed at the body of the dead man; but
+it was there. I used to wonder sometimes what one would feel like if one
+saw an apple drop from the tree and shoot up into the air and disappear.
+I think I know now how one would feel.
+
+"Even then we couldn't believe that it would last. We were not seriously
+afraid for ourselves. We spoke of getting out in an hour or two, before
+dinner anyhow. It couldn't last, because it was impossible. Indeed, at
+twelve o'clock young Griffith said he would go down to the well by the
+back way and draw another pail of water. I went to the door and stood by
+it. He had not gone a dozen yards before they were on him. He ran for
+his life, and we had all we could do to bar the door in time. And then I
+began to get frightened.
+
+"Still we could not believe in it. Somebody would come along shouting in
+an hour or two and it would all melt away and vanish. There could not be
+any real danger. There was plenty of bacon in the house, and half the
+weekly baking of loaves and some beer in the cellar and a pound or so of
+tea, and a whole pitcher of water that had been drawn from the well the
+night before. We could do all right for the day and in the morning it
+would have all gone away.
+
+"But day followed day and it was still there. I knew Treff Loyne was a
+lonely place--that was why I had gone there, to have a long rest from
+all the jangle and rattle and turmoil of London, that makes a man alive
+and kills him too. I went to Treff Loyne because it was buried in the
+narrow valley under the ash trees, far away from any track. There was
+not so much as a footpath that was near it; no one ever came that way.
+Young Griffith had told me that it was a mile and a half to the nearest
+house, and the thought of the silent peace and retirement of the farm
+used to be a delight to me.
+
+"And now this thought came back without delight, with terror. Griffith
+thought that a shout might be heard on a still night up away on the
+Allt, 'if a man was listening for it,' he added, doubtfully. My voice
+was clearer and stronger than his, and on the second night I said I
+would go up to my bedroom and call for help through the open window. I
+waited till it was all dark and still, and looked out through the window
+before opening it. And then I saw over the ridge of the long barn across
+the yard what looked like a tree, though I knew there was no tree there.
+It was a dark mass against the sky, with wide-spread boughs, a tree of
+thick, dense growth. I wondered what this could be, and I threw open the
+window, not only because I was going to call for help, but because I
+wanted to see more clearly what the dark growth over the barn really
+was.
+
+"I saw in the depth of the dark of it points of fire, and colors in
+light, all glowing and moving, and the air trembled. I stared out into
+the night, and the dark tree lifted over the roof of the barn and rose
+up in the air and floated towards me. I did not move till at the last
+moment when it was close to the house; and then I saw what it was and
+banged the window down only just in time. I had to fight, and I saw the
+tree that was like a burning cloud rise up in the night and sink again
+and settle over the barn.
+
+"I told them downstairs of this. They sat with white faces, and Mrs.
+Griffith said that ancient devils were let loose and had come out of the
+trees and out of the old hills because of the wickedness that was on the
+earth. She began to, murmur something to herself, something that sounded
+to me like broken-down Latin.
+
+"I went up to my room again an hour later, but the dark tree swelled
+over the barn. Another day went by, and at dusk I looked out, but the
+eyes of fire were watching me. I dared not open the window.
+
+"And then I thought of another plan. There was the great old fireplace,
+with the round Flemish chimney going high above the house. If I stood
+beneath it and shouted I thought perhaps the sound might be carried
+better than if I called out of the window; for all I knew the round
+chimney might act as a sort of megaphone. Night after night, then, I
+stood in the hearth and called for help from nine o'clock to eleven. I
+thought of the lonely place, deep in the valley of the ashtrees, of the
+lonely hills and lands about it. I thought of the little cottages far
+away and hoped that my voice might reach to those within them. I thought
+of the winding lane high on the Allt, and of the few men that came there
+of nights; but I hoped that my cry might come to one of them.
+
+"But we had drunk up the beer, and we would only let ourselves have
+water by little drops, and on the fourth night my throat was dry, and I
+began to feel strange and weak; I knew that all the voice I had in my
+lungs would hardly reach the length of the field by the farm.
+
+"It was then we began to dream of wells and fountains, and water coming
+very cold, in little drops, out of rocky places in the middle of a cool
+wood. We had given up all meals; now and then one would cut a lump from
+the sides of bacon on the kitchen wall and chew a bit of it, but the
+saltness was like fire.
+
+"There was a great shower of rain one night. The girl said we might open
+a window and hold out bowls and basins and catch the rain. I spoke of
+the cloud with burning eyes. She said 'we will go to the window in the
+dairy at the back, and one of us can get some water at all events,' She
+stood up with her basin on the stone slab in the dairy and looked out
+and heard the plashing of the rain, falling very fast. And she
+unfastened the catch of the window and had just opened it gently with
+one hand, for about an inch, and had her basin in the other hand. 'And
+then,' said she, 'there was something that began to tremble and shudder
+and shake as it did when we went to the Choral Festival at St. Teilo's,
+and the organ played, and there was the cloud and the burning close
+before me.'
+
+"And then we began to dream, as I say. I woke up in my sitting-room one
+hot afternoon when the sun was shining, and I had been looking and
+searching in my dream all through the house, and I had gone down to the
+old cellar that wasn't used, the cellar with the pillars and the vaulted
+room, with an iron pike in my hand. Something said to me that there was
+water there, and in my dream I went to a heavy stone by the middle
+pillar and raised it up, and there beneath was a bubbling well of cold,
+clear water, and I had just hollowed my hand to drink it when I woke. I
+went into the kitchen and told young Griffith. I said I was sure there
+was water there. He shook his head, but he took up the great kitchen
+poker and we went down to the old cellar. I showed him the stone by the
+pillar, and he raised it up. But there was no well.
+
+"Do you know, I reminded myself of many people whom I have met in life?
+I would not be convinced. I was sure that, after all, there was a well
+there. They had a butcher's cleaver in the kitchen and I took it down to
+the old cellar and hacked at the ground with it. The others didn't
+interfere with me. We were getting past that. We hardly ever spoke to
+one another. Each one would be wandering about the house, upstairs and
+downstairs, each one of us, I suppose, bent on his own foolish plan and
+mad design, but we hardly ever spoke. Years ago, I was an actor for a
+bit, and I remember how it was on first nights; the actors treading
+softly up and down the wings, by their entrance, their lips moving and
+muttering over the words of their parts, but without a word for one
+another. So it was with us. I came upon young Griffith one evening
+evidently trying to make a subterranean passage under one of the walls
+of the house. I knew he was mad, as he knew I was mad when he saw me
+digging for a well in the cellar; but neither said anything to the
+other.
+
+"Now we are past all this. We are too weak. We dream when we are awake
+and when we dream we think we wake. Night and day come and go and we
+mistake one for another; I hear Griffith murmuring to himself about the
+stars when the sun is high at noonday, and at midnight I have found
+myself thinking that I walked in bright sunlit meadows beside cold,
+rushing streams that flowed from high rocks.
+
+"Then at the dawn figures in black robes, carrying lighted tapers in
+their hands pass slowly about and about; and I hear great rolling organ
+music that sounds as if some tremendous rite were to begin, and voices
+crying in an ancient song shrill from the depths of the earth.
+
+"Only a little while ago I heard a voice which sounded as if it were at
+my very ears, but rang and echoed and resounded as if it were rolling
+and reverberated from the vault of some cathedral, chanting in terrible
+modulations. I heard the words quite clearly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"_Incipit liber iræ Domini Dei nostri._ (Here beginneth The Book of the
+Wrath of the Lord our God.)
+
+"And then the voice sang the word _Aleph,_ prolonging it, it seemed
+through ages, and a light was extinguished as it began the chapter:
+
+"_In that day, saith the Lord, there shall be a cloud over the land, and
+in the cloud a burning and a shape of fire, and out of the cloud shall
+issue forth my messengers; they shall run all together, they shall not
+turn aside; this shall be a day of exceeding bitterness, without
+salvation. And on every high hill, saith the Lord of Hosts, I will set
+my sentinels, and my armies shall encamp in the place of every valley;
+in the house that is amongst rushes I will execute judgment, and in vain
+shall they fly for refuge to the munitions of the rocks. In the groves
+of the woods, in the places where the leaves are as a tent above them,
+they shall find the sword of the slayer; and they that put their trust
+in walled cities shall be confounded. Woe unto the armed man, woe unto
+him that taketh pleasure in the strength of his artillery, for a little
+thing shall smite him, and by one that hath no might shall he be brought
+down into the dust. That which is low shall be set on high; I will make
+the lamb and the young sheep to be as the lion from the swellings of
+Jordan; they shall not spare, saith the Lord, and the doves shall be as
+eagles on the hill Engedi; none shall be found that may abide the onset
+of their battle._
+
+"Even now I can hear the voice rolling far away, as if it came from the
+altar of a great church and I stood at the door. There are lights very
+far away in the hollow of a vast darkness, and one by one they are put
+out. I hear a voice chanting again with that endless modulation that
+climbs and aspires to the stars, and shines there, and rushes down to
+the dark depths of the earth, again to ascend; the word is _Zain._"
+
+Here the manuscript lapsed again, and finally into utter, lamentable
+confusion. There were scrawled lines wavering across the page on which
+Secretan seemed to have been trying to note the unearthly music that
+swelled in his dying ears. As the scrapes and scratches of ink showed,
+he had tried hard to begin a new sentence. The pen had dropped at last
+out of his hand upon the paper, leaving a blot and a smear upon it.
+
+Lewis heard the tramp of feet along the passage; they were carrying out
+the dead to the cart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+_The End of the Terror_
+
+
+Dr. Lewis maintained that we should never begin to understand the real
+significance of life until we began to study just those aspects of it
+which we now dismiss and overlook as utterly inexplicable, and
+therefore, unimportant.
+
+We were discussing a few months ago the awful shadow of the terror which
+at length had passed away from the land. I had formed my opinion, partly
+from observation, partly from certain facts which had been communicated
+to me, and the pass-words having been exchanged, I found that Lewis had
+come by very different ways to the same end.
+
+"And yet," he said, "it is not a true end, or rather, it is like all
+the ends of human inquiry, it leads one to a great mystery. We must
+confess that what has happened might have happened at any time in the
+history of the world. It did not happen till a year ago as a matter of
+fact, and therefore we made up our minds that it never could happen; or,
+one would better say, it was outside the range even of imagination. But
+this is our way. Most people are quite sure that the Black
+Death--otherwise the Plague--will never invade Europe again. They have
+made up their complacent minds that it was due to dirt and bad drainage.
+As a matter of fact the Plague had nothing to do with dirt or with
+drains; and there is nothing to prevent its ravaging England to-morrow.
+But if you tell people so, they won't believe you. They won't believe in
+anything that isn't there at the particular moment when you are talking
+to them. As with the Plague, so with the Terror. We could not believe
+that such a thing could ever happen. Remnant said, truly enough, that
+whatever it was, it was outside theory, outside our theory. Flatland
+cannot believe in the cube or the sphere."
+
+I agreed with all this. I added that sometimes the world was incapable
+of seeing, much less believing, that which was before its own eyes.
+
+"Look," I said, "at any eighteenth century print of a Gothic cathedral.
+You will find that the trained artistic eye even could not behold in any
+true sense the building that was before it. I have seen an old print of
+Peterborough Cathedral that looks as if the artist had drawn it from a
+clumsy model, constructed of bent wire and children's bricks.
+
+"Exactly; because Gothic was outside the aesthetic theory (and therefore
+vision) of the time. You can't believe what you don't see: rather, you
+can't see what you don't believe. It was so during the time of the
+Terror. All this bears out what Coleridge said as to the necessity of
+having the idea before the facts could be of any service to one. Of
+course, he was right; mere facts, without the correlating idea, are
+nothing and lead to no conclusion. We had plenty of facts, but we could
+make nothing of them. I went home at the tail of that dreadful
+procession from Treff Loyne in a state of mind very near to madness. I
+heard one of the soldiers saying to the other: 'There's no rat that'll
+spike a man to the heart, Bill.' I don't know why, but I felt that if I
+heard any more of such talk as that I should go crazy; it seemed to me
+that the anchors of reason were parting. I left the party and took the
+short cut across the fields into Porth. I looked up Davies in the High
+Street and arranged with him that he should take on any cases I might
+have that evening, and then I went home and gave my man his instructions
+to send people on. And then I shut myself up to think it all out--if I
+could.
+
+"You must not suppose that my experiences of that afternoon had afforded
+me the slightest illumination. Indeed, if it had not been that I had
+seen poor old Griffith's body lying pierced in his own farmyard, I think
+I should have been inclined to accept one of Secretan's hints, and to
+believe that the whole family had fallen a victim to a collective
+delusion or hallucination, and had shut themselves up and died of thirst
+through sheer madness. I think there have been such cases. It's the
+insanity of inhibition, the belief that you can't do something which you
+are really perfectly capable of doing. But; I had seen the body of the
+murdered man and the wound that had killed him.
+
+"Did the manuscript left by Secretan give me no hint? Well, it seemed to
+me to make confusion worse confounded. You have seen it; you know that
+in certain places it is evidently mere delirium, the wanderings of a
+dying mind. How was I to separate the facts from the phantasms--lacking
+the key to the whole enigma. Delirium is often a sort of cloud-castle,
+a sort of magnified and distorted shadow of actualities, but it is a
+very difficult thing, almost an impossible thing, to reconstruct the
+real house from the distortion of it, thrown on the clouds of the
+patient's brain. You see, Secretan in writing that extraordinary
+document almost insisted on the fact that he was not in his proper
+sense; that for days he had been part asleep, part awake, part
+delirious. How was one to judge his statement, to separate delirium from
+fact? In one thing he stood confirmed; you remember he speaks of calling
+for help up the old chimney of Treff Loyne; that did seem to fit in with
+the tales of a hollow, moaning cry that had been heard upon the Allt: so
+far one could take him as a recorder of actual experiences. And I looked
+in the old cellars of the farm and found a frantic sort of rabbit-hole
+dug by one of the pillars; again he was confirmed. But what was one to
+make of that story of the chanting voice, and the letters of the Hebrew
+alphabet, and the chapter out of some unknown Minor Prophet? When one
+has the key it is easy enough to sort out the facts, or the hints of
+facts from the delusions; but I hadn't the key on that September
+evening. I was forgetting the 'tree' with lights and fires in it; that,
+I think, impressed me more than anything with the feeling that
+Secretan's story was, in the main, a true story. I had seen a like
+appearance down there in my own garden; but what was it?
+
+"Now, I was saying that, paradoxically, it is only by the inexplicable
+things that life can be explained. We are apt to say, you know, 'a very
+odd coincidence' and pass the matter by, as if there were no more to be
+said, or as if that were the end of it. Well, I believe that the only
+real path lies through the blind alleys."
+
+"How do you mean?"
+
+"Well, this is an instance of what I mean. I told you about Merritt, my
+brother-in-law, and the capsizing of that boat, the _Mary Ann_. He had
+seen, he said, signal lights flashing from one of the farms on the
+coast, and he was quite certain that the two things were intimately
+connected as cause and effect. I thought it all nonsense, and I was
+wondering how I was going to shut him up when a big moth flew into the
+room through that window, fluttered about, and succeeded in burning
+itself alive in the lamp. That gave me my cue; I asked Merritt if he
+knew why moths made for lamps or something of the kind; I thought it
+would be a hint to him that I was sick of his flashlights and his
+half-baked theories. So it was--he looked sulky and held his tongue.
+
+"But a few minutes later I was called out by a man who had found his
+little boy dead in a field near his cottage about an hour before. The
+child was so still, they said, that a great moth had settled on his
+forehead and only fluttered away when they lifted up the body. It was
+absolutely illogical; but it was this odd 'coincidence' of the moth in
+my lamp and the moth on the dead boy's forehead that first set me on the
+track. I can't say that it guided me in any real sense; it was more like
+a great flare of red paint on a wall; it rang up my attention, if I may
+say so; it was a sort of shock like a bang on the big drum. No doubt
+Merritt was talking great nonsense that evening so far as his particular
+instance went; the flashes of light from the farm had nothing to do with
+the wreck of the boat. But his general principle was sound; when you
+hear a gun go off and see a man fall it is idle to talk of 'a mere
+coincidence.' I think a very interesting book might be written on this
+question: I would call it 'A Grammar of Coincidence.'
+
+"But as you will remember, from having read my notes on the matter, I
+was called in about ten days later to see a man named Cradock, who had
+been found in a field near his farm quite dead. This also was at night.
+His wife found him, and there were some very queer things in her story.
+She said that the hedge of the field looked as if it were changed; she
+began to be afraid that she had lost her way and got into the wrong
+field. Then she said the hedge was lighted up as if there were a lot of
+glow-worms in it, and when she peered over the stile there seemed to be
+some kind of glimmering upon the ground, and then the glimmering melted
+away, and she found her husband's body near where this light had been.
+Now this man Cradock had been suffocated just as the little boy Roberts
+had been suffocated, and as that man in the Midlands who took a short
+cut one night had been suffocated. Then I remembered that poor Johnnie
+Roberts had called out about 'something shiny' over the stile just
+before he played truant. Then, on my part, I had to contribute the very
+remarkable sight I witnessed here, as I looked down over the garden; the
+appearance as of a spreading tree where I knew there was no such tree,
+and then the shining and burning of lights and moving colors. Like the
+poor child and Mrs. Cradock, I had seen something shiny, just as some
+man in Stratfordshire had seen a dark cloud with points of fire in it
+floating over the trees. And Mrs. Cradock thought that the shape of the
+trees in the hedge had changed.
+
+"My mind almost uttered the word that was wanted; but you see the
+difficulties. This set of circumstances could not, so far as I could
+see, have any relation with the other circumstances of the Terror. How
+could I connect all this with the bombs and machine-guns of the
+Midlands, with the armed men who kept watch about the munition shops by
+day and night. Then there was the long list of people here who had
+fallen over the cliffs or into the quarry; there were the cases of the
+men stifled in the slime of the marshes; there was the affair of the
+family murdered in front of their cottage on the Highway; there was the
+capsized _Mary Ann_. I could not see any thread that could bring all
+these incidents together; they seemed to me to be hopelessly
+disconnected. I could not make out any relation between the agency that
+beat out the brains of the Williams's and the agency, that overturned
+the boat. I don't know, but I think it's very likely if nothing more had
+happened that I should have put the whole thing down as an unaccountable
+series of crimes and accidents which chanced to occur in Meirion in the
+summer of 1915. Well, of course, that would have been an impossible
+standpoint in view of certain incidents in Merritt's story. Still, if
+one is confronted by the insoluble, one lets it go at last. If the
+mystery is inexplicable, one pretends that there isn't any mystery. That
+is the justification for what is called free thinking.
+
+"Then came that extraordinary business of Treff Loyne. I couldn't put
+that on one side. I couldn't pretend that nothing strange or out of the
+way had happened. There was no getting over it or getting round it. I
+had seen with my eyes that there was a mystery, and a most horrible
+mystery. I have forgotten my logic, but one might say that Treff Loyne
+demonstrated the existence of a mystery in the figure of Death.
+
+"I took it all home, as I have told you, and sat down for the evening
+before it. It appalled me, not only by its horror, but here again by the
+discrepancy between its terms. Old Griffith, so far as I could judge,
+had been killed by the thrust of a pike or perhaps of a sharpened stake:
+how could one relate this to the burning tree that had floated over the
+ridge of the barn. It was as if I said to you: 'here is a man drowned,
+and here is a man burned alive: show that each death was caused by the
+same agency!' And the moment that I left this particular case of Treff
+Loyne, and tried to get some light on it from other instances of the
+Terror, I would think of the man in the midlands who heard the feet of
+a thousand men rustling in the wood, and their voices as if dead men sat
+up in their bones and talked. And then I would say to myself, 'and how
+about that boat overturned in a calm sea?' There seemed no end to it, no
+hope of any solution.
+
+"It was, I believe, a sudden leap of the mind that liberated me from the
+tangle. It was quite beyond logic. I went back to that evening when
+Merritt was boring me with his flashlights, to the moth in the candle,
+and to the moth on the forehead of poor Johnnie Roberts. There was no
+sense in it; but I suddenly determined that the child and Joseph Cradock
+the farmer, and that unnamed Stratfordshire man, all found at night, all
+asphyxiated, had been choked by vast swarms of moths. I don't pretend
+even now that this is demonstrated, but I'm sure it's true.
+
+"Now suppose you encounter a swarm of these creatures in the dark.
+Suppose the smaller ones fly up your nostrils. You will gasp for breath
+and open your mouth. Then, suppose some hundreds of them fly into your
+mouth, into your gullet, into your windpipe, what will happen to you?
+You will be dead in a very short time, choked, asphyxiated."
+
+"But the moths would be dead too. They would be found in the bodies."
+
+"The moths? Do you know that it is extremely difficult to kill a moth
+with cyanide of potassium? Take a frog, kill it, open its stomach. There
+you will find its dinner of moths and small beetles, and the 'dinner'
+will shake itself and walk off cheerily, to resume an entirely active
+existence. No; that is no difficulty.
+
+"Well, now I came to this. I was shutting out all the other cases. I was
+confining myself to those that came under the one formula. I got to the
+assumption or conclusion, whichever you like, that certain people had
+been asphyxiated by the action of moths. I had accounted for that
+extraordinary appearance of burning or colored lights that I had
+witnessed myself, when I saw the growth of that strange tree in my
+garden. That was clearly the cloud with points of fire in it that the
+Stratfordshire man took for a new and terrible kind of poison gas, that
+was the shiny something that poor little Johnnie Roberts had seen over
+the stile, that was the glimmering light that had led Mrs. Cradock to
+her husband's dead body, that was the assemblage of terrible eyes that
+had watched over Treff Loyne by night. Once on the right track I
+understood all this, for coming into this room in the dark, I have been
+amazed by the wonderful burning and the strange fiery colors of the eyes
+of a single moth, as it crept up the pane of glass, outside. Imagine the
+effect of myriads of such eyes, of the movement of these lights and
+fires in a vast swarm of moths, each insect being in constant motion
+while it kept its place in the mass: I felt that all this was clear and
+certain.
+
+"Then the next step. Of course, we know nothing really about moths;
+rather, we know nothing of moth reality. For all I know there may be
+hundreds of books which treat of moth and nothing but moth. But these
+are scientific books, and science only deals with surfaces; it has
+nothing to do with realities--it is impertinent if it attempts to do
+with realities. To take a very minor matter; we don't even know why the
+moth desires the flame. But we do know what the moth does not do; it
+does not gather itself into swarms with the object of destroying human
+life. But here, by the hypothesis, were cases in which the moth had done
+this very thing; the moth race had entered, it seemed, into a malignant
+conspiracy against the human race. It was quite impossible, no
+doubt--that is to say, it had never happened before--but I could see no
+escape from this conclusion.
+
+"These insects, then, were definitely hostile to man; and then I
+stopped, for I could not see the next step, obvious though it seems to
+me now. I believe that the soldiers' scraps of talk on the way to Treff
+Loyne and back flung the next plank over the gulf. They had spoken of
+'rat poison,' of no rat being able to spike a man through the heart; and
+then, suddenly, I saw my way clear. If the moths were infected with
+hatred of men, and possessed the design and the power of combining
+against him; why not suppose this hatred, this design, this power shared
+by other non-human creatures.
+
+"The secret of the Terror might be condensed into a sentence: the
+animals had revolted against men.
+
+"Now, the puzzle became easy enough; one had only to classify. Take the
+cases of the people who met their deaths by falling over cliffs or over
+the edge of quarries. We think of sheep as timid creatures, who always
+ran away. But suppose sheep that don't run away; and, after all, in
+reason why should they run away? Quarry or no quarry, cliff or no
+cliff; what would happen to you if a hundred sheep ran after you instead
+of running from you? There would be no help for it; they would have you
+down and beat you to death or stifle you. Then suppose man, woman, or
+child near a cliff's edge or a quarry-side, and a sudden rush of sheep.
+Clearly there is no help; there is nothing for it but to go over. There
+can be no doubt that that, is what happened in all these cases.
+
+"And again; you know the country and you know how a herd of cattle will
+sometimes pursue people through the fields in a solemn, stolid sort of
+way. They behave as if they wanted to close in on you. Townspeople
+sometimes get frightened and scream and run; you or I would take no
+notice, or at the utmost, wave our sticks at the herd, which will stop
+dead or lumber off. But suppose they don't lumber off. The mildest old
+cow, remember, is stronger than any man. What can one man or half a
+dozen men do against half a hundred of these beasts no longer
+restrained by that mysterious inhibition, which has made for ages the
+strong the humble slaves of the weak? But if you are botanizing in the
+marsh, like that poor fellow who was staying at Porth, and forty or
+fifty young cattle gradually close round you, and refuse to move when
+you shout and wave your stick, but get closer and closer instead, and
+get you into the slime. Again, where is your help? If you haven't got an
+automatic pistol, you must go down and stay down, while the beasts lie
+quietly on you for five minutes. It was a quicker death for poor
+Griffith of Treff Loyne--one of his own beasts gored him to death with
+one sharp thrust of its horn into his heart. And from that morning those
+within the house were closely besieged by their own cattle and horses
+and sheep; and when those unhappy people within opened a window to call
+for help or to catch a few drops of rain water to relieve their burning
+thirst, the cloud waited for them with its myriad eyes of fire. Can you
+wonder that Secretan's statement reads in places like mania? You
+perceive the horrible position of those people in Treff Loyne; not only
+did they see death advancing on them, but advancing with incredible
+steps, as if one were to die not only in nightmare but by nightmare. But
+no one in his wildest, most fiery dreams had ever imagined such a fate.
+I am not astonished that Secretan at one moment suspected the evidence
+of his own senses, at another surmised that the world's end had come."
+
+"And how about the Williams's who were murdered on the Highway near
+here?"
+
+"The horses were the murderers; the horses that afterwards stampeded the
+camp below. By some means which is still obscure to me they lured that
+family into the road and beat their brains out; their shod hoofs were
+the instruments of execution. And, as for the _Mary Ann_, the boat that
+was capsized, I have no doubt that it was overturned by a sudden rush
+of the porpoises that were gamboling about in the water of Larnac Bay. A
+porpoise is a heavy beast--half a dozen of them could easily upset a
+light rowing-boat. The munition works? Their enemy was rats. I believe
+that it has been calculated that in 'greater London' the number of rats
+is about equal to the number of human beings, that is, there are about
+seven millions of them. The proportion would be about the same in all
+the great centers of population; and the rat, moreover, is, on occasion,
+migratory in its habits. You can understand now that story of the
+_Semiramis_, beating about the mouth of the Thames, and at last cast
+away by Arcachon, her only crew dry heaps of bones. The rat is an expert
+boarder of ships. And so one can understand the tale told by the
+frightened man who took the path by the wood that led up from the new
+munition works. He thought he heard a thousand men treading softly
+through the wood and chattering to one another in some horrible tongue;
+what he did hear was the marshaling of an army of rats--their array
+before the battle.
+
+"And conceive the terror of such an attack. Even one rat in a fury is
+said to be an ugly customer to meet; conceive then, the irruption of
+these terrible, swarming myriads, rushing upon the helpless, unprepared,
+astonished workers in the munition shops."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There can be no doubt, I think, that Dr. Lewis was entirely justified in
+these extraordinary conclusions. As I say, I had arrived at pretty much
+the same end, by different ways; but this rather as to the general
+situation, while Lewis had made his own particular study of those
+circumstances of the Terror that were within his immediate purview, as a
+physician in large practice in the southern part of Meirion. Of some of
+the cases which he reviewed he had, no doubt, no immediate or first-hand
+knowledge; but he judged these instances by their similarity to the
+facts which had come under his personal notice. He spoke of the affairs
+of the quarry at Llanfihangel on the analogy of the people who were
+found dead at the bottom of the cliffs near Porth, and he was no doubt
+justified in doing so. He told me that, thinking the whole matter over,
+he was hardly more astonished by the Terror in itself than by the
+strange way in which he had arrived at his conclusions.
+
+"You know," he said, "those certain evidences of animal malevolence
+which we knew of, the bees that stung the child to death, the trusted
+sheepdog's turning savage, and so forth. Well, I got no light whatever
+from all this; it suggested nothing to me--simply because I had not got
+that 'idea' which Coleridge rightly holds necessary in all inquiry;
+facts _qua_ facts, as we said, mean nothing and, come to nothing. You do
+not believe, therefore you cannot see.
+
+"And then, when the truth at last appeared it was through the whimsical
+'coincidence' as we call such signs, of the moth in my lamp and the
+moth on the dead child's forehead. This, I think, is very
+extraordinary."
+
+"And there seems to have been one beast that remained faithful; the dog
+at Treff Loyne. That is strange."
+
+"That remains a mystery."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It would not be wise, even now, to describe too closely the terrible
+scenes that were to be seen in the munition areas of the north and the
+midlands during the black months of the Terror. Out of the factories
+issued at black midnight the shrouded dead in their coffins, and their
+very kinsfolk did not know how they had come by their deaths. All the
+towns were full of houses of mourning, were full of dark and terrible
+rumors; incredible, as the incredible reality. There were things done
+and suffered that perhaps never will be brought to light, memories and
+secret traditions of these things will be whispered in families,
+delivered from father to son, growing wilder with the passage of the
+years, but never growing wilder than the truth.
+
+It is enough to say that the cause of the Allies was for awhile in
+deadly peril. The men at the front called in their extremity for guns
+and shells. No one told them what was happening in the places where
+these munitions were made.
+
+At first the position was nothing less than desperate; men in high
+places were almost ready to cry "mercy" to the enemy. But, after the
+first panic, measures were taken such as those described by Merritt in
+his account of the matter. The workers were armed with special weapons,
+guards were mounted, machine-guns were placed in position, bombs and
+liquid flame were ready against the obscene hordes of the enemy, and the
+"burning clouds" found a fire fiercer than their own. Many deaths
+occurred amongst the airmen; but they, too, were given special guns,
+arms that scattered shot broadcast, and so drove away the dark flights
+that threatened the airplanes.
+
+And, then, in the winter of 1915-16, the Terror ended suddenly as it had
+begun. Once more a sheep was a frightened beast that ran instinctively
+from a little child; the cattle were again solemn, stupid creatures,
+void of harm; the spirit and the convention of malignant design passed
+out of the hearts of all the animals. The chains that they had cast off
+for awhile were thrown again about them.
+
+And, finally, there comes the inevitable "why?" Why did the beasts who
+had been humbly and patiently subject to man, or affrighted by his
+presence, suddenly know their strength and learn how to league together,
+and declare bitter war against their ancient master?
+
+It is a most difficult and obscure question. I give what explanation I
+have to give with very great diffidence, and an eminent disposition to
+be corrected, if a clearer light can be found.
+
+Some friends of mine, for whose judgment I have very great respect, are
+inclined to think that there was a certain contagion of hate. They hold
+that the fury of the whole world at war, the great passion of death that
+seems driving all humanity to destruction, infected at last these lower
+creatures, and in place of their native instinct of submission, gave
+them rage and wrath and ravening.
+
+This may be the explanation. I cannot say that it is not so, because I
+do not profess to understand the working of the universe. But I confess
+that the theory strikes me as fanciful. There may be a contagion of hate
+as there is a contagion of smallpox; I do not know, but I hardly believe
+it.
+
+In my opinion, and it is only an opinion, the source of the great revolt
+of the beasts is to be sought in a much subtler region of inquiry. I
+believe that the subjects revolted because the king abdicated. Man has
+dominated the beasts throughout the ages, the spiritual has reigned over
+the rational through the peculiar quality and grace of spirituality that
+men possess, that makes a man to be that which he is. And when he
+maintained this power and grace, I think it is pretty clear that between
+him and the animals there was a certain treaty and alliance. There was
+supremacy on the one hand, and submission on the other; but at the same
+time there was between the two that cordiality which exists between
+lords and subjects in a well-organized state. I know a socialist who
+maintains that Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" give a picture of true
+democracy. I do not know about that, but I see that knight and miller
+were able to get on quite pleasantly together, just because the knight
+knew that he was a knight and the miller knew that he was a miller. If
+the knight had had conscientious objections to his knightly grade,
+while the miller saw no reason why he should not be a knight, I am sure
+that their intercourse would have been difficult, unpleasant, and
+perhaps murderous.
+
+So with man. I believe in the strength and truth of tradition. A learned
+man said to me a few weeks ago: "When I have to choose between the
+evidence of tradition and the evidence of a document, I always believe
+the evidence of tradition. Documents may be falsified, and often are
+falsified; tradition is never falsified." This is true; and, therefore,
+I think, one may put trust in the vast body of folklore which asserts
+that there was once a worthy and friendly alliance between man and the
+beasts. Our popular tale of Dick Whittington and his Cat no doubt
+represents the adaptation of a very ancient legend to a comparatively
+modern personage, but we may go back into the ages and find the popular
+tradition asserting that not only are the animals the subjects, but
+also the friends of man.
+
+All that was in virtue of that singular spiritual element in man which
+the rational animals do not possess. Spiritual does not mean
+respectable, it does not even mean moral, it does not mean "good" in the
+ordinary acceptation of the word. It signifies the royal prerogative of
+man, differentiating him from the beasts.
+
+For long ages he has been putting off this royal robe, he has been
+wiping the balm of consecration from his own breast. He has declared,
+again and again, that he is not spiritual, but rational, that is, the
+equal of the beasts over whom he was once sovereign. He has vowed that
+he is not Orpheus but Caliban.
+
+But the beasts also have within them something which corresponds to the
+spiritual quality in men--we are content to call it instinct. They
+perceived that the throne was vacant--not even friendship was possible
+between them and the self-deposed monarch. If he were not king he was a
+sham, an imposter, a thing to be destroyed.
+
+Hence, I think, the Terror. They have risen once--they may rise again.
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Terror, by Arthur Machen
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Terror, by Arthur Machen
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Terror
+       A Mystery
+
+Author: Arthur Machen
+
+Release Date: March 20, 2011 [EBook #35617]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TERROR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dave Haren and Marc D'Hooghe at
+http://www.freeliterature.org (From images generously made
+available by the Internet Archive
+
+
+
+
+
+THE TERROR
+
+_A MYSTERY_
+
+BY
+
+ARTHUR MACHEN
+
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE BOWMEN"
+
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+ROBERT M. MCBRIDE & COMPANY
+
+UNION SQUARE, NORTH
+
+1917
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    I _The Coming of the Terror_
+
+   II _Death in the Village_
+
+  III _The Doctor's Theory_
+
+   IV _The Spread of the Terror_
+
+    V _The Incident of the Unknown Tree_
+
+   VI _Mr. Remnant's Z Ray_
+
+  VII _The Case of the Hidden Germans_
+
+ VIII _What Mr. Merritt Found_
+
+   IX _The Light on the Water_
+
+    X _The Child and the Moth_
+
+   XI _At Treff Loyne Farm_
+
+  XII _The Letter of Wrath_
+
+ XIII _The Last Words of Mr. Secretan_
+
+  XIV _The End of the Terror_
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+_The Coming of the Terror_
+
+
+After two years we are turning once more to the morning's news with a
+sense of appetite and glad expectation. There were thrills at the
+beginning of the war; the thrill of horror and of a doom that seemed at
+once incredible and certain; this was when Namur fell and the German
+host swelled like a flood over the French fields, and drew very near to
+the walls of Paris. Then we felt the thrill of exultation when the good
+news came that the awful tide had been turned back, that Paris and the
+world were safe; for awhile at all events.
+
+Then for days we hoped for more news as good as this or better. Has Von
+Kluck been surrounded? Not to-day, but perhaps he will be surrounded
+to-morrow. But the days became weeks, the weeks drew out to months; the
+battle in the West seemed frozen. Now and again things were done that
+seemed hopeful, with promise of events still better. But Neuve Chapelle
+and Loos dwindled into disappointments as their tale was told fully; the
+lines in the West remained, for all practical purposes of victory,
+immobile. Nothing seemed to happen; there was nothing to read save the
+record of operations that were clearly trifling and insignificant.
+People speculated as to the reason of this inaction; the hopeful said
+that Joffre had a plan, that he was "nibbling," others declared that we
+were short of munitions, others again that the new levies were not yet
+ripe for battle. So the months went by, and almost two years of war had
+been completed before the motionless English line began to stir and
+quiver as if it awoke from a long sleep, and began to roll onward,
+overwhelming the enemy.
+
+The secret of the long inaction of the British Armies has been well
+kept. On the one hand it was rigorously protected by the censorship,
+which severe, and sometimes severe to the point of absurdity--"the
+captains and the ... depart," for instance--became in this particular
+matter ferocious. As soon as the real significance of that which was
+happening, or beginning to happen, was perceived by the authorities, an
+underlined circular was issued to the newspaper proprietors of Great
+Britain and Ireland. It warned each proprietor that he might impart the
+contents of this circular to one other person only, such person being
+the responsible editor of his paper, who was to keep the communication
+secret under the severest penalties. The circular forbade any mention of
+certain events that had taken place, that might take place; it forbade
+any kind of allusion to these events or any hint of their existence, or
+of the possibility of their existence, not only in the Press, but in
+any form whatever. The subject was not to be alluded to in conversation,
+it was not to be hinted at, however obscurely, in letters; the very
+existence of the circular, its subject apart, was to be a dead secret.
+
+These measures were successful. A wealthy newspaper proprietor of the
+North, warmed a little at the end of the Throwsters' Feast (which was
+held as usual, it will be remembered), ventured to say to the man next
+to him: "How awful it would be, wouldn't it, if...." His words were
+repeated, as proof, one regrets to say, that it was time for "old
+Arnold" to "pull himself together"; and he was fined a thousand pounds.
+Then, there was the case of an obscure weekly paper published in the
+county town of an agricultural district in Wales. The _Meiros Observer_
+(we will call it) was issued from a stationer's back premises, and
+filled its four pages with accounts of local flower shows, fancy fairs
+at vicarages, reports of parish councils, and rare bathing fatalities.
+It also issued a visitors' list, which has been known to contain six
+names.
+
+This enlightened organ printed a paragraph, which nobody noticed, which
+was very like paragraphs that small country newspapers have long been in
+the habit of printing, which could hardly give so much as a hint to any
+one--to any one, that is, who was not fully instructed in the secret. As
+a matter of fact, this piece of intelligence got into the paper because
+the proprietor, who was also the editor, incautiously left the last
+processes of this particular issue to the staff, who was the
+Lord-High-Every-thing-Else of the establishment; and the staff put in a
+bit of gossip he had heard in the market to fill up two inches on the
+back page. But the result was that the _Meiros Observer_ ceased to
+appear, owing to "untoward circumstances" as the proprietor said; and he
+would say no more. No more, that is, by way of explanation, but a great
+deal more by way of execration of "damned, prying busybodies."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now a censorship that is sufficiently minute and utterly remorseless can
+do amazing things in the way of hiding ... what it wants to hide. Before
+the war, one would have thought otherwise; one would have said that,
+censor or no censor, the fact of the murder at X or the fact of the bank
+robbery at Y would certainly become known; if not through the Press, at
+all events through rumor and the passage of the news from mouth to
+mouth. And this would be true--of England three hundred years ago, and
+of savage tribelands of to-day. But we have grown of late to such a
+reverence for the printed word and such a reliance on it, that the old
+faculty of disseminating news by word of mouth has become atrophied.
+Forbid the Press to mention the fact that Jones has been murdered, and
+it is marvelous how few people will hear of it, and of those who hear
+how few will credit the story that they have heard. You meet a man in
+the train who remarks that he has been told something about a murder in
+Southwark; there is all the difference in the world between the
+impression you receive from such a chance communication and that given
+by half a dozen lines of print with name, and street and date and all
+the facts of the case. People in trains repeat all sorts of tales, many
+of them false; newspapers do not print accounts of murders that have not
+been committed.
+
+Then another consideration that has made for secrecy. I may have seemed
+to say that the old office of rumor no longer exists; I shall be
+reminded of the strange legend of "the Russians" and the mythology of
+the "Angels of Mons." But let me point out, in the first place, that
+both these absurdities depended on the papers for their wide
+dissemination. If there had been no newspapers or magazines Russians and
+Angels would have made but a brief, vague appearance of the most
+shadowy kind--a few would have heard of them, fewer still would have
+believed in them, they would have been gossiped about for a bare week or
+two, and so they would have vanished away.
+
+And, then, again, the very fact of these vain rumors and fantastic tales
+having been so widely believed for a time was fatal to the credit of any
+stray mutterings that may have got abroad. People had been taken in
+twice; they had seen how grave persons, men of credit, had preached and
+lectured about the shining forms that had saved the British Army at
+Mons, or had testified to the trains, packed with gray-coated
+Muscovites, rushing through the land at dead of night: and now there was
+a hint of something more amazing than either of the discredited legends.
+But this time there was no word of confirmation to be found in daily
+paper, or weekly review, or parish magazine, and so the few that heard
+either laughed, or, being serious, went home and jotted down notes for
+essays on "War-time Psychology: Collective Delusions."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I followed neither of these courses. For before the secret circular had
+been issued my curiosity had somehow been aroused by certain paragraphs
+concerning a "Fatal Accident to Well-known Airman." The propeller of the
+airplane had been shattered, apparently by a collision with a flight of
+pigeons; the blades had been broken and the machine had fallen like lead
+to the earth. And soon after I had seen this account, I heard of some
+very odd circumstances relating to an explosion in a great munition
+factory in the Midlands. I thought I saw the possibility of a connection
+between two very different events.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It has been pointed out to me by friends who have been good enough to
+read this record, that certain phrases I have used may give the
+impression that I ascribe all the delays of the war on the Western front
+to the extraordinary circumstances which occasioned the issue of the
+Secret Circular. Of course this is not the case, there were many reasons
+for the immobility of our lines from October 1914 to July 1916. These
+causes have been evident enough and have been openly discussed and
+deplored. But behind them was something of infinitely greater moment. We
+lacked men, but men were pouring into the new army; we were short of
+shells, but when the shortage was proclaimed the nation set itself to
+mend this matter with all its energy. We could undertake to supply the
+defects of our army both in men and munitions--_if_ the new and
+incredible danger could be overcome. It has been overcome; rather,
+perhaps, it has ceased to exist; and the secret may now be told.
+
+I have said my attention was attracted by an account of the death of a
+well-known airman. I have not the habit of preserving cuttings, I am
+sorry to say, so that I cannot be precise as to the date of this event.
+To the best of my belief it was either towards the end of May or the
+beginning of June 1915. The newspaper paragraph announcing the death of
+Flight-Lieutenant Western-Reynolds was brief enough; accidents, and
+fatal accidents, to the men who are storming the air for us are,
+unfortunately, by no means so rare as to demand an elaborated notice.
+But the manner in which Western-Reynolds met his death struck me as
+extraordinary, inasmuch as it revealed a new danger in the element that
+we have lately conquered. He was brought down, as I said, by a flight of
+birds; of pigeons, as appeared by what was found on the bloodstained and
+shattered blades of the propeller. An eye-witness of the accident, a
+fellow-officer, described how Western-Reynolds set out from the
+aerodrome on a fine afternoon, there being hardly any wind. He was
+going to France; he had made the journey to and fro half a dozen times
+or more, and felt perfectly secure and at ease.
+
+"'Wester' rose to a great height at once, and we could scarcely see the
+machine. I was turning to go when one of the fellows called out, 'I say!
+What's this?' He pointed up, and we saw what looked like a black cloud
+coming from the south at a tremendous rate. I saw at once it wasn't a
+cloud; it came with a swirl and a rush quite different from any cloud
+I've ever seen. But for a second I couldn't make out exactly what it
+was. It altered its shape and turned into a great crescent, and wheeled
+and veered about as if it was looking for something. The man who had
+called out had got his glasses, and was staring for all he was worth.
+Then he shouted that it was a tremendous flight of birds, 'thousands of
+them.' They went on wheeling and beating about high up in the air, and
+we were watching them, thinking it was interesting, but not supposing
+that they would make any difference to 'Wester,' who was just about out
+of sight. His machine was just a speck. Then the two arms of the
+crescent drew in as quick as lightning, and these thousands of birds
+shot in a solid mass right up there across the sky, and flew away
+somewhere about nor'-nor'-by-west. Then Henley, the man with the
+glasses, called out, 'He's down!' and started running, and I went after
+him. We got a car and as we were going along Henley told me that he'd
+seen the machine drop dead, as if it came out of that cloud of birds. He
+thought then that they must have mucked up the propeller somehow. That
+turned out to be the case. We found the propeller blades all broken and
+covered with blood and pigeon feathers, and carcasses of the birds had
+got wedged in between the blades, and were sticking to them."
+
+This was the story that the young airman told one evening in a small
+company. He did not speak "in confidence," so I have no hesitation in
+reproducing what he said. Naturally, I did not take a verbatim note of
+his conversation, but I have something of a knack of remembering talk
+that interests me, and I think my reproduction is very near to the tale
+that I heard. And let it be noted that the flying man told his story
+without any sense or indication of a sense that the incredible, or all
+but the incredible, had happened. So far as he knew, he said, it was the
+first accident of the kind. Airmen in France had been bothered once or
+twice by birds--he thought they were eagles--flying viciously at them,
+but poor old "Wester" had been the first man to come up against a flight
+of some thousands of pigeons.
+
+"And perhaps I shall be the next," he added, "but why look for trouble?
+Anyhow, I'm going to see _Toodle-oo_ to-morrow afternoon."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, I heard the story, as one hears all the varied marvels and
+terrors of the air; as one heard some years ago of "air pockets,"
+strange gulfs or voids in the atmosphere into which airmen fell with
+great peril; or as one heard of the experience of the airman who flew
+over the Cumberland mountains in the burning summer of 1911, and as he
+swam far above the heights was suddenly and vehemently blown upwards,
+the hot air from the rocks striking his plane as if it had been a blast
+from a furnace chimney. We have just begun to navigate a strange region;
+we must expect to encounter strange adventures, strange perils. And here
+a new chapter in the chronicles of these perils and adventures had been
+opened by the death of Western-Reynolds; and no doubt invention and
+contrivance would presently hit on some way of countering the new
+danger.
+
+It was, I think, about a week or ten days after the airman's death that
+my business called me to a northern town, the name of which, perhaps,
+had better remain unknown. My mission was to inquire into certain
+charges of extravagance which had been laid against the working people,
+that is, the munition workers of this especial town. It was said that
+the men who used to earn L2 10s. a week were now getting from seven to
+eight pounds, that "bits of girls" were being paid two pounds instead of
+seven or eight shillings, and that, in consequence, there was an orgy of
+foolish extravagance. The girls, I was told, were eating chocolates at
+four, five, and six shillings a pound, the women were ordering
+thirty-pound pianos which they couldn't play, and the men bought gold
+chains at ten and twenty guineas apiece.
+
+I dived into the town in question and found, as usual, that there was a
+mixture of truth and exaggeration in the stories that I had heard.
+Gramophones, for example: they cannot be called in strictness
+necessaries, but they were undoubtedly finding a ready sale, even in the
+more expensive brands. And I thought that there were a great many very
+spick and span perambulators to be seen on the pavement; smart
+perambulators, painted in tender shades of color and expensively fitted.
+
+"And how can you be surprised if people will have a bit of a fling?" a
+worker said to me. "We're seeing money for the first time in our lives,
+and it's bright. And we work hard for it, and we risk our lives to get
+it. You've heard of explosion yonder?"
+
+He mentioned certain works on the outskirts of the town. Of course,
+neither the name of the works nor of the town had been printed; there
+had been a brief notice of "Explosion at Munition Works in the Northern
+District: Many Fatalities." The working man told me about it, and added
+some dreadful details.
+
+"They wouldn't let their folks see bodies; screwed them up in coffins as
+they found them in shop. The gas had done it."
+
+"Turned their faces black, you mean?"
+
+"Nay. They were all as if they had been bitten to pieces."
+
+This was a strange gas.
+
+I asked the man in the northern town all sorts of questions about the
+extraordinary explosion of which he had spoken to me. But he had very
+little more to say. As I have noted already, secrets that may not be
+printed are often deeply kept; last summer there were very few people
+outside high official circles who knew anything about the "Tanks," of
+which we have all been talking lately, though these strange instruments
+of war were being exercised and tested in a park not far from London. So
+the man who told me of the explosion in the munition factory was most
+likely genuine in his profession that he knew nothing more of the
+disaster. I found out that he was a smelter employed at a furnace on the
+other side of the town to the ruined factory; he didn't know even what
+they had been making there; some very dangerous high explosive, he
+supposed. His information was really nothing more than a bit of
+gruesome gossip, which he had heard probably at third or fourth or fifth
+hand. The horrible detail of faces "as if they had been bitten to
+pieces" had made its violent impression on him, that was all.
+
+I gave him up and took a tram to the district of the disaster; a sort of
+industrial suburb, five miles from the center of the town. When I asked
+for the factory, I was told that it was no good my going to it as there
+was nobody there. But I found it; a raw and hideous shed with a walled
+yard about it, and a shut gate. I looked for signs of destruction, but
+there was nothing. The roof was quite undamaged; and again it struck me
+that this had been a strange accident. There had been an explosion of
+sufficient violence to kill workpeople in the building, but the building
+itself showed no wounds or scars.
+
+A man came out of the gate and locked it behind him. I began to ask him
+some sort of question, or rather, I began to "open" for a question with
+"A terrible business here, they tell me," or some such phrase of
+convention. I got no farther. The man asked me if I saw a policeman
+walking down the street. I said I did, and I was given the choice of
+getting about my business forthwith or of being instantly given in
+charge as a spy. "Th'ast better be gone and quick about it," was, I
+think, his final advice, and I took it.
+
+Well, I had come literally up against a brick wall. Thinking the problem
+over, I could only suppose that the smelter or his informant had twisted
+the phrases of the story. The smelter had said the dead men's faces were
+"bitten to pieces"; this might be an unconscious perversion of "eaten
+away." That phrase might describe well enough the effect of strong
+acids, and, for all I knew of the processes of munition-making, such
+acids might be used and might explode with horrible results in some
+perilous stage of their admixture.
+
+It was a day or two later that the accident to the airman,
+Western-Reynolds, came into my mind. For one of those instants which are
+far shorter than any measure of time there flashed out the possibility
+of a link between the two disasters. But here was a wild impossibility,
+and I drove it away. And yet I think that the thought, mad as it seemed,
+never left me; it was the secret light that at last guided me through a
+somber grove of enigmas.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was about this time, so far as the date can be fixed, that a whole
+district, one might say a whole county, was visited by a series of
+extraordinary and terrible calamities, which were the more terrible
+inasmuch as they continued for some time to be inscrutable mysteries. It
+is, indeed, doubtful whether these awful events do not still remain
+mysteries to many of those concerned; for before the inhabitants of
+this part of the country had time to join one link of evidence to
+another the circular was issued, and thenceforth no one knew how to
+distinguish undoubted fact from wild and extravagant surmise.
+
+The district in question is in the far west of Wales; I shall call it,
+for convenience, Meirion. In it there is one seaside town of some repute
+with holiday-makers for five or six weeks in the summer, and dotted
+about the county there are three or four small old towns that seem
+drooping in a slow decay, sleepy and gray with age and forgetfulness.
+They remind me of what I have read of towns in the west of Ireland.
+Grass grows between the uneven stones of the pavements, the signs above
+the shop windows decline, half the letters of these signs are missing,
+here and there a house has been pulled down, or has been allowed to
+slide into ruin, and wild greenery springs up through the fallen stones,
+and there is silence in all the streets. And, it is to be noted, these
+are not places that were once magnificent. The Celts have never had the
+art of building, and so far as I can see, such towns as Towy and Merthyr
+Tegveth and Meiros must have been always much as they are now, clusters
+of poorish, meanly-built houses, ill-kept and down at heel.
+
+And these few towns are thinly scattered over a wild country where north
+is divided from south by a wilder mountain range. One of these places is
+sixteen miles from any station; the others are doubtfully and deviously
+connected by single-line railways served by rare trains that pause and
+stagger and hesitate on their slow journey up mountain passes, or stop
+for half an hour or more at lonely sheds called stations, situated in
+the midst of desolate marshes. A few years ago I traveled with an
+Irishman on one of these queer lines, and he looked to right and saw the
+bog with its yellow and blue grasses and stagnant pools, and he looked
+to left and saw a ragged hillside, set with gray stone walls. "I can
+hardly believe," he said, "that I'm not still in the wilds of Ireland."
+
+Here, then, one sees a wild and divided and scattered region a land of
+outland hills and secret and hidden valleys. I know white farms on this
+coast which must be separate by two hours of hard, rough walking from
+any other habitation, which are invisible from any other house. And
+inland, again, the farms are often ringed about by thick groves of ash,
+planted by men of old days to shelter their roof-trees from rude winds
+of the mountain and stormy winds of the sea; so that these places, too,
+are hidden away, to be surmised only by the wood smoke that rises from
+the green surrounding leaves. A Londoner must see them to believe in
+them; and even then he can scarcely credit their utter isolation.
+
+Such, then in the main is Meirion, and on this land in the early summer
+of last year terror descended--a terror without shape, such as no man
+there had ever known.
+
+It began with the tale of a little child who wandered out into the lanes
+to pick flowers one sunny afternoon, and never came back to the cottage
+on the hill.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+_Death in the Village_
+
+
+The child who was lost came from a lonely cottage that stands on the
+slope of a steep hillside called the Allt, or the height. The land about
+it is wild and ragged; here the growth of gorse and bracken, here a
+marshy hollow of reeds and rushes, marking the course of the stream from
+some hidden well, here thickets of dense and tangled undergrowth, the
+outposts of the wood. Down through this broken and uneven ground a path
+leads to the lane at the bottom of the valley; then the land rises again
+and swells up to the cliffs over the sea, about a quarter of a mile
+away. The little girl, Gertrude Morgan, asked her mother if she might go
+down to the lane and pick the purple flowers--these were orchids--that
+grew there, and her mother gave her leave, telling her she must be sure
+to be back by tea-time, as there was apple-tart for tea.
+
+She never came back. It was supposed that she must have crossed the road
+and gone to the cliff's edge, possibly in order to pick the sea-pinks
+that were then in full blossom. She must have slipped, they said, and
+fallen into the sea, two hundred feet below. And, it may be said at
+once, that there was no doubt some truth in this conjecture, though it
+stopped very far short of the whole truth. The child's body must have
+been carried out by the tide, for it was never found.
+
+The conjecture of a false step or of a fatal slide on the slippery turf
+that slopes down to the rocks was accepted as being the only explanation
+possible. People thought the accident a strange one because, as a rule,
+country children living by the cliffs and the sea become wary at an
+early age, and Gertrude Morgan was almost ten years old. Still, as the
+neighbors said, "that's how it must have happened, and it's a great
+pity, to be sure." But this would not do when in a week's time a strong
+young laborer failed to come to his cottage after the day's work. His
+body was found on the rocks six or seven miles from the cliffs where the
+child was supposed to have fallen; he was going home by a path that he
+had used every night of his life for eight or nine years, that he used
+of dark nights in perfect security, knowing every inch of it. The police
+asked if he drank, but he was a teetotaler; if he were subject to fits,
+but he wasn't. And he was not murdered for his wealth, since
+agricultural laborers are not wealthy. It was only possible again to
+talk of slippery turf and a false step; but people began to be
+frightened. Then a woman was found with her neck broken at the bottom of
+a disused quarry near Llanfihangel, in the middle of the county. The
+"false step" theory was eliminated here, for the quarry was guarded with
+a natural hedge of gorse bushes. One would have to struggle and fight
+through sharp thorns to destruction in such a place as this; and indeed
+the gorse bushes were broken as if some one had rushed furiously through
+them, just above the place where the woman's body was found. And this
+was strange: there was a dead sheep lying beside her in the pit, as if
+the woman and the sheep together had been chased over the brim of the
+quarry. But chased by whom, or by what? And then there was a new form of
+terror.
+
+This was in the region of the marshes under the mountain. A man and his
+son, a lad of fourteen or fifteen, set out early one morning to work and
+never reached the farm where they were bound. Their way skirted the
+marsh, but it was broad, firm and well metalled, and it had been raised
+about two feet above the bog. But when search was made in the evening of
+the same day Phillips and his son were found dead in the marsh, covered
+with black slime and pondweed. And they lay some ten yards from the
+path, which, it would seem, they must have left deliberately. It was
+useless of course, to look for tracks in the black ooze, for if one
+threw a big stone into it a few seconds removed all marks of the
+disturbance. The men who found the two bodies beat about the verges and
+purlieus of the marsh in hope of finding some trace of the murderers;
+they went to and fro over the rising ground where the black cattle were
+grazing, they searched the alder thickets by the brook; but they
+discovered nothing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Most horrible of all these horrors, perhaps, was the affair of the
+Highway, a lonely and unfrequented by-road that winds for many miles on
+high and lonely land. Here, a mile from any other dwelling, stands a
+cottage on the edge of a dark wood. It was inhabited by a laborer named
+Williams, his wife, and their three children. One hot summer's evening,
+a man who had been doing a day's gardening at a rectory three or four
+miles away, passed the cottage, and stopped for a few minutes to chat
+with Williams, the laborer, who was pottering about his garden, while
+the children were playing on the path by the door. The two talked of
+their neighbors and of the potatoes till Mrs. Williams appeared at the
+doorway and said supper was ready, and Williams turned to go into the
+house. This was about eight o'clock, and in the ordinary course the
+family would have their supper and be in bed by nine, or by half-past
+nine at latest. At ten o'clock that night the local doctor was driving
+home along the Highway. His horse shied violently and then stopped dead
+just opposite the gate to the cottage. The doctor got down, frightened
+at what he saw; and there on the roadway lay Williams, his wife, and the
+three children, stone dead, all of them. Their skulls were battered in
+as if by some heavy iron instrument; their faces were beaten into a
+pulp.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+_The Doctors Theory_
+
+
+It is not easy to make any picture of the horror that lay dark on the
+hearts of the people of Meirion. It was no longer possible to believe or
+to pretend to believe that these men and women and children had met
+their deaths through strange accidents. The little girl and the young
+laborer might have slipped and fallen over the cliffs, but the woman who
+lay dead with the dead sheep at the bottom of the quarry, the two men
+who had been lured into the ooze of the marsh, the family who were found
+murdered on the Highway before their own cottage door; in these cases
+there could be no room for the supposition of accident. It seemed as if
+it were impossible to frame any conjecture or outline of a conjecture
+that would account for these hideous and, as it seemed, utterly
+purposeless crimes. For a time people said that there must be a madman
+at large, a sort of country variant of Jack the Ripper, some horrible
+pervert who was possessed by the passion of death, who prowled darkling
+about that lonely land, hiding in woods and in wild places, always
+watching and seeking for the victims of his desire.
+
+Indeed, Dr. Lewis, who found poor Williams, his wife and children
+miserably slaughtered on the Highway, was convinced at first that the
+presence of a concealed madman in the countryside offered the only
+possible solution to the difficulty.
+
+"I felt sure," he said to me afterwards, "that the Williams's had been
+killed by a homicidal maniac. It was the nature of the poor creatures'
+injuries that convinced me that this was the case. Some years ago
+thirty-seven or thirty-eight years ago as a matter of fact--I had
+something to do with a case which on the face of it had a strong
+likeness to the Highway murder. At that time I had a practice at Usk, in
+Monmouthshire. A whole family living in a cottage by the roadside were
+murdered one evening; it was called, I think, the Llangibby murder; the
+cottage was near the village of that name. The murderer was caught in
+Newport; he was a Spanish sailor, named Garcia, and it appeared that he
+had killed father, mother, and the three children for the sake of the
+brass works of an old Dutch clock, which were found on him when he was
+arrested.
+
+"Garcia had been serving a month's imprisonment in Usk Jail for some
+small theft, and on his release he set out to walk to Newport, nine or
+ten miles away; no doubt to get another ship. He passed the cottage and
+saw the man working in his garden. Garcia stabbed him with his sailor's
+knife. The wife rushed out; he stabbed her. Then he went into the
+cottage and stabbed the three children, tried to set the place on fire,
+and made off with the clockworks. That looked like the deed of a madman,
+but Garcia wasn't mad--they hanged him, I may say--he was merely a man
+of a very low type, a degenerate who hadn't the slightest value for
+human life. I am not sure, but I think he came from one of the Spanish
+islands, where the people are said to be degenerates, very likely from
+too much inter-breeding.
+
+"But my point is that Garcia stabbed to kill and did kill, with one blow
+in each case. There was no senseless hacking and slashing. Now those
+poor people on the Highway had their heads smashed to pieces by what
+must have been a storm of blows. Any one of them would have been fatal,
+but the murderer must have gone on raining blows with his iron hammer on
+people who were already stone dead. And _that_ sort of thing is the work
+of a madman, and nothing but a madman. That's how I argued the matter
+out to myself just after the event.
+
+"I was utterly wrong, monstrously wrong. But who could have suspected
+the truth?"
+
+Thus Dr. Lewis, and I quote him, or the substance of him, as
+representative of most of the educated opinion of the district at the
+beginnings of the terror. People seized on this theory largely because
+it offered at least the comfort of an explanation, and any explanation,
+even the poorest, is better than an intolerable and terrible mystery.
+Besides, Dr. Lewis's theory was plausible; it explained the lack of
+purpose that seemed to characterize the murders. And yet--there were
+difficulties even from the first. It was hardly possible that a strange
+madman should be able to keep hidden in a countryside where any stranger
+is instantly noted and noticed; sooner or later he would be seen as he
+prowled along the lanes or across the wild places. Indeed, a drunken,
+cheerful, and altogether harmless tramp was arrested by a farmer and his
+man in the fact and act of sleeping off beer under a hedge; but the
+vagrant was able to prove complete and undoubted alibis, and was soon
+allowed to go on his wandering way.
+
+Then another theory, or rather a variant of Dr. Lewis's theory, was
+started. This was to the effect that the person responsible for the
+outrages was, indeed, a madman; but a madman only at intervals. It was
+one of the members of the Porth Club, a certain Mr. Remnant, who was
+supposed to have originated this more subtle explanation. Mr. Remnant
+was a middle-aged man, who, having nothing particular to do, read a
+great many books by way of conquering the hours. He talked to the
+club--doctors, retired colonels, parsons, lawyers--about "personality,"
+quoted various psychological textbooks in support of his contention that
+personality was sometimes fluid and unstable, went back to "Dr. Jekyll
+and Mr. Hyde" as good evidence of this proposition, and laid stress on
+Dr. Jekyll's speculation that the human soul, so far from being one and
+indivisible, might, possibly turn out to be a mere polity, a state in
+which dwelt many strange and incongruous citizens, whose characters were
+not merely unknown but altogether unsurmised by that form of
+consciousness which so rashly assumed that it was not only the president
+of the republic but also its sole citizen.
+
+"The long and the short of it is," Mr. Remnant concluded, "that any one
+of us may be the murderer, though he hasn't the faintest notion of the
+fact. Take Llewelyn there."
+
+Mr. Payne Llewelyn was an elderly lawyer, a rural Tulkinghorn. He was
+the hereditary solicitor to the Morgans of Pentwyn. This does not sound
+anything tremendous to the Saxons of London; but the style is far more
+than noble to the Celts of West Wales; it is immemorial; Teilo Sant was
+of the collaterals of the first known chief of the race. And Mr. Payne
+Llewelyn did his best to look like the legal adviser of this ancient
+house. He was weighty, he was cautious, he was sound, he was secure. I
+have compared him to Mr. Tulkinghorn of Lincoln's Inn Fields; but Mr.
+Llewelyn would most certainly never have dreamed of employing his
+leisure in peering into the cupboards where the family skeletons were
+hidden. Supposing such cupboards to have existed, Mr. Payne Llewelyn
+would have risked large out-of-pocket expenses to furnish them with
+double, triple, impregnable locks. He was a new man, an _advena_,
+certainly; for he was partly of the Conquest, being descended on one
+side from Sir Payne Turberville; but he meant to stand by the old stock.
+
+"Take Llewelyn now," said Mr. Remnant. "Look here, Llewelyn, can you
+produce evidence to show where you were on the night those people were
+murdered on the Highway? I thought not."
+
+Mr. Llewelyn, an elderly man, as I have said, hesitated before speaking.
+
+"I thought not," Remnant went on. "Now I say that it is perfectly
+possible that Llewelyn may be dealing death throughout Meirion, although
+in his present personality he may not have the faintest suspicion that
+there is another Llewelyn within him, a Llewelyn who follows murder as a
+fine art."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Payne Llewelyn did not at all relish Mr. Remnant's suggestion that
+he might well be a secret murderer, ravening for blood, remorseless as a
+wild beast. He thought the phrase about his following murder as a fine
+art was both nonsensical and in the worst taste, and his opinion was not
+changed when Remnant pointed out that it was used by De Quincey in the
+title of one of his most famous essays.
+
+"If you had allowed me to speak," he said with some coldness of manner,
+"I would have told you that on Tuesday last, the night on which those
+unfortunate people were murdered on the Highway I was staying at the
+Angel Hotel, Cardiff. I had business in Cardiff, and I was detained
+till Wednesday afternoon."
+
+Having given this satisfactory alibi, Mr. Payne Llewelyn left the club,
+and did not go near it for the rest of the week.
+
+Remnant explained to those who stayed in the smoking room that, of
+course, he had merely used Mr. Llewelyn as a concrete example of his
+theory, which, he persisted, had the support of a considerable body of
+evidence.
+
+"There are several cases of double personality on record," he declared.
+"And I say again that it is quite possible that these murders may have
+been committed by one of us in his secondary personality. Why, I may be
+the murderer in my Remnant B. state, though Remnant A. knows nothing
+whatever about it, and is perfectly convinced that he could not kill a
+fowl, much less a whole family. Isn't it so, Lewis?"
+
+Dr. Lewis said it was so, in theory, but he thought not in fact.
+
+"Most of the cases of double or multiple personality that have been
+investigated," he said, "have been in connection with the very dubious
+experiments of hypnotism, or the still more dubious experiments of
+spiritualism. All that sort of thing, in my opinion, is like tinkering
+with the works of a clock--amateur tinkering, I mean. You fumble about
+with the wheels and cogs and bits of mechanism that you don't really
+know anything about; and then you find your clock going backwards or
+striking 240 at tea-time. And I believe it's just the same thing with
+these psychical research experiments; the secondary personality is very
+likely the result of the tinkering and fumbling with a very delicate
+apparatus that we know nothing about. Mind, I can't say that it's
+impossible for one of us to be the Highway murderer in his B. state, as
+Remnant puts it. But I think it's extremely improbable. Probability is
+the guide of life, you know, Remnant," said Dr. Lewis, smiling at that
+gentleman, as if to say that he also had done a little reading in his
+day. "And it follows" therefore, that improbability is also the guide of
+life. When you get a very high degree of probability, that is, you are
+justified in taking it as a certainty; and on the other hand, if a
+supposition is highly improbable, you are justified in treating it as an
+impossible one. That is, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a
+thousand."
+
+"How about the thousandth case?" said Remnant. "Supposing these
+extraordinary crimes constitute the thousandth case?"
+
+The doctor smiled and shrugged his shoulders, being tired of the
+subject. But for some little time highly respectable members of Porth
+society would look suspiciously at one another wondering whether, after
+all, there mightn't be "something in it." However, both Mr. Remnant's
+somewhat crazy theory and Dr. Lewis's plausible theory became untenable
+when two more victims of an awful and mysterious death were offered up
+in, sacrifice, for a man was found dead in the Llanfihangel quarry,
+where the woman had been discovered. And on the same day a girl of
+fifteen was found broken on the jagged rocks under the cliffs near
+Porth. Now, it appeared that these two deaths must have occurred at
+about the same time, within an hour of one another, certainly; and the
+distance between the quarry and the cliffs by Black Rock is certainly
+twenty miles.
+
+"A motor could do it," one man said.
+
+But it was pointed out that there was no high road between the two
+places; indeed, it might be said that there was no road at all between
+them. There was a network of deep, narrow, and tortuous lands that
+wandered into one another at all manner of queer angles for, say,
+seventeen miles; this in the middle, as it were, between Black Rock and
+the quarry at Llanfihangel. But to get to the high land of the cliffs
+one had to take a path that went through two miles of fields; and the
+quarry lay a mile away from the nearest by-road in the midst of gorse
+and bracken and broken land. And, finally, there was no track of
+motor-car or motor-bicycle in the lanes which must have been followed to
+pass from one place to the other.
+
+"What about an airplane, then?" said the man of the motor-car theory.
+Well, there was certainly an aerodrome not far from one of the two
+places of death; but somehow, nobody believed that the Flying Corps
+harbored a homicidal maniac. It seemed clear, therefore, that there must
+be more than one person concerned in the terror of Meirion. And Dr.
+Lewis himself abandoned his own theory.
+
+"As I said to Remnant at the Club," he remarked, "improbability is the
+guide of life. I can't believe that there are a pack of madmen or even
+two madmen at large in the country. I give it up."
+
+And now a fresh circumstance or set of circumstances became manifest to
+confound judgment and to awaken new and wild surmises. For at about
+this time people realized that none of the dreadful events that were
+happening all about them was so much as mentioned in the Press. I have
+already spoken of the fate of the _Meiros Observer._ This paper was
+suppressed by the authorities because it had inserted a brief paragraph
+about some person who had been "found dead under mysterious
+circumstances"; I think that paragraph referred to the first death of
+Llanfihangel quarry. Thenceforth, horror followed on horror, but no word
+was printed in any of the local journals. The curious went to the
+newspaper offices--there were two left in the county--but found nothing
+save a firm refusal to discuss the matter. And the Cardiff papers were
+drawn and found blank; and the London Press was apparently ignorant of
+the fact that crimes that had no parallel were terrorizing a whole
+countryside. Everybody wondered what could have happened, what was
+happening; and then it was whispered that the coroner would allow no
+inquiry to be made as to these deaths of darkness.
+
+"In consequence of instructions received from the Home Office," one
+coroner was understood to have said, "I have to tell the jury that their
+business will be to hear the medical evidence and to bring in a verdict
+immediately in accordance with that evidence. I shall disallow all
+questions."
+
+One jury protested. The foreman refused to bring in any verdict at all.
+
+"Very good," said the coroner. "Then I beg to inform you, Mr. Foreman
+and gentlemen of the jury, that under the Defense of the Realm Act, I
+have power to supersede your functions, and to enter a verdict according
+to the evidence which has been laid before the Court as if it had been
+the verdict of you all."
+
+The foreman and jury collapsed and accepted what they could not avoid.
+But the rumors that got abroad of all this, added to the known fact
+that the terror was ignored in the Press, no doubt by official command,
+increased the panic that was now; arising, and gave it a new direction.
+Clearly, people reasoned, these Government restrictions and prohibitions
+could only refer to the war, to some great danger in connection with the
+war. And that being so, it followed that the outrages which must be kept
+so secret were the work of the enemy, that is of concealed German
+agents.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+_The Spread of the Terror_
+
+
+It is time, I think, for me to make one point clear. I began this
+history with certain references to an extraordinary accident to an
+airman whose machine fell to the ground after collision with a huge
+flock of pigeons; and then to an explosion in a northern munition
+factory, an explosion, as I noted, of a very singular kind. Then I
+deserted the neighborhood of London, and the northern district, and
+dwelt on a mysterious and terrible series of events which occurred in
+the summer of 1915 in a Welsh county, which I have named, for
+convenience, Meirion.
+
+Well, let it be understood at once that all this detail that I have
+given about the occurrences in Meirion does not imply that the county
+in the far west was alone or especially afflicted by the terror that was
+over the land. They tell me that in the villages about Dartmoor the
+stout Devonshire hearts sank as men's hearts used to sink in the time of
+plague and pestilence. There was horror, too, about the Norfolk Broads,
+and far up by Perth no one would venture on the path that leads by Scone
+to the wooded heights above the Tay. And in the industrial districts: I
+met a man by chance one day in an odd London corner who spoke with
+horror of what a friend had told him.
+
+"'Ask no questions, Ned,' he says to me, 'but I tell yow a' was in
+Bairnigan t'other day, and a' met a pal who'd seen three hundred coffins
+going out of a works not far from there.'"
+
+And then the ship that hovered outside the mouth of the Thames with all
+sails set and beat to and fro in the wind, and never answered any hail,
+and showed no light! The forts shot at her and brought down one of the
+masts, but she went suddenly about with a change of wind under what sail
+still stood, and then veered down Channel, and drove ashore at last on
+the sandbanks and pinewoods of Arcachon, and not a man alive on her, but
+only rattling heaps of bones! That last voyage of the _Semiramis_ would
+be something horribly worth telling; but I only heard it at a distance
+as a yarn, and only believed it because it squared with other things
+that I knew for certain.
+
+This, then, is my point; I have written of the terror as it fell on
+Meirion, simply because I have had opportunities of getting close there
+to what really happened. Third or fourth or fifth hand in the other
+places; but round about Porth and Merthyr Tegveth I have spoken with
+people who have seen the tracks of the terror with their own eyes.
+
+Well, I have said that the people of that far western county realized,
+not only that death was abroad in their quiet lanes and on their
+peaceful hills, but that for some reason it was to be kept all secret.
+Newspapers might not print any news of it, the very juries summoned to
+investigate it were allowed to investigate nothing. And so they
+concluded that this veil of secrecy must somehow be connected with the
+war; and from this position it was not a long way to a further
+inference: that the murderers of innocent men and women and children
+were either Germans or agents of Germany. It would be just like the
+Huns, everybody agreed, to think out such a devilish scheme as this; and
+they always thought out their schemes beforehand. They hoped to seize
+Paris in a few weeks, but when they were beaten on the Marne they had
+their trenches on the Aisne ready to fall back on: it had all been
+prepared years before the war. And so, no doubt, they had devised this
+terrible plan against England in case they could not beat us in open
+fight: there were people ready, very likely, all over the country, who
+were prepared to murder and destroy everywhere as soon as they got the
+word. In this way the Germans intended to sow terror throughout England
+and fill our hearts with panic and dismay, hoping so to weaken their
+enemy at home that he would lose all heart over the war abroad. It was
+the Zeppelin notion, in another form; they were committing these
+horrible and mysterious outrages thinking that we should be frightened
+out of our wits.
+
+It all seemed plausible enough; Germany had by this time perpetrated so
+many horrors and had so excelled in devilish ingenuities that no
+abomination seemed too abominable to be probable, or too ingeniously
+wicked to be beyond the tortuous malice of the Hun. But then came the
+questions as to who the agents of this terrible design were, as to where
+they lived, as to how they contrived to move unseen from field to field,
+from lane to lane. All sorts of fantastic attempts were made to answer
+these questions; but it was felt that they remained unanswered. Some
+suggested that the murderers landed from submarines, or flew from hiding
+places on the West Coast of Ireland, coming and going by night; but
+there were seen to be flagrant impossibilities in both these
+suggestions. Everybody agreed that the evil work was no doubt the work
+of Germany; but nobody could begin to guess how it was done. Somebody at
+the Club asked Remnant for his theory.
+
+"My theory," said that ingenious person, "is that human progress is
+simply a long march from one inconceivable to another. Look at that
+airship of ours that came over Porth yesterday: ten years ago that would
+have been an inconceivable sight. Take the steam engine, stake printing,
+take the theory of gravitation: they were all inconceivable till
+somebody thought of them. So it is, no doubt, with this infernal dodgery
+that we're talking about: the Huns have found it out, and we haven't;
+and there you are. We can't conceive how these poor people have been
+murdered, because the method's inconceivable to us."
+
+The club listened with some awe to this high argument. After Remnant had
+gone, one member said:
+
+"Wonderful man, that." "Yes," said Dr. Lewis. "He was asked whether he
+knew something. And his reply really amounted to 'No, I don't,' But I
+have never heard it better put."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was, I suppose, at about this time when the people were puzzling
+their heads as to the secret methods used by the Germans or their agents
+to accomplish their crimes that a very singular circumstance became
+known to a few of the Porth people. It related to the murder of the
+Williams family on the Highway in front of their cottage door. I do not
+know that I have made it plain that the old Roman road called the
+Highway follows the course of a long, steep hill that goes steadily
+westward till it slants down and droops towards the sea. On either side
+of the road the ground falls away, here into deep shadowy woods, here to
+high pastures, now and again into a field of corn, but for the most part
+into the wild and broken land that is characteristic of Arfon. The
+fields are long and narrow, stretching up the steep hillside; they fall
+into sudden dips and hollows, a well springs up in the midst of one and
+a grove of ash and thorn bends over it, shading it; and beneath it the
+ground is thick with reeds and rushes. And then may come on either side
+of such a field territories glistening with the deep growth of bracken,
+and rough with gorse and rugged with thickets of blackthorn, green
+lichen hanging strangely from the branches; such are the lands on either
+side of the Highway.
+
+Now on the lower slopes of it, beneath the Williams's cottage, some
+three or four fields down the hill, there is a military camp. The place
+has been used as a camp for many years, and lately the site has been
+extended and huts have been erected. But a considerable number of the
+men were under canvas here in the summer of 1915.
+
+On the night of the Highway murder this camp, as it appeared afterwards,
+was the scene of the extraordinary panic of the horses.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A good many men in the camp were asleep in their tents soon after 9:30,
+when the Last Post was sounded. They woke up in panic. There was a
+thundering sound on the steep hillside above them, and down upon the
+tents came half a dozen horses, mad with fright, trampling the canvas,
+trampling the men, bruising dozens of them and killing two.
+
+Everything was in wild confusion, men groaning and screaming in the
+darkness, struggling with the canvas and the twisted ropes, shouting
+out, some of them, raw lads enough, that the Germans had landed, others
+wiping the blood from their eyes, a few, roused suddenly from heavy
+sleep, hitting out at one another, officers coming up at the double
+roaring out orders to the sergeants, a party of soldiers who were just
+returning to camp from the village seized with fright at what they could
+scarcely see or distinguish, at the wildness of the shouting and cursing
+and groaning that they could not understand, bolting out of the camp
+again and racing for their lives back to the village: everything in the
+maddest confusion of wild disorder.
+
+Some of the men had seen the horses galloping down the hill as if terror
+itself was driving them. They scattered off into the darkness, and
+somehow or another found their way back in the night to their pasture
+above the camp. They were grazing there peacefully in the morning, and
+the only sign of the panic of the night before was the mud they had
+scattered all over themselves as they pelted through a patch of wet
+ground. The farmer said they were as quiet a lot as any in Meirion; he
+could make nothing of it.
+
+"Indeed," he said, "I believe they must have seen the devil himself to
+be in such a fright as that: save the people!"
+
+Now all this was kept as quiet as might be at the time when it happened;
+it became known to the men of the Porth Club in the days when they were
+discussing the difficult question of the German outrages, as the murders
+were commonly called. And this wild stampede of the farm horses was held
+by some to be evidence of the extraordinary and unheard of character of
+the dreadful agency that was at work. One of the members of the club had
+been told by an officer who was in the camp at the time of the panic
+that the horses that came charging down were in a perfect fury of
+fright, that he had never seen horses in such a state, and so there was
+endless speculation as to the nature of the sight or the sound that had
+driven half a dozen quiet beasts into raging madness.
+
+Then, in the middle of this talk, two or three other incidents, quite as
+odd and incomprehensible, came to be known, borne on chance trickles of
+gossip that came into the towns from outland farms, or were carried by
+cottagers tramping into Porth on market day with a fowl or two and eggs
+and garden stuff; scraps and fragments of talk gathered by servants from
+the country folk and repeated--to their mistresses. And in such ways it
+came out that up at Plas Newydd there had been a terrible business over
+swarming the bees; they had turned as wild as wasps and much more
+savage. They had come about the people who were taking the swarms like a
+cloud. They settled on one man's face so that you could not see the
+flesh for the bees crawling all over it, and they had stung him so badly
+that the doctor did not know whether he would get over it, and they had
+chased a girl who had come out to see the swarming, and settled on her
+and stung her to death. Then they had gone off to a brake below the
+farm and got into a hollow tree there, and it was not safe to go near
+it, for they would come out at you by day or by night.
+
+And much the same thing had happened, it seemed, at three or four farms
+and cottages where bees were kept. And there were stories, hardly so
+clear or so credible, of sheep dogs, mild and trusted beasts, turning as
+savage as wolves and injuring the farm boys in a horrible manner--in one
+case it was said with fatal results. It was certainly true that old Mrs.
+Owen's favorite Brahma-Dorking cock had gone mad; she came into Porth
+one Saturday morning with her face and her neck all bound up and
+plastered. She had gone out to her bit of a field to feed the poultry
+the night before, and the bird had flown at her and attacked her most
+savagely, inflicting some very nasty wounds before she could beat it
+off.
+
+"There was a stake handy, lucky for me," she said, "and I did beat him
+and beat him till the life was out of him. But what is come to the
+world, whatever?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now Remnant, the man of theories, was also a man of extreme leisure. It
+was understood that he had succeeded to ample means when he was quite a
+young man, and after tasting the savors of the law, as it were, for half
+a dozen terms at the board of the Middle Temple, he had decided that it
+would be senseless to bother himself with passing examinations for a
+profession which he had not the faintest intention of practising. So he
+turned a deaf ear to the call of "Manger" ringing through the Temple
+Courts, and set himself out to potter amiably through the world. He had
+pottered all over Europe, he had looked at Africa, and had even put his
+head in at the door of the East, on a trip which included the Greek
+isles and Constantinople. Now getting into the middle fifties, he had
+settled at Porth for the sake, as he said, of the Gulf Stream and the
+fuchsia hedges, and pottered over his books and his theories and the
+local gossip. He was no more brutal than the general public, which
+revels in the details of mysterious crime; but it must be said that the
+terror, black though it was, was a boon to him. He peered and
+investigated and poked about with the relish of a man to whose life a
+new zest has been added. He listened attentively to the strange tales of
+bees and dogs and poultry that came into Porth with the country baskets
+of butter, rabbits, and green peas; and he evolved at last a most
+extraordinary theory.
+
+Full of this discovery, as he thought it, he went one night to see Dr.
+Lewis and take his view of the matter.
+
+"I want to talk to you," said Remnant to the doctor, "about what I have
+called provisionally, the Z Ray."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+_The Incident of the Unknown Tree_
+
+
+Dr. Lewis, smiling indulgently, and quite prepared for some monstrous
+piece of theorizing, led Remnant into the room that overlooked the
+terraced garden and the sea.
+
+The doctor's house, though it was only a ten minutes' walk from the
+center of the town, seemed remote from all other habitations. The drive
+to it from the road came through a deep grove of trees and a dense
+shrubbery, trees were about the house on either side, mingling with
+neighboring groves, and below, the garden fell down, terrace by green
+terrace, to wild growth, a twisted path amongst red rocks, and at last
+to the yellow sand of a little cove. The room to which the doctor took
+Remnant looked over these terraces and across the water to the dim
+boundaries of the bay. It had French windows that were thrown wide open,
+and the two men sat in the soft light of the lamp--this was before the
+days of severe lighting regulations in the Far West--and enjoyed the
+sweet odors and the sweet vision of the summer evening. Then Remnant
+began:
+
+"I suppose, Lewis, you've heard these extraordinary stories of bees and
+dogs and things that have been going about lately?"
+
+"Certainly I have heard them. I was called in at Plas Newydd, and
+treated Thomas Trevor, who's only just out of danger, by the way. I
+certified for the poor child, Mary Trevor. She was dying when I got to
+the place. There was no doubt she was stung to death by bees, and I
+believe there were other very similar cases at Llantarnam and Morwen;
+none fatal, I think. What about them?"
+
+"Well: then there are the stories of good-tempered old sheepdogs
+turning wicked and 'savaging' children?"
+
+"Quite so. I haven't seen any of these cases professionally; but I
+believe the stories are accurate enough."
+
+"And the old woman assaulted by her own poultry?"
+
+"That's perfectly true. Her daughter put some stuff of their own
+concoction on her face and neck, and then she came to me. The wounds
+seemed going all right, so I told her to continue the treatment,
+whatever it might be."
+
+"Very good," said Mr. Remnant. He spoke now with an italic
+impressiveness. "_Don't you see the link between all this and the
+horrible things that have been happening about here for the last
+month?_"
+
+Lewis stared at Remnant in amazement. He lifted his red eyebrows and
+lowered them in a kind of scowl. His speech showed traces of his native
+accent.
+
+"Great burning!" he exclaimed. "What on earth are you getting at now?
+It is madness. Do you mean to tell me that you think there is some
+connection between a swarm or two of bees that have turned nasty, a
+cross dog, and a wicked old barn-door cock and these poor people that
+have been pitched over the cliffs and hammered to death on the road?
+There's no sense in it, you know."
+
+"I am strongly inclined to believe that there is a great deal of sense
+in it," replied Remnant, with extreme calmness. "Look here, Lewis, I saw
+you grinning the other day at the club when I was telling the fellows
+that in my opinion all these outrages had been committed, certainly by
+the Germans, but by some method of which we have no conception. But what
+I meant to say when I talked about inconceivables was just this: that
+the Williams's and the rest of them have been killed in some way that's
+not in theory at all, not in our theory, at all events, some way we've
+not contemplated, not thought of for an instant. Do you see my point?"
+
+"Well, in a sort of way. You mean there's an absolute originality in the
+method? I suppose that is so. But what next?"
+
+Remnant seemed to hesitate, partly from a sense of the portentous nature
+of what he was about to say, partly from a sort of half-unwillingness to
+part with so profound a secret.
+
+"Well," he said, "you will allow that we have two sets of phenomena of a
+very extraordinary kind occurring at the same time. Don't you think that
+it's only reasonable to connect the two sets with one another."
+
+"So the philosopher of Tenterden steeple and the Goodwin Sands thought,
+certainly," said Lewis. "But what is the connection? Those poor folks on
+the Highway weren't stung by bees or worried by a dog. And horses don't
+throw people over cliffs or stifle them in marshes."
+
+"No; I never meant to suggest anything so absurd. It is evident to me
+that in all these cases of animals turning suddenly savage the cause has
+been terror, panic, fear. The horses that went charging into the camp
+were mad with fright, we know. And I say that in the other instances we
+have been discussing the cause was the same. The creatures were exposed
+to an infection of fear, and a frightened beast or bird or insect uses
+its weapons, whatever they may be. If, for example, there had been
+anybody with those horses when they took their panic they would have
+lashed out at him with their heels."
+
+"Yes, I dare say that that is so. Well."
+
+"Well; my belief is that the Germans have made an extraordinary
+discovery. I have called it the Z Ray. You know that the ether is merely
+an hypothesis; we have to suppose that it's there to account for the
+passage of the Marconi current from one place to another. Now, suppose
+that there is a psychic ether as well as a material ether, suppose that
+it is possible to direct irresistible impulses across this medium,
+suppose that these impulses are towards murder or suicide; then I think
+that you have an explanation of the terrible series of events that have
+been happening in Meirion for the last few weeks. And it is quite clear
+to my mind that the horses and the other creatures have been exposed to
+this Z Ray, and that it has produced on them the effect of terror, with
+ferocity as the result of terror. Now what do you say to that?
+Telepathy, you know, is well established; so is hypnotic suggestion. You
+have only to look in the Encyclopaedia Britannica' to see that, and
+suggestion is so strong in some cases as to be an irresistible
+imperative. Now don't you feel that putting telepathy and suggestion
+together, as it were, you have more than the elements of what I call the
+Z Ray? I feel myself that I have more to go on in making my hypothesis
+than the inventor of the steam engine had in making his hypothesis when
+he saw the lid of the kettle bobbing up and down. What do you say?"
+
+Dr. Lewis made no answer. He was watching the growth of a new, unknown
+tree in his garden.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The doctor made no answer to Remnant's question. For one thing, Remnant
+was profuse in his eloquence--he has been rigidly condensed in this
+history--and Lewis was tired of the sound of his voice. For another
+thing, he found the Z Ray theory almost too extravagant to be bearable,
+wild enough to tear patience to tatters. And then as the tedious
+argument continued Lewis became conscious that there was something
+strange about the night.
+
+It was a dark summer night. The moon was old and faint, above the
+Dragon's Head across the bay, and the air was very still. It was so
+still that Lewis had noted that not a leaf stirred on the very tip of a
+high tree that stood out against the sky; and yet he knew that he was
+listening to some sound that he could not determine or define. It was
+not the wind in the leaves, it was not the gentle wash of the water of
+the sea against the rocks; that latter sound he could distinguish quite
+easily. But there was something else. It was scarcely a sound; it was as
+if the air itself trembled and fluttered, as the air trembles in a
+church when they open the great pedal pipes of the organ.
+
+The doctor listened intently. It was not an illusion, the sound was not
+in his own head, as he had suspected for a moment; but for the life of
+him he could not make out whence it came or what it was. He gazed down
+into the night over the terraces of his garden, now sweet with the scent
+of the flowers of the night; tried to peer over the tree-tops across the
+sea towards the Dragon's Head. It struck him suddenly that this strange
+fluttering vibration of the air might be the noise of a distant
+aeroplane or airship; there was not the usual droning hum, but this
+sound might be caused by a new type of engine. A new type of engine?
+Possibly it was an enemy airship; their range, it had been said, was
+getting longer; and Lewis was just going to call Remnant's attention to
+the sound, to its possible cause, and to the possible danger that might
+be hovering over them, when he saw something that caught his breath and
+his heart with wild amazement and a touch of terror.
+
+He had been staring upward into the sky, and, about to speak to Remnant,
+he had let his eyes drop for an instant. He looked down towards the
+trees in the garden, and saw with utter astonishment that one had
+changed its shape in the few hours that had passed since the setting of
+the sun. There was a thick grove of ilexes bordering the lowest terrace,
+and above them rose one tall pine, spreading its head of sparse, dark
+branches dark against the sky.
+
+As Lewis glanced down over the terraces he saw that the tall pine tree
+was no longer there. In its place there rose above the ilexes what might
+have been a greater ilex; there was the blackness of a dense growth of
+foliage rising like a broad and far-spreading and rounded cloud over the
+lesser trees.
+
+Here, then was a sight wholly incredible, impossible. It is doubtful
+whether the process of the human mind in such a case has ever been
+analyzed and registered; it is doubtful whether it ever can be
+registered. It is hardly fair to bring in the mathematician, since he
+deals with absolute truth (so far as mortality can conceive absolute
+truth); but how would a mathematician feel if he were suddenly
+confronted with a two-sided triangle? I suppose he would instantly
+become a raging madman; and Lewis, staring wide-eyed and wild-eyed at a
+dark and spreading tree which his own experience informed him was not
+there, felt for an instant that shock which should affront us all when
+we first realize the intolerable antinomy of Achilles and the Tortoise.
+Common sense tells us that Achilles will flash past the tortoise almost
+with the speed of the lightning; the inflexible truth of mathematics
+assures us that till the earth boils and the heavens cease to endure the
+Tortoise must still be in advance; and thereupon we should, in common
+decency, go mad. We do not go mad, because, by special grace, we are
+certified that, in the final: court of appeal, all science is a lie,
+even the highest science of all; and so we simply grin at Achilles and
+the Tortoise, as we grin at Darwin, deride Huxley, and laugh at Herbert
+Spencer.
+
+Dr. Lewis did not grin. He glared into the dimness of the night, at the
+great spreading tree that he knew could not be there. And as he gazed he
+saw that what at first appeared the dense blackness of foliage was
+fretted and starred with wonderful appearances of lights and colors.
+
+Afterwards he said to me: "I remember thinking to myself: 'Look here, I
+am not delirious; my temperature is perfectly normal. I am not drunk; I
+only had a pint of Graves with my dinner, over three hours ago. I have
+not eaten any poisonous fungus; I have not taken _Anhelonium Lewinii_
+experimentally. So, now then! What is happening?'"
+
+The night had gloomed over; clouds obscured the faint moon and the misty
+stars. Lewis rose, with some kind of warning and inhibiting gesture to
+Remnant, who, he was conscious was gaping at him in astonishment. He
+walked to the open French window, and took a pace forward on to the path
+outside, and looked, very intently, at the dark shape of the tree, down
+below the sloping garden, above the washing of the waves. He shaded the
+light of the lamp behind him by holding his hands on each side of his
+eyes.
+
+The mass of the tree--the tree that couldn't be there--stood out against
+the sky, but not so clearly, now that the clouds had rolled up. Its
+edges, the limits of its leafage, were not so distinct. Lewis thought
+that he could detect some sort of quivering movement in it; though the
+air was at a dead calm. It was a night on which one might hold up a
+lighted match and watch it burn without any wavering or inclination of
+the flame.
+
+"You know," said Lewis, "how a bit of burnt paper will sometimes hang
+over the coals before it goes up the chimney, and little worms of fire
+will shoot through it. It was like that, if you should be standing some
+distance away. Just threads and hairs of yellow light I saw, and specks
+and sparks of fire, and then a twinkling of a ruby no bigger than a pin
+point, and a green wandering in the black, as if an emerald were
+crawling, and then little veins of deep blue. 'Woe is me!' I said to
+myself in Welsh, 'What is all this color and burning?'
+
+"And, then, at that very moment there came a thundering rap at the door
+of the room inside, and there was my man telling me that I was wanted
+directly up at the Garth, as old Mr. Trevor Williams had been taken very
+bad. I knew his heart was not worth much, so I had to go off directly,
+and leave Remnant to make what he could of it all."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+_Mr. Remnant's Z Ray _
+
+
+Dr. Lewis was kept some time at the Garth. It was past twelve when he
+got back to his house.
+
+He went quickly to the room that overlooked the garden and the sea and
+threw open the French window and peered into the darkness. There, dim
+indeed against the dim sky but unmistakable, was the tall pine with its
+sparse branches, high above the dense growth of the ilex trees. The
+strange boughs which had amazed him had vanished; there was no
+appearance now of colors or of fires.
+
+He drew his chair up to the open window and sat there gazing and
+wondering far into the night, till brightness came upon the sea and sky,
+and the forms of the trees in the garden grew clear and evident. He
+went up to his bed at last filled with a great perplexity, still asking
+questions to which there was no answer.
+
+The doctor did not say anything about the strange tree to Remnant. When
+they next met, Lewis said that he had thought there was a man hiding
+amongst the bushes--this in explanation of that warning gesture he had
+used, and of his going out into the garden and staring into the night.
+He concealed the truth because he dreaded the Remnant doctrine that
+would undoubtedly be produced; indeed, he hoped that he had heard the
+last of the theory of the Z Ray. But Remnant firmly reopened this
+subject.
+
+"We were interrupted just as I was putting my case to you," he said.
+"And to sum it all up, it amounts to this: that the Huns have made one
+of the great leaps of science. They are sending 'suggestions' (which
+amount to irresistible commands) over here, and the persons affected are
+seized with suicidal or homicidal mania. The people who were killed by
+falling over the cliffs or into the quarry probably committed suicide;
+and so with the man and boy who were found in the bog. As to the Highway
+case, you remember that Thomas Evans said that he stopped and talked to
+Williams on the night of the murder. In my opinion Evans was the
+murderer. He came under the influence of the Ray, became a homicidal
+maniac in an instant, snatched Williams's spade from his hand and killed
+him and the others."
+
+"The bodies were found by me on the road."
+
+"It is possible that the first impact of the Ray produces violent
+nervous excitement, which would manifest itself externally. Williams
+might have called to his wife to come and see what was the matter with
+Evans. The children would naturally follow their mother. It seems to me
+simple. And as for the animals--the horses, dogs, and so forth, they as
+I say, were no doubt panic stricken by the Ray, and hence driven to
+frenzy."
+
+"Why should Evans have murdered Williams instead of Williams murdering
+Evans? Why should the impact of the Ray affect one and not the other?"
+
+"Why does one man react violently to a certain drug, while it makes no
+impression on another man? Why is A able to drink a bottle of whisky and
+remain sober, while B is turned into something very like a lunatic after
+he has drunk three glasses?"
+
+"It is a question of idiosyncrasy," said the doctor.
+
+"Is idiosyncrasy Greek for 'I don't know'?" asked Remnant.
+
+"Not at all," said Lewis, smiling blandly. "I mean that in some
+diatheses whisky--as you have mentioned whisky--appears not to be
+pathogenic, or at all events not immediately pathogenic. In other cases,
+as you very justly observed, there seems to be a very marked cachexia
+associated with the exhibition of the spirit in question, even in
+comparatively small doses."
+
+Under this cloud of professional verbiage Lewis escaped from the Club
+and from Remnant. He did not want to hear any more about that Dreadful
+Ray, because he felt sure that the Ray was all nonsense. But asking
+himself why he felt this certitude in the matter he had to confess that
+he didn't know. An aeroplane, he reflected, was all nonsense before it
+was made; and he remembered talking in the early nineties to a friend of
+his about the newly discovered X Rays. The friend laughed incredulously,
+evidently didn't believe a word of it, till Lewis told him that there
+was an article on the subject in the current number of the _Saturday
+Review_; whereupon the unbeliever said, "Oh, is that so? Oh, really. I
+_see_," and was converted on the X Ray faith on the spot. Lewis,
+remembering this talk, marveled at the strange processes of the human
+mind, its illogical and yet all-compelling _ergos_, and wondered
+whether he himself was only waiting for an article on the Z Ray in the
+_Saturday Review_ to become a devout believer in the doctrine of
+Remnant.
+
+But he wondered with far more fervor as to the extraordinary thing he
+had seen in his own garden with his own eyes. The tree that changed all
+its shape for an hour or two of the night, the growth of strange boughs,
+the apparition of secret fires among them, the sparkling of emerald and
+ruby lights: how could one fail to be afraid with great amazement at the
+thought of such a mystery?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dr. Lewis's thoughts were distracted from the incredible adventure of
+the tree by the visit of his sister and her husband. Mr. and Mrs.
+Merritt lived in a well-known manufacturing town of the Midlands, which
+was now, of course, a center of munition work. On the day of their
+arrival at Porth, Mrs. Merritt, who was tired after the long, hot
+journey, went to bed early, and Merritt and Lewis went into the room by
+the garden for their talk and tobacco. They spoke of the year that had
+passed since their last meeting, of the weary dragging of the war, of
+friends that had perished in it, of the hopelessness of an early ending
+of all this misery. Lewis said nothing of the terror that was on the
+land. One does not greet a tired man who is come to a quiet, sunny place
+for relief from black smoke and work and worry with a tale of horror.
+Indeed, the doctor saw that his brother-in-law looked far from well. And
+he seemed "jumpy"; there was an occasional twitch of his mouth that
+Lewis did not like at all.
+
+"Well," said the doctor, after an interval of silence and port wine, "I
+am glad to see you here again. Porth always suits you. I don't think
+you're looking quite up to your usual form. But three weeks of Meirion
+air will do wonders."
+
+"Well, I hope it will," said the other. "I am not up to the mark.
+Things are not going well at Midlingham."
+
+"Business is all right, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes. Business is all right. But there are other things that are all
+wrong. We are living under a reign of terror. It comes to that."
+
+"What on earth do you mean?"
+
+"Well, I suppose I may tell you what I know. It's not much. I didn't
+dare write it. But do you know that at every one of the munition works
+in Midlingham and all about it there's a guard of soldiers with drawn
+bayonets and loaded rifles day and night? Men with bombs, too. And
+machine-guns at the big factories."
+
+"German spies?"
+
+"You don't want Lewis guns to fight spies with. Nor bombs. Nor a platoon
+of men. I woke up last night. It was the machine-gun at Benington's Army
+Motor Works. Firing like fury. And then bang! bang! bang! That was the
+hand bombs."
+
+"But what against?"
+
+"Nobody knows."
+
+"Nobody knows what is happening," Merritt repeated, and he went on to
+describe the bewilderment and terror that hung like a cloud over the
+great industrial city in the Midlands, how the feeling of concealment,
+of some intolerable secret danger that must not be named, was worst of
+all.
+
+"A young fellow I know," he said, "was on short leave the other day from
+the front, and he spent it with his people at Belmont--that's about
+four miles out of Midlingham, you know. 'Thank God,' he said to me, 'I
+am going back to-morrow. It's no good saying that the Wipers salient is
+nice, because it isn't. But it's a damned sight better than this. At the
+front you know what you're up against anyhow.' At Midlingham everybody
+has the feeling that we're up against something awful and we don't know
+what; it's that that makes people inclined to whisper. There's terror
+in the air."
+
+Merritt made a sort of picture of the great town cowering in its fear of
+an unknown danger.
+
+"People are afraid to go about alone at nights in the outskirts. They
+make up parties at the stations to go home together if it's anything
+like dark, or if there are any lonely bits on their way."
+
+"But why? I don't understand. What are they afraid of?"
+
+"Well, I told you about my being awakened up the other night with the
+machine-guns at the motor works rattling away, and the bombs exploding
+and making the most terrible noise. That sort of thing alarms one, you
+know. It's only natural."
+
+"Indeed, it must be very terrifying. You mean, then, there is a general
+nervousness about, a vague sort of apprehension that makes people
+inclined to herd together?"
+
+"There's that, and there's more. People have gone out that have never
+come back. There were a couple of men in the train to Holme, arguing
+about the quickest way to get to Northend, a sort of outlying part of
+Holme where they both lived. They argued all the way out of Midlingham,
+one saying that the high road was the quickest though it was the longest
+way. 'It's the quickest going because it's the cleanest going,' he
+said."
+
+"The other chap fancied a short cut across the fields, by the canal.
+'It's half the distance,' he kept on. 'Yes, if you don't lose your way,'
+said the other. Well, it appears they put an even half-crown on it, and
+each was to try his own way when they got out of the train. It was
+arranged that they were to meet at the 'Wagon' in Northend. 'I shall be
+at the "Wagon" first,' said the man who believed in the short cut, and
+with that he climbed over the stile and made off across the fields. It
+wasn't late enough to be really dark, and a lot of them thought he
+might win the stakes. But he never turned up at the Wagon--or anywhere
+else for the matter of that."
+
+"What happened to him?"
+
+"He was found lying on his back in the middle of a field--some way from
+the path. He was dead. The doctors said he'd-been suffocated. Nobody
+knows how. Then there have been other cases. We whisper about them at
+Midlingham, but we're afraid to speak out."
+
+Lewis was ruminating all this profoundly. Terror in Meirion and terror
+far away in the heart of England; but at Midlingham, so far as he could
+gather from these stories of soldiers on guard, of crackling
+machine-guns, it was a case of an organized attack on the munitioning of
+the army. He felt that he did not know enough to warrant his deciding
+that the terror of Meirion and of Stratfordshire were one.
+
+Then Merritt began again:
+
+"There's a queer story going about, when the door's shut and the
+curtain's drawn, that is, as to a place right out in the country over
+the other side of Midlingham; on the opposite side to Dunwich. They've
+built one of the new factories out there, a great red brick town of
+sheds they tell me it is, with a tremendous chimney. It's not been
+finished more than a month or six weeks. They plumped it down right in
+the middle of the fields, by the line, and they're building huts for the
+workers as fast as they can but up to the present the men are billeted
+all about, up and down the line.
+
+"About two hundred yards from this place there's an old footpath,
+leading from the station and the main road up to a small hamlet on the
+hillside. Part of the way this path goes by a pretty large wood, most of
+it thick undergrowth. I should think there must be twenty acres of wood,
+more or less. As it happens, I used this path once long ago; and I can
+tell you it's a black place of nights.
+
+"A man had to go this way one night. He got along all right till he
+came to the wood. And then he said his heart dropped out of his body. It
+was awful to hear the noises in that wood. Thousands of men were in it,
+he swears that. It was full of rustling, and pattering of feet trying to
+go dainty, and the crack of dead boughs lying on the ground as some one
+trod on them, and swishing of the grass, and some sort of chattering
+speech going on, that sounded, so he said, as if the dead sat in their
+bones and talked! He ran for his life, anyhow; across fields, over
+hedges, through brooks. He must have run, by his tale, ten miles out of
+his way before he got home to his wife, and beat at the door, and broke
+in, and bolted it behind him.".
+
+"There is something rather alarming about any wood at night," said Dr.
+Lewis.
+
+Merritt shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"People say that the Germans have landed, and that they are hiding in
+underground places all over the country."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+_The Case of the Hidden Germans_
+
+
+Lewis gasped for a moment, silent in contemplation of the magnificence
+of rumor. The Germans already landed, hiding underground, striking by
+night, secretly, terribly, at the power of England! Here was a
+conception which made the myth of "The Russians" a paltry fable; before
+which the Legend of Mons was an ineffectual thing.
+
+It was monstrous. And yet--
+
+He looked steadily at Merritt; a square-headed, black-haired, solid sort
+of man. He had symptoms of nerves about him for the moment, certainly,
+but one could not wonder at that, whether the tales he told were true,
+or whether he merely believed them to be true. Lewis had known his
+brother-in-law for twenty years or more, and had always found him a
+sure man in his own small world. "But then," said the doctor to himself,
+"those men, if they once get out of the ring of that little world of
+theirs, they are lost. Those are the men that believed in Madame
+Blavatsky."
+
+"Well," he said, "what do you think yourself? The Germans landed and
+hiding somewhere about the country: there's something extravagant in the
+notion, isn't there?"
+
+"I don't know what to think. You can't get over the facts. There are the
+soldiers with their rifles and their guns at the works all over
+Stratfordshire, and those guns go off. I told you I'd heard them. Then
+who are the soldiers shooting at? That's what we ask ourselves at
+Midlingham."
+
+"Quite so; I quite understand. It's an extraordinary state of things."
+
+"It's more than extraordinary; it's an awful state of things. It's
+terror in the dark, and there's nothing worse than that. As that young
+fellow I was telling you about said, 'At the front you do know what
+you're up against.'"
+
+"And people really believe that a number of Germans have somehow got
+over to England and have hid themselves underground?"
+
+"People say they've got a new kind of poison-gas. Some think that they
+dig underground places and make the gas there, and lead it by secret
+pipes into the shops; others say that they throw gas bombs into the
+factories. It must be worse than anything they've used in France, from
+what the authorities say."
+
+"The authorities? Do _they_ admit that there are Germans in hiding about
+Midlingham?"
+
+"No. They call it 'explosions.' But we know it isn't explosions. We know
+in the Midlands what an explosion sounds like and looks like. And we
+know that the people killed in these 'explosions' are put into their
+coffins in the works. Their own relations are not allowed to see them."
+
+"And so you believe in the German theory?"
+
+"If I do, it's because one must believe in something. Some say they've
+seen the gas. I heard that a man living in Dunwich saw it one night like
+a black cloud with sparks of fire in it floating over the tops of the
+trees by Dunwich Common."
+
+The light of an ineffable amazement came into Lewis's eyes. The night of
+Remnant's visit, the trembling vibration of the air, the dark tree that
+had grown in his garden since the setting of the sun, the strange
+leafage that was starred with burning, with emerald and ruby fires, and
+all vanished away when he returned from his visit to the Garth; and such
+a leafage had appeared as a burning cloud far in the heart of England:
+what intolerable mystery, what tremendous doom was signified in this?
+But one thing was clear and certain: that the terror of Meirion was
+also the terror of the Midlands.
+
+Lewis made up his mind most firmly that if possible all this should be
+kept from his brother-in-law. Merritt had come to Porth as to a city of
+refuge from the horrors of Midlingham; if it could be managed he should
+be spared the knowledge that the cloud of terror had gone before him and
+hung black over the western land. Lewis passed the port and said in an
+even voice:
+
+"Very strange, indeed; a black cloud with sparks of fire?"
+
+"I can't answer for it, you know; it's only a rumor."
+
+"Just so; and you think or you're inclined to think that this and all
+the rest you've told me is to be put down to the hidden Germans?"
+
+"As I say; because one must think something.
+
+"I quite see your point. No doubt, if it's true, it's the most awful
+blow that has ever been dealt at any nation in the whole history of
+man. The enemy established in our vitals! But is it possible, after all?
+How could it have been worked?"
+
+Merritt told Lewis how it had been worked, or rather, how people said it
+had been worked. The idea, he said, was that this was a part, and a most
+important part, of the great German plot to destroy England and the
+British Empire.
+
+The scheme had been prepared years ago, some thought soon after the
+Franco-Prussian War. Moltke had seen that the invasion of England (in
+the ordinary sense of the term invasion) presented very great
+difficulties. The matter was constantly in discussion in the inner
+military and high political circles, and the general trend of opinion in
+these quarters was that at the best, the invasion of England would
+involve Germany in the gravest difficulties, and leave France in the
+position of the _tertius gaudens_. This was the state of affairs when a
+very high Prussian personage was approached by the Swedish professor,
+Huvelius.
+
+Thus Merritt, and here I would say in parenthesis that this Huvelius was
+by all accounts an extraordinary man. Considered personally and apart
+from his writings he would appear to have been a most amiable
+individual. He was richer than the generality of Swedes, certainly far
+richer than the average university professor in Sweden. But his shabby,
+green frock-coat, and his battered, furry hat were notorious in the
+university town where he lived. No one laughed, because it was well
+known that Professor Huvelius spent every penny of his private means and
+a large portion of his official stipend on works of kindness and
+charity. He hid his head in a garret, some one said, in order that
+others might be able to swell on the first floor. It was told of him
+that he restricted himself to a diet of dry bread and coffee for a month
+in order that a poor woman of the streets, dying of consumption, might
+enjoy luxuries in hospital.
+
+And this was the man who wrote the treatise "De Facinore Humano"; to
+prove the infinite corruption of the human race.
+
+Oddly enough, Professor Huvelius wrote the most cynical book in the
+world--Hobbes preaches rosy sentimentalism in comparison--with the very
+highest motives. He held that a very large part of human misery,
+misadventure, and sorrow was due to the false convention that the heart
+of man was naturally and in the main well disposed and kindly, if not
+exactly righteous. "Murderers, thieves, assassins, violators, and all
+the host of the abominable," he says in one passage, "are created by the
+false pretense and foolish credence of human virtue. A lion in a cage is
+a fierce beast, indeed; but what will he be if we declare him to be a
+lamb and open the doors of his den? Who will be guilty of the deaths of
+the men, women and children whom he will surely devour, save those who
+unlocked the cage?" And he goes on to show that kings and the rulers of
+the peoples could decrease the sum of human misery to a vast extent by
+acting on the doctrine of human wickedness. "War," he declares, "which
+is one of the worst of evils, will always continue to exist. But a wise
+king will desire a brief war rather than a lengthy one, a short evil
+rather than a long evil. And this not from the benignity of his heart
+towards his enemies, for we have seen that the human heart is naturally
+malignant, but because he desires to conquer, and to conquer easily,
+without a great expenditure of men or of treasure, knowing that if he
+can accomplish this feat his people will love him and his crown will be
+secure. So he will wage brief victorious wars, and not only spare his
+own nation, but the nation of the enemy, since in a short war the loss
+is less on both sides than in a long war. And so from evil will come
+good."
+
+And how, asks Huvelius, are such wars to be waged? The wise prince, he
+replies, will begin by assuming the enemy to be infinitely corruptible
+and infinitely stupid, since stupidity and corruption are the chief
+characteristics of man. So the prince will make himself friends in the
+very councils of his enemy, and also amongst the populace, bribing the
+wealthy by proffering to them the opportunity of still greater wealth,
+and winning the poor by swelling words. "For, contrary to the common
+opinion, it is the wealthy who are greedy of wealth; while the populace
+are to be gained by talking to them about liberty, their unknown god.
+And so much are they enchanted by the words liberty, freedom, and such
+like, that the wise can go to the poor, rob them of what little they
+have, dismiss them with a hearty kick, and win their hearts and their
+votes for ever, if only they will assure them that the treatment which
+they have received is called liberty."
+
+Guided by these principles, says Huvelius, the wise prince will entrench
+himself in the country that he desires to conquer; "nay, with but little
+trouble, he may actually and literally throw his garrisons into the
+heart of the enemy country before war has begun."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This is a long and tiresome parenthesis; but it is necessary as
+explaining the long tale which Merritt told his brother-in-law, he
+having received it from some magnate of the Midlands, who had traveled
+in Germany. It is probable that the story was suggested in the first
+place by the passage from Huvelius which I have just quoted.
+
+Merritt knew nothing of the real Huvelius, who was all but a saint; he
+thought of the Swedish professor as a monster of iniquity, "worse," as
+he said, "than Neech"--meaning, no doubt, Nietzsche.
+
+So he told the story of how Huvelius had sold his plan to the Germans; a
+plan for filling England with German soldiers. Land was to be bought in
+certain suitable and well-considered places, Englishmen were to be
+bought as the apparent owners of such land, and secret excavations were
+to be made, till the country was literally undermined. A subterranean
+Germany, in fact, was to be dug under selected districts of England;
+there were to be great caverns, underground cities, well drained, well
+ventilated, supplied with water, and in these places vast stores both of
+food and of munitions were to be accumulated, year after year, till "the
+Day" dawned. And then, warned in time, the secret garrison would leave
+shops, hotels, offices, villas, and vanish underground, ready to begin
+their work of bleeding England at the heart.
+
+"That's what Henson told me," said Merritt at the end of his long story.
+"Henson, head of the Buckley Iron and Steel Syndicate. He has been a lot
+in Germany."
+
+"Well," said Lewis, "of course, it may be so. If it is so, it is
+terrible beyond words."
+
+Indeed, he found something horribly plausible in the story. It was an
+extraordinary plan, of course; an unheard of scheme; but it did not seem
+impossible. It was the Trojan Horse on a gigantic scale; indeed, he
+reflected, the story of the horse with the warriors concealed within it
+which was dragged into the heart of Troy by the deluded Trojans
+themselves might be taken as a prophetic parable of what had happened to
+England--if Henson's theory were well founded. And this theory certainly
+squared with what one had heard of German preparations in Belgium and in
+France: emplacements for guns ready for the invader, German
+manufactories which were really German forts on Belgian soil, the
+caverns by the Aisne made ready for the cannon; indeed, Lewis thought he
+remembered something about suspicious concrete tennis-courts on the
+heights commanding London. But a German army hidden under English
+ground! It was a thought to chill the stoutest heart.
+
+And it seemed from that wonder of the burning tree, that the enemy
+mysteriously and terribly present at Midlingham, was present also in
+Meirion. Lewis, thinking of the country as he knew it, of its wild and
+desolate hillsides, its deep woods, its wastes and solitary places,
+could not but confess that no more fit region could be found for the
+deadly enterprise of secret men. Yet, he thought again, there was but
+little harm to be done in Meirion to the armies of England or to their
+munitionment. They were working for panic terror? Possibly that might be
+so; but the camp under the Highway? That should be their first object,
+and no harm had been done there.
+
+Lewis did not know that since the panic of the horses men had died
+terribly in that camp; that it was now a fortified place, with a deep,
+broad trench, a thick tangle of savage barbed wire about it, and a
+machine-gun planted at each corner.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+_What Mr. Merritt Found_
+
+
+Mr. Merritt began to pick up his health and spirits a good deal. For the
+first morning or two of his stay at the doctor's he contented himself
+with a very comfortable deck chair close to the house, where he sat
+under the shade of an old mulberry tree beside his wife and watched the
+bright sunshine on the green lawns, on the creamy crests of the waves,
+on the headlands of that glorious coast, purple even from afar with the
+imperial glow of the heather, on the white farmhouses gleaming in the
+sunlight, high over the sea, far from any turmoil, from any troubling of
+men.
+
+The sun was hot, but the wind breathed all the while gently,
+incessantly, from the east, and Merritt, who had come to this quiet
+place, not only from dismay, but from the stifling and oily airs of the
+smoky Midland town, said that that east wind, pure and clear and like
+well water from the rock, was new life to him. He ate a capital dinner,
+at the end of his first day at Porth and took rosy views. As to what
+they had been talking about the night before, he said to Lewis, no doubt
+there must be trouble of some sort, and perhaps bad trouble; still,
+Kitchener would soon put it all right.
+
+So things went on very well. Merritt began to stroll about the garden,
+which was full of the comfortable spaces, groves, and surprises that
+only country gardens know. To the right of one of the terraces he found
+an arbor or summer-house covered with white roses, and he was as pleased
+as if he had discovered the Pole. He spent a whole day there, smoking
+and lounging and reading a rubbishy sensational story, and declared that
+the Devonshire roses had taken many years off his age. Then on the
+other side of the garden there was a filbert grove that he had never
+explored on any of his former visits; and again there was a find. Deep
+in the shadow of the filberts was a bubbling well, issuing from rocks,
+and all manner of green, dewy ferns growing about it and above it, and
+an angelica springing beside it. Merritt knelt on his knees, and
+hollowed his hand and drank the well water. He said (over his port) that
+night that if all water were like the water of the filbert well the
+world would turn to teetotalism. It takes a townsman to relish the
+manifold and exquisite joys of the country.
+
+It was not till he began to venture abroad that Merritt found that
+something was lacking of the old rich peace that used to dwell in
+Meirion. He had a favorite walk which he never neglected, year after
+year. This walk led along the cliffs towards Meiros, and then one could
+turn inland and return to Porth by deep winding lanes that went over
+the Allt. So Merritt set out early one morning and got as far as a
+sentry-box at the foot of the path that led up to the cliff. There was a
+sentry pacing up and down in front of the box, and he called on Merritt
+to produce his pass, or to turn back to the main road. Merritt was a
+good deal put out, and asked the doctor about this strict guard. And the
+doctor was surprised.
+
+"I didn't know they had put their bar up there," he said. "I suppose
+it's wise. We are certainly in the far West here; still, the Germans
+might slip round and raid us and do a lot of damage just because Meirion
+is the last place we should expect them to go for."
+
+"But there are no fortifications, surely, on the cliff?"
+
+"Oh, no; I never heard of anything of the kind there."
+
+"Well, what's the point of forbidding the public to go on the cliff,
+then? I can quite understand putting a sentry on the top to keep a
+look-out for the enemy. What I don't understand is a sentry at the
+bottom who can't keep a look-out for anything, as he can't see the sea.
+And why warn the public off the cliffs? I couldn't facilitate a German
+landing by standing on Pengareg, even if I wanted to."
+
+"It is curious," the doctor agreed. "Some military reasons, I suppose."
+
+He let the matter drop, perhaps because the matter did not affect him.
+People who live in the country all the year round, country doctors
+certainly, are little given to desultory walking in search of the
+picturesque.
+
+Lewis had no suspicion that sentries whose object was equally obscure
+were being dotted all over the country. There was a sentry, for example,
+by the quarry at Llanfihangel, where the dead woman and the dead sheep
+had been found some weeks before. The path by the quarry was used a good
+deal, and its closing would have inconvenienced the people of the
+neighborhood very considerably. But the sentry had his box by the side
+of the track and had his orders to keep everybody strictly to the path,
+as if the quarry were a secret fort.
+
+It was not known till a month or two ago that one of these sentries was
+himself a victim of the terror. The men on duty at this place were given
+certain very strict orders, which from the nature of the case, must have
+seemed to them unreasonable. For old soldiers, orders are orders; but
+here was a young bank clerk, scarcely in training for a couple of
+months, who had not begun to appreciate the necessity of hard, literal
+obedience to an order which seemed to him meaningless. He found himself
+on a remote and lonely hillside, he had not the faintest notion that his
+every movement was watched; and he disobeyed a certain instruction that
+had been given him. The post was found deserted by the relief; the
+sentry's dead body was found at the bottom of the quarry.
+
+This by the way; but Mr. Merritt discovered again and again that things
+happened to hamper his walks and his wanderings. Two or three miles from
+Porth there is a great marsh made by the Afon river before it falls into
+the sea, and here Merritt had been accustomed to botanize mildly. He had
+learned pretty accurately the causeways of solid ground that lead
+through the sea of swamp and ooze and soft yielding soil, and he set out
+one hot afternoon determined to make a thorough exploration of the
+marsh, and this time to find that rare Bog Bean, that he felt sure, must
+grow somewhere in its wide extent.
+
+He got into the by-road that skirts the marsh, and to the gate which he
+had always used for entrance.
+
+There was the scene as he had known it always, the rich growth of reeds
+and flags and rushes, the mild black cattle grazing on the "islands" of
+firm turf, the scented procession of the meadowsweet, the royal glory
+of the loosestrife, flaming pennons, crimson and golden, of the giant
+dock.
+
+But they were bringing out a dead man's body through the gate.
+
+A laboring man was holding open the gate on the marsh. Merritt,
+horrified, spoke to him and asked who it was, and how it had happened.
+
+"They do say he was a visitor at Porth. Somehow he has been drowned in
+the marsh, whatever."
+
+"But it's perfectly safe. I've been all over it a dozen times."
+
+"Well, indeed, we did always think so. If you did slip by accident,
+like, and fall into the water, it was not so deep; it was easy enough to
+climb out again. And this gentleman was quite young, to look at him,
+poor man; and he has come to Meirion for his pleasure and holiday and
+found his death in it!"
+
+"Did he do it on purpose? Is it suicide?"
+
+"They say he had no reasons to do that."
+
+Here the sergeant of police in charge of the party interposed, according
+to orders, which he himself did not understand.
+
+"A terrible thing, sir, to be sure, and a sad pity; and I am sure this
+is not the sort of sight you have come to see down in Meirion this
+beautiful summer. So don't you think, sir, that it would be more
+pleasant like, if you would leave us to this sad business of ours? I
+have heard many gentlemen staying in Porth say that there is nothing to
+beat the view from the hill over there, not in the whole of Wales."
+
+Every one is polite in Meirion, but somehow Merritt understood that, in
+English, this speech meant "move on."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Merritt moved back to Porth--he was not in the humor for any idle,
+pleasurable strolling after so dreadful a meeting with death. He made
+some inquiries in the town about the dead man, but nothing seemed known
+of him. It was said that he had been on his honeymoon, that he had been
+staying at the Porth Castle Hotel; but the people of the hotel declared
+that they had never heard of such a person. Merritt got the local paper
+at the end of the week; there was not a word in it of any fatal accident
+in the marsh. He met the sergeant of police in the street. That officer
+touched his helmet with the utmost politeness and a "hope you are
+enjoying yourself, sir; indeed you do look a lot better already"; but as
+to the poor man who was found drowned or stifled in the marsh, he knew
+nothing.
+
+The next day Merritt made up his mind to go to the marsh to see whether
+he could find anything to account for so strange a death. What he found
+was a man with an armlet standing by the gate. The armlet had the
+letters "C.W." on it, which are understood to mean Coast Watcher. The
+Watcher "said he had strict instructions to keep everybody away from the
+marsh. Why? He didn't know, but some said that the river was changing
+its course since the new railway embankment was built, and the marsh had
+become dangerous to people who didn't know it thoroughly.
+
+"Indeed, sir," he added, "it is part of my orders not to set foot on the
+other side of that gate myself, not for one scrag-end of a minute."
+
+Merritt glanced over the gate incredulously. The marsh looked as it had
+always looked; there was plenty of sound, hard ground to walk on; he
+could see the track that he used to follow as firm as ever. He did not
+believe in the story of the changing course of the river, and Lewis said
+he had never heard of anything of the kind. But Merritt had put the
+question in the middle of general conversation; he had not led up to it
+from any discussion of the death in the marsh, and so the doctor was
+taken unawares. If he had known of the connection in Merritt's mind
+between the alleged changing of the Afon's course and the tragical
+event in the marsh, no doubt he would have confirmed the official
+explanation. He was, above all things, anxious to prevent his sister and
+her husband from finding out that the invisible hand of terror that
+ruled at Midlingham was ruling also in Meirion.
+
+Lewis himself had little doubt that the man who was found dead in the
+marsh had been struck down by the secret agency, whatever it was, that
+had already accomplished so much of evil; but it was a chief part of the
+terror that no one knew for certain that this or that particular event
+was to be ascribed to it. People do occasionally fall over cliffs
+through their own carelessness, and as the case of Garcia, the Spanish
+sailor, showed, cottagers and their wives and children are now and then
+the victims of savage and purposeless violence. Lewis had never wandered
+about the marsh himself; but Remnant had pottered round it and about it,
+and declared that the man who met his death there--his name was never
+known, in Porth at all events--must either have committed suicide by
+deliberately lying prone in the ooze and stifling himself, or else must
+have been held down in it. There were no details available, so it was
+clear that the authorities had classified this death with the others;
+still, the man might have committed suicide, or he might have had a
+sudden seizure and fallen in the slimy water face-downwards. And so on:
+it was possible to believe that case A _or_ B _or_ C was in the category
+of ordinary accidents or ordinary crimes. But it was not possible to
+believe that A _and_ B _and_ C were all in that category. And thus it
+was to the end, and thus it is now. We know that the terror reigned, and
+how it reigned, but there were many dreadful events ascribed to its rule
+about which there must always be room for doubt.
+
+For example, there was the case of the _Mary Ann_, the rowing-boat which
+came to grief in so strange a manner, almost under Merritt's eyes. In
+my opinion he was quite wrong in associating the sorry fate of the boat
+and her occupants with a system of signaling by flashlights which he
+detected or thought that he detected, on the afternoon in which the
+_Mary Ann_ was capsized. I believe his signaling theory to be all
+nonsense, in spite of the naturalized German governess who was lodging
+with her employers in the suspected house. But, on the other hand, there
+is no doubt in my own mind that the boat was overturned and those in it
+drowned by the work of the terror.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+_The Light on the Water_
+
+
+Let it be noted carefully that so far Merritt had not the slightest
+suspicion that the terror of Midlingham was quick over. Meirion. Lewis
+had watched and shepherded him carefully. He had let out no suspicion of
+what had happened in Meirion, and before taking his brother-in-law to
+the club he had passed round a hint among the members. He did not tell
+the truth about Midlingham--and here again is a point of interest, that
+as the terror deepened the general public cooperated voluntarily, and,
+one would say, almost subconsciously, with the authorities in concealing
+what they knew from one another--but he gave out a desirable portion of
+the truth: that his brother-in-law was "nervy," not by any means up to
+the mark, and that it was therefore desirable that he should be spared
+the knowledge of the intolerable and tragic mysteries which were being
+enacted all about them.
+
+"He knows about that poor fellow who was found in the marsh," said
+Lewis, "and he has a kind of vague suspicion that there is something out
+of the common about the case; but no more than that."
+
+"A clear case of suggested, or rather commanded suicide," said Remnant.
+"I regard it as a strong confirmation of my theory."
+
+"Perhaps so," said the doctor, dreading lest he might have to hear about
+the Z Ray all over again. "But please don't let anything out to him; I
+want him to get built up thoroughly before he goes back to Midlingham."
+
+
+Then, on the other hand, Merritt was as still as death about the doings
+of the Midlands; he hated to think of them, much more to speak of them;
+and thus, as I say, he and the men at the Porth Club kept their secrets
+from one another; and thus, from the beginning to the end of the terror,
+the links were not drawn together. In many cases, no doubt, A and B met
+every day and talked familiarly, it may be confidentially, on other
+matters of all sorts, each having in his possession half of the truth,
+which he concealed from the other. So the two halves were never put
+together to make a whole.
+
+Merritt, as the doctor guessed, had a kind of uneasy feeling--it
+scarcely amounted to a suspicion--as to the business of the marsh;
+chiefly because he thought the official talk about the railway
+embankment and the course of the river rank nonsense. But finding that
+nothing more happened, he let the matter drop from his mind, and settled
+himself down to enjoy his holiday.
+
+He found to his delight that there were no sentries or watchers to
+hinder him from the approach to Larnac Bay, a delicious cove, a place
+where the ashgrove and the green meadow and the glistening bracken
+sloped gently down to red rocks and firm yellow sands. Merritt
+remembered a rock that formed a comfortable seat, and here he
+established himself of a golden afternoon, and gazed at the blue of the
+sea and the crimson bastions and bays of the coast as it bent inward to
+Sarnau and swept out again southward to the odd-shaped promontory called
+the Dragon's Head. Merritt gazed on, amused by the antics of the
+porpoises who were tumbling and splashing and gamboling a little way out
+at sea, charmed by the pure and radiant air that was so different from
+the oily smoke that often stood for heaven at Midlingham, and charmed,
+too, by the white farmhouses dotted here and there on the heights of the
+curving coast.
+
+Then he noticed a little row-boat at about two hundred yards from the
+shore. There were two or three people aboard, he could not quite make
+out how many, and they seemed to be doing something with a line; they
+were no doubt fishing, and Merritt (who disliked fish) wondered how
+people could spoil such an afternoon, such a sea, such pellucid and
+radiant air by trying to catch white, flabby, offensive, evil-smelling
+creatures that would be excessively nasty when cooked. He puzzled over
+this problem and turned away from it to the contemplation of the crimson
+headlands. And then he says that he noticed that signaling was going on.
+Flashing lights of intense brilliance, he declares, were coming from one
+of those farms on the heights of the coast; it was as if white fire was
+spouting from it. Merritt was certain, as the light appeared and
+disappeared, that some message was being sent, and he regretted that he
+knew nothing of heliography. Three short flashes, a long and very
+brilliant flash, then two short flashes. Merritt fumbled in his pocket
+for pencil and paper so that he might record these signals, and,
+bringing his eyes down to the sea level, he became aware, with
+amazement and horror, that the boat had disappeared. All that he could
+see was some vague, dark object far to westward, running out with the
+tide.
+
+Now it is certain, unfortunately, that the _Mary Ann_ was capsized and
+that two schoolboys and the sailor in charge were drowned. The bones of
+the boat were found amongst the rocks far along the coast, and the three
+bodies were also washed ashore. The sailor could not swim at all, the
+boys only a little, and it needs an exceptionally fine swimmer to fight
+against the outward suck of the tide as it rushes past Pengareg Point.
+
+But I have no belief whatever in Merritt's theory. He held (and still
+holds, for all I know), that the flashes of light which he saw coming
+from Penyrhaul, the farmhouse oh the height, had some connection with
+the disaster to the _Mary Ann_. When it was ascertained that a family
+were spending their summer at the farm, and that the governess was a
+German, though a long naturalized German, Merritt could not see that
+there was anything left to argue about, though there might be many
+details to discover. But, in my opinion, all this was a mere mare's
+nest; the flashes of brilliant light were caused, no doubt, by the sun
+lighting up one window of the farmhouse after the other.
+
+Still, Merritt was convinced from the very first, even before the
+damning circumstance of the German governess was brought to light; and
+on the evening of the disaster, as Lewis and he sat together after
+dinner, he was endeavoring to put what he called the common sense of the
+matter to the doctor.
+
+"If you hear a shot," said Merritt, "and you see a man fall, you know
+pretty well what killed him."
+
+There was a flutter of wild wings in the room. A great moth beat to and
+fro and dashed itself madly against the ceiling, the walls, the glass
+bookcase. Then a sputtering sound, a momentary dimming of the lamp. The
+moth had succeeded in its mysterious quest.
+
+"Can you tell me," said Lewis as if he were answering Merritt, "why
+moths rush into the flame?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Lewis had put his question as to the strange habits of the common moth
+to Merritt with the deliberate intent of closing the debate on death by
+heliograph. The query was suggested, of course, by the incident of the
+moth in the lamp, and Lewis thought that he had said, "Oh, shut up!" in
+a somewhat elegant manner. And, in fact Merritt looked dignified,
+remained silent, and helped himself to port.
+
+That was the end that the doctor had desired. He had no doubt in his own
+mind that the affair of the _Mary Ann_ was but one more item in the long
+account of horrors that grew larger almost with every day; and he was
+in no humor to listen to wild and futile theories as to the manner in
+which the disaster had been accomplished. Here was a proof that the
+terror that was upon them was mighty not only on the land but on the
+waters; for Lewis could not see that the boat could have been attacked
+by any ordinary means of destruction. From Merritt's story, it must have
+been in shallow water. The shore of Larnac Bay shelves very gradually,
+and the Admiralty charts showed the depth of water two hundred yards out
+to be only two fathoms; this would be too shallow for a submarine. And
+it could not have been shelled, and it could not have been torpedoed;
+there was no explosion. The disaster might have been due to
+carelessness; boys, he considered, will play the fool anywhere, even in
+a boat; but he did not think so; the sailor would have stopped them.
+And, it may be mentioned, that the two boys were as a matter of fact
+extremely steady, sensible young fellows, not in the least likely to
+play foolish tricks of any kind.
+
+Lewis was immersed in these reflections, having successfully silenced
+his brother-in-law; he was trying in vain to find some clue to the
+horrible enigma. The Midlingham theory of a concealed German force,
+hiding in places under the earth, was extravagant enough, and yet it
+seemed the only solution that approached plausibility; but then again
+even a subterranean German host would hardly account for this wreckage
+of a boat, floating on a calm sea. And then what of the tree with the
+burning in it that had appeared in the garden there a few weeks ago, and
+the cloud with a burning in it that had shown over the trees of the
+Midland village?
+
+I think I have, already written something of the probable emotions of
+the mathematician confronted suddenly with an undoubted two-sided
+triangle. I said, if I remember, that he would be forced, in decency,
+to go mad; and I believe that Lewis was very near to this point. He felt
+himself confronted with an intolerable problem that most instantly
+demanded solution, and yet, with the same breath, as it were, denied the
+possibility of there being any solution. People were being killed in an
+inscrutable manner by some inscrutable means, day after day, and one
+asked "why" and "how"; and there seemed no answer. In the Midlands,
+where every kind of munitionment was manufactured, the explanation of
+German agency was plausible; and even if the subterranean notion was to
+be rejected as savoring altogether too much of the fairytale, or rather
+of the sensational romance, yet it was possible that the backbone of the
+theory was true; the Germans might have planted their agents in some way
+or another in the midst of our factories. But here in Meirion, what
+serious effect could be produced by the casual and indiscriminate
+slaughter of a couple of schoolboys in a boat, of a harmless
+holiday-maker in a marsh? The creation of an atmosphere of terror and
+dismay? It was possible, of course, but it hardly seemed tolerable, in
+spite of the enormities of Louvain and of the _Lusitania_.
+
+Into these meditations, and into the still dignified silence of Merritt
+broke the rap on the door of Lewis's man, and those words which harass
+the ease of the country doctor when he tries to take any ease: "You're
+wanted in the surgery, if you please, sir." Lewis bustled out, and
+appeared no more that night.
+
+The doctor had been summoned to a little hamlet on the outskirts of
+Porth, separated from it by half a mile or three-quarters of road. One
+dignifies, indeed, this settlement without a name in calling it a
+hamlet; it was a mere row of four cottages, built about a hundred years
+ago for the accommodation of the workers in a quarry long since
+disused. In one of these cottages the doctor found a father and mother
+weeping and crying out to "doctor bach, doctor bach," and two frightened
+children, and one little body, still and dead. It was the youngest of
+the three, little Johnnie, and he was dead.
+
+The doctor found that the child had been asphyxiated. He felt the
+clothes; they were dry; it was not a case of drowning. He looked at the
+neck; there was no mark of strangling. He asked the father how it had
+happened, and father and mother, weeping most lamentably, declared they
+had no knowledge of how their child had been killed: "unless it was the
+People that had done it." The Celtic fairies are still malignant. Lewis
+asked what had happened that evening; where had the child been?
+
+"Was he with his brother and sister? Don't they know anything about it?"
+
+Reduced into some sort of order from its original piteous confusion,
+this is the story that the doctor gathered.
+
+All three children had been well and happy through the day. They had
+walked in with the mother, Mrs. Roberts, to Porth on a marketing
+expedition in the afternoon; they had returned to the cottage, had had
+their tea, and afterwards played about on the road in front of the
+house. John Roberts had come home somewhat late from his work, and it
+was after dusk when the family sat down to supper. Supper over, the
+three children went out again to play with other children from the
+cottage next door, Mrs. Roberts telling them that they might have half
+an hour before going to bed.
+
+The two mothers came to the cottage gates at the same moment and called
+out to their children to come along and be quick about it. The two small
+families had been playing on the strip of turf across the road, just by
+the stile into the fields. The children ran across the road; all of
+them except Johnnie Roberts. His brother Willie said that just as their
+mother called them he heard Johnnie cry out:
+
+"Oh, what is that beautiful shiny thing over the stile?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+_The Child and the Moth_
+
+
+The little Roberts's ran across the road, up the path, and into the
+lighted room. Then they noticed that Johnnie had not followed them. Mrs.
+Roberts was doing something in the back kitchen, and Mr. Roberts had
+gone out to the shed to bring in some sticks for the next morning's
+fire. Mrs. Roberts heard the children run in and went on with her work.
+The children whispered to one another that Johnnie would "catch it" when
+their mother came out of the back room and found him missing; but they
+expected he would run in through the open door any minute. But six or
+seven, perhaps ten, minutes passed, and there was no Johnnie. Then the
+father and mother came into the kitchen together, and saw that their
+little boy was not there.
+
+They thought it was some small piece of mischief--that the two other
+children had hidden the boy somewhere in the room: in the big cupboard
+perhaps.
+
+"What have you done with him then?" said Mrs. Roberts. "Come out, you
+little rascal, directly in a minute."
+
+There was no little rascal to come out, and Margaret Roberts, the girl,
+said that Johnnie had not come across the road with them: he must be
+still playing all by himself by the hedge.
+
+"What did you let him stay like that for?" said Mrs. Roberts. "Can't I
+trust you for two minutes together? Indeed to goodness, you are all of
+you more trouble than you are worth." She went to the open door:
+
+"Johnnie! Come you in directly, or you will be sorry for it. Johnnie!"
+
+The poor woman called at the door. She went out to the gate and called
+there:
+
+"Come you, little Johnnie. Come you, bachgen, there's a good boy. I do
+see you hiding there."
+
+She thought he must be hiding in the shadow of the hedge, and that he
+would come running and laughing--"he was always such a happy little
+fellow"--to her across the road. But no little merry figure danced out
+of the gloom of the still, dark night; it was all silence.
+
+It was then, as the mother's heart began to chill, though she still
+called cheerfully to the missing child, that the elder boy told how
+Johnnie had said there was something beautiful by the stile: "and
+perhaps he did climb over, and he is running now about the meadow, and
+has lost his way."
+
+The father got his lantern then, and the whole family went crying and
+calling about the meadow, promising cakes and sweets and a fine toy to
+poor Johnnie if he would come to them.
+
+They found the little body, under the ashgrove in the middle of the
+field. He was quite still and dead, so still that a great moth had
+settled on his forehead, fluttering away when they lifted him up.
+
+Dr. Lewis heard this story. There was nothing to be done; little to be
+said to these most unhappy people.
+
+"Take care of the two that you have left to you," said the doctor as he
+went away. "Don't let them out of your sight if you can help it. It is
+dreadful times that we are living in."
+
+It is curious to record, that all through these dreadful times the
+simple little "season" went through its accustomed course at Porth. The
+war and its consequences had somewhat thinned the numbers of the summer
+visitors; still a very fair contingent of them occupied the hotels and
+boarding-houses and lodging-houses and bathed from the old-fashioned
+machines on one beach, or from the new-fashioned tents on the other, and
+sauntered in the sun, or lay stretched out in the shade under the trees
+that grow down almost to the water's edge. Porth never tolerated
+Ethiopians or shows of any kind on its sands, but "The Rockets" did very
+well during that summer in their garden entertainment, given in the
+castle grounds, and the fit-up companies that came to the Assembly Rooms
+are said to have paid their bills to a woman and to a man.
+
+Porth depends very largely on its midland and northern custom, custom of
+a prosperous, well-established sort. People who think Llandudno
+overcrowded and Colwyn Bay too raw and red and new, come year after year
+to the placid old town in the southwest and delight in its peace; and as
+I say, they enjoyed themselves much as usual there in the summer of
+1915. Now and then they became conscious, as Mr. Merritt became
+conscious, that they could not wander about quite in the old way; but
+they accepted sentries and coast-watchers and people who politely
+pointed out the advantages of seeing the view from this point rather
+than from that as very necessary consequences of the dreadful war that
+was being waged; nay, as a Manchester man said, after having been turned
+back from his favorite walk to Castell Coch, it was gratifying to think
+that they were so well looked after.
+
+"So far as I can see," he added, "there's nothing to prevent a submarine
+from standing out there by Ynys Sant and landing half a dozen men in a
+collapsible boat in any of these little coves. And pretty fools we
+should look, shouldn't we, with our throats cut on the sands; or carried
+back to Germany in the submarine?" He tipped the coast-watcher
+half-a-crown.
+
+"That's right, lad," he said, "you give us the tip."
+
+Now here was a strange thing. The north-countryman had his thoughts on
+elusive submarines and German raiders; the watcher had simply received
+instructions to keep people off the Castell Coch fields, without reason
+assigned. And there can be no doubt that the authorities themselves,
+while they marked out the fields as in the "terror zone," gave their
+orders in the dark and were themselves profoundly in the dark as to the
+manner of the slaughter that had been done there; for if they had
+understood what had happened, they would have understood also that their
+restrictions were useless.
+
+The Manchester man was warned off his walk about ten days after Johnnie
+Roberts's death. The Watcher had been placed at his post because, the
+night before, a young farmer had been found by his wife lying in the
+grass close to the Castle, with no scar on him, nor any mark of
+violence, but stone dead.
+
+The wife of the dead man, Joseph Cradock, finding her husband lying
+motionless on the dewy turf, went white and stricken up the path to the
+village and got two men who bore the body to the farm. Lewis was sent
+for, and knew, at once when he saw the dead man that he had perished in
+the way that the little Roberts boy had perished--whatever that awful
+way might be. Cradock had been asphyxiated; and here again there was no
+mark of a grip on the throat. It might have been a piece of work by
+Burke and Hare, the doctor reflected; a pitch plaster might have been
+clapped over the man's mouth and nostrils and held there.
+
+Then a thought struck him; his brother-in-law had talked of a new kind
+of poison gas that was said to be used against the munition workers in
+the Midlands: was it possible that the deaths of the man and the boy
+were due to some such instrument? He applied his tests but could find no
+trace of any gas having been employed. Carbonic acid gas? A man could
+not be killed with that in the open air; to be fatal that required a
+confined space, such a position as the bottom of a huge vat or of a
+well.
+
+He did not know how Cradock had been killed; he confessed it to himself.
+He had been suffocated; that was all he could say.
+
+It seemed that the man had gone out at about half-past nine to look
+after some beasts. The field in which they were was about five minutes'
+walk from the house. He told his wife he would be back in a quarter of
+an hour or twenty minutes. He did not return, and when he had been gone
+for three-quarters of an hour Mrs. Cradock went out to look for him. She
+went into the field where the beasts were, and everything seemed all
+right, but there was no trace of Cradock. She called out; there was no
+answer.
+
+Now the meadow in which the cattle were pastured is high ground; a hedge
+divides it from the fields which fall gently down to the castle and the
+sea. Mrs. Cradock hardly seemed able to say why, having failed to find
+her husband among his beasts, she turned to the path which led to
+Castell Coch. She said at first that she had thought that one of the
+oxen might have broken through the hedge and strayed, and that Cradock
+had perhaps gone after it. And then, correcting herself, she said:
+
+"There was that; and then there was something else that I could not make
+out at all. It seemed to me that the hedge did look different from
+usual. To be sure, things do look different at night, and there was a
+bit of sea mist about, but somehow it did look odd to me, and I said to
+myself, 'have I lost my way, then?'"
+
+She declared that the shape of the trees in the hedge appeared to have
+changed, and besides, it had a look "as if it was lighted up, somehow,"
+and so she went on towards the stile to see what all this could be, and
+when she came near everything was as usual. She looked over the stile
+and called and hoped to see her husband coming towards her or to hear
+his voice; but there was no answer, and glancing down the path she saw,
+or thought she saw, some sort of brightness on the ground, "a dim sort
+of light like a bunch of glow-worms in a hedge-bank.
+
+"And so I climbed over the stile and went down the path, and the light
+seemed to melt away; and there was my poor husband lying on his back,
+saying not a word to me when I spoke to him and touched him."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So for Lewis the terror blackened and became altogether intolerable, and
+others, he perceived, felt as he did. He did not know, he never asked
+whether the men at the club had heard of these deaths of the child and
+the young farmer; but no one spoke of them. Indeed, the change was
+evident; at the beginning of the terror men spoke of nothing else; now
+it had become all too awful for ingenious chatter or labored and
+grotesque theories. And Lewis had received a letter from his
+brother-in-law at Midlingham; it contained the sentence, "I am afraid
+Fanny's health has not greatly benefited by her visit to Porth; there
+are still several symptoms I don't at all like." And this told him, in a
+phraseology that the doctor and Merritt had agreed upon, that the terror
+remained heavy in the Midland town.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was soon after the death of Cradock that people began to tell strange
+tales of a sound that was to be heard of nights about the hills and
+valleys to the northward of Porth. A man who had missed the last train
+from Meiros and had been forced to tramp the ten miles between Meiros
+and Porth seems to have been the first to hear it. He said he had got to
+the top of the hill by Tredonoc, somewhere between half-past ten and
+eleven, when he first noticed an odd noise that he could not make out at
+all; it was like a shout, a long, drawn-out, dismal wail coming from a
+great way off, faint with distance. He stopped to listen, thinking at
+first that it might be owls hooting in the woods; but it was different,
+he said, from that: it was a long cry, and then there was silence and
+then it began over again. He could make nothing of it, and feeling
+frightened, he did not quite know of what, he walked on briskly and was
+glad to see the lights of Porth station.
+
+He told his wife of this dismal sound that night, and she told the
+neighbors, and most of them thought that it was "all fancy"--or drink,
+or the owls after all. But the night after, two or three people, who had
+been to some small merrymaking in a cottage just off the Meiros road,
+heard the sound as they were going home, soon after ten. They, too,
+described it as a long, wailing cry, indescribably dismal in the
+stillness of the autumn night; "like the ghost of a voice," said one;
+"as if it came up from the bottom of the earth," said another.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+_At Treff Loyne Farm_
+
+
+Let it be remembered, again and again, that, all the while that the
+terror lasted, there was no common stock of information as to the
+dreadful things that were being done. The press had not said one word
+upon it, there was no criterion by which the mass of the people could
+separate fact from mere vague rumor, no test by which ordinary
+misadventure or disaster could be distinguished from the achievements of
+the secret and awful force that was at work.
+
+And so with every event of the passing day. A harmless commercial
+traveler might show himself in the course of his business in the
+tumbledown main street of Meiros and find himself regarded with looks of
+fear and suspicion as a possible worker of murder, while it is likely
+enough that the true agents of the terror went quite unnoticed. And
+since the real nature of all this mystery of death was unknown, it
+followed easily that the signs and warnings and omens of it were all the
+more unknown. Here was horror, there was horror; but there was no links
+to join one horror with another; no common basis of knowledge from which
+the connection between this horror and that horror might be inferred.
+
+So there was no one who suspected at all that this dismal and hollow
+sound that was now heard of nights in the region to the north of Porth,
+had any relation at all to the case of the little girl who went out one
+afternoon to pick purple flowers and never returned, or to the case of
+the man whose body was taken out of the peaty slime of the marsh, or to
+the case of Cradock, dead in his fields, with a strange glimmering of
+light about his body, as his wife reported. And it is a question as to
+how far the rumor of this melancholy, nocturnal summons got abroad at
+all. Lewis heard of it, as a country doctor hears of most things,
+driving up and down the lanes, but he heard of it without much interest,
+with no sense that it was in any sort of relation to the terror. Remnant
+had been given the story of the hollow and echoing voice of the darkness
+in a colored and picturesque form; he employed a Tredonoc man to work in
+his garden once a week. The gardener had not heard the summons himself,
+but he knew a man who had done so.
+
+"Thomas Jenkins, Pentoppin, he did put his head out late last night to
+see what the weather was like, as he was cutting a field of corn the
+next day, and he did tell me that when he was with the Methodists in
+Cardigan he did never hear no singing eloquence in the chapels that was
+like to it. He did declare it was like a wailing of Judgment Day."
+
+Remnant considered the matter, and was inclined to think that the sound
+must be caused by a subterranean inlet of the sea; there might be, he
+supposed, an imperfect or half-opened or tortuous blow-hole in the
+Tredonoc woods, and the noise of the tide, surging up below, might very
+well produce that effect of a hollow wailing, far away. But neither he
+nor any one else paid much attention to the matter; save the few who
+heard the call at dead of night, as it echoed awfully over the black
+hills.
+
+The sound had been heard for three or perhaps four nights, when the
+people coming out of Tredonoc church after morning service on Sunday
+noticed that there was a big yellow sheepdog in the churchyard. The dog,
+it appeared, had been waiting for the congregation; for it at once
+attached itself to them, at first to the whole body, and then to a group
+of half a dozen who took the turning to the right. Two of these
+presently went off over the fields to their respective houses, and four
+strolled on in the leisurely Sunday-morning manner of the country, and
+these the dog followed, keeping to heel all the time. The men were
+talking hay, corn and markets and paid no attention to the animal, and
+so they strolled along the autumn lane till they came to a gate in the
+hedge, whence a roughly made farm road went through the fields, and
+dipped down into the woods and to Treff Loyne farm.
+
+Then the dog became like a possessed creature. He barked furiously. He
+ran up to one of the men and looked up at him, "as if he were begging
+for his life," as the man said, and then rushed to the gate and stood by
+it, wagging his tail and barking at intervals. The men stared and
+laughed.
+
+"Whose dog will that be?" said one of them.
+
+"It will be Thomas Griffith's, Treff Loyne," said another.
+
+"Well, then, why doesn't he go home? Go home then!" He went through the
+gesture of picking up a stone from the road and throwing it at the dog.
+"Go home, then! Over the gate with you."
+
+But the dog never stirred. He barked and whined and ran up to the men
+and then back to the gate. At last he came to one of them, and crawled
+and abased himself on the ground and then took hold of the man's coat
+and tried to pull him in the direction of the gate. The farmer shook the
+dog off, and the four went on their way; and the dog stood in the road
+and watched them and then put up its head and uttered a long and dismal
+howl that was despair.
+
+The four farmers thought nothing of it; sheepdogs in the country are
+dogs to look after sheep, and their whims and fancies are not studied.
+But the yellow dog--he was a kind of degenerate collie--haunted the
+Tredonoc lanes from that day. He came to a cottage door one night and
+scratched at it, and when it was opened lay down, and then, barking, ran
+to the garden gate and waited, entreating, as it seemed, the cottager
+to follow him. They drove him away and again he gave that long howl of
+anguish. It was almost as bad, they said, as the noise that they had
+heard a few nights before. And then it occurred to somebody, so far as I
+can make out with no particular reference to the odd conduct of the
+Treff Loyne sheepdog, that Thomas Griffith had not been seen for some
+time past. He had missed market day at Porth, he had not been at
+Tredonoc church, where he was a pretty regular attendant on Sunday; and
+then, as heads were put together, it appeared that nobody had seen any
+of the Griffith family for days and days.
+
+Now in a town, even in a small town, this process of putting heads
+together is a pretty quick business. In the country, especially in a
+countryside of wild lands and scattered and lonely farms and cottages,
+the affair takes time. Harvest was going on, everybody was busy in his
+own fields, and after the long day's hard work neither the farmer nor
+his men felt inclined to stroll about in search of news or gossip. A
+harvester at the day's end is ready for supper and sleep and for nothing
+else.
+
+And so it was late in that week when it was discovered that Thomas
+Griffith and all his house had vanished from this world.
+
+I have often been reproached for my curiosity over questions which are
+apparently of slight importance, or of no importance at all. I love to
+inquire, for instance, into the question of the visibility of a lighted
+candle at a distance. Suppose, that is, a candle lighted on a still,
+dark night in the country; what is the greatest distance at which you
+can see that there is a light at all? And then as to the human voice;
+what is its carrying distance, under good conditions, as a mere sound,
+apart from any matter of making out words that may be uttered?
+
+They are trivial questions, no doubt, but they have always interested
+me, and the latter point has its application to the strange business of
+Treff Loyne. That melancholy and hollow sound, that wailing summons that
+appalled the hearts of those who heard it was, indeed, a human voice,
+produced in a very exceptional manner; and it seems to have been heard
+at points varying from a mile and a half to two miles from the farm. I
+do not know whether this is anything extraordinary; I do not know
+whether the peculiar method of production was calculated to increase or
+to diminish the carrying power of the sound.
+
+Again and again I have laid emphasis in this story of the terror on the
+strange isolation of many of the farms and cottages in Meirion. I have
+done so in the effort to convince the townsman of something that he has
+never known. To the Londoner a house a quarter of a mile from the
+outlying suburban lamp, with no other dwelling within two hundred yards,
+is a lonely house, a place to fit with ghosts and mysteries and terrors.
+How can he understand then, the true loneliness of the white farmhouses
+of Meirion, dotted here and there, for the most part not even on the
+little lanes and deep winding byways, but set in the very heart of the
+fields, or alone on huge bastioned headlands facing the sea, and whether
+on the high verge of the sea or on the hills or in the hollows of the
+inner country, hidden from the sight of men, far from the sound of any
+common call. There is Penyrhaul, for example, the farm from which the
+foolish Merritt thought he saw signals of light being made: from seaward
+it is of course, widely visible; but from landward, owing partly to the
+curving and indented configuration of the bay, I doubt whether any other
+habitation views it from a nearer distance than three miles.
+
+And of all these hidden and remote places, I doubt if any is so deeply
+buried as Treff Loyne. I have little or no Welsh, I am sorry to say, but
+I suppose that the name is corrupted from Trellwyn, or Tref-y-llwyn,
+"the place in the grove," and, indeed, it lies in the very heart of
+dark, overhanging woods. A deep, narrow valley runs down from the high
+lands of the Allt, through these woods, through steep hillsides of
+bracken and gorse, right down to the great marsh, whence Merritt saw the
+dead man being carried. The valley lies away from any road, even from
+that by-road, little better than a bridlepath, where the four farmers,
+returning from church were perplexed by the strange antics of the
+sheepdog. One cannot say that the valley is overlooked, even from a
+distance, for so narrow is it that the ashgroves that rim it on either
+side seem to meet and shut it in. I, at all events, have never found any
+high place from which Treff Loyne is visible; though, looking down from
+the Allt, I have seen blue wood-smoke rising from its hidden chimneys.
+
+Such was the place, then, to which one September afternoon a party went
+up to discover what had happened to Griffith and his family. There were
+half a dozen farmers, a couple of policemen, and four soldiers,
+carrying their arms; those last had been lent by the officer commanding
+at the camp. Lewis, too, was of the party; he had heard by chance that
+no one knew what had become of Griffith and his family; and he was
+anxious about a young fellow, a painter, of his acquaintance, who had
+been lodging at Treff Loyne all the summer.
+
+They all met by the gate of Tredonoc churchyard, and tramped solemnly
+along the narrow lane; all of them, I think, with some vague discomfort
+of mind, with a certain shadowy fear, as of men who do not quite know
+what they may encounter. Lewis heard the corporal and the three soldiers
+arguing over their orders.
+
+"The Captain says to me," muttered the corporal, "'Don't hesitate to
+shoot if there's any trouble.' 'Shoot what, sir,' I says. 'The trouble,'
+says he, and that's all I could get out of him."
+
+The men grumbled in reply; Lewis thought he heard some obscure
+reference to ratpoison, and wondered what they were talking about.
+
+They came to the gate in the hedge, where the farm road led down to
+Treff Loyne. They followed this track, roughly made, with grass growing
+up between its loosely laid stones, down by the hedge from field to
+wood, till at last they came to the sudden walls of the valley, and the
+sheltering groves of the ash trees. Here the way curved down the steep
+hillside, and bent southward, and followed henceforward the hidden
+hollow of the valley, under the shadow of the trees.
+
+Here was the farm enclosure; the outlying walls of the yard and the
+barns and sheds and outhouses. One of the farmers threw open the gate
+and walked into the yard, and forthwith began bellowing at the top of
+his voice:
+
+"Thomas Griffith! Thomas Griffith! Where be you, Thomas Griffith?"
+
+The rest followed him. The corporal snapped out an order over his
+shoulder, and there was a rattling metallic noise as the men fixed their
+bayonets and became in an instant dreadful dealers out of death, in
+place of harmless fellows with a feeling for beer.
+
+"Thomas Griffith!" again bellowed the farmer.
+
+There was no answer to this summons. But they found poor Griffith lying
+on his face at the edge of the pond in the middle of the yard. There was
+a ghastly wound in his side, as if a sharp stake had been driven into
+his body.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+_The Letter of Wrath_
+
+
+It was a still September afternoon. No wind stirred in the hanging woods
+that were dark all about the ancient house of Treff Loyne; the only
+sound in the dim air was the lowing of the cattle; they had wandered, it
+seemed, from the fields and had come in by the gate of the farmyard and
+stood there melancholy, as if they mourned for their dead master. And
+the horses; four great, heavy, patient-looking beasts they were there
+too, and in the lower field the sheep were standing, as if they waited
+to be fed.
+
+"You would think they all knew there was something wrong," one of the
+soldiers muttered to another. A pale sun showed for a moment and
+glittered on their bayonets. They were standing about the body of poor,
+dead Griffith, with a certain grimness growing on their faces and
+hardening there. Their corporal snapped something at them again; they
+were quite ready. Lewis knelt down by the dead man and looked closely at
+the great gaping wound in his side.
+
+"He's been dead a long time," he said. "A week, two weeks, perhaps. He
+was killed by some sharp pointed weapon. How about the family? How many
+are there of them? I never attended them."
+
+"There was Griffith, and his wife, and his son Thomas and Mary Griffith,
+his daughter. And I do think there was a gentleman lodging with them
+this summer."
+
+That was from one of the farmers. They all looked at one another, this
+party of rescue, who knew nothing of the danger that had smitten this
+house of quiet people, nothing of the peril which had brought them to
+this pass of a farmyard with a dead man in it, and his beasts standing
+patiently about him, as if they waited for the farmer to rise up and
+give them their food. Then the party turned to the house. It was an old,
+sixteenth century building, with the singular round, "Flemish" chimney
+that is characteristic of Meirion. The walls were snowy with whitewash,
+the windows were deeply set and stone mullioned, and a solid,
+stone-tiled porch sheltered the doorway from any winds that might
+penetrate to the hollow of that hidden valley. The windows were shut
+tight. There was no sign of any life or movement about the place. The
+party of men looked at one another, and the churchwarden amongst the
+farmers, the sergeant of police, Lewis, and the corporal drew together.
+
+"What is it to goodness, doctor?" said the churchwarden.
+
+"I can tell you nothing at all--except that that poor man there has been
+pierced to the heart," said Lewis.
+
+"Do you think they are inside and they will shoot us?" said another
+farmer. He had no notion of what he meant by "they," and no one of them
+knew better than he. They did not know what the danger was, or where it
+might strike them, or whether it was from without or from within. They
+stared at the murdered man, and gazed dismally at one another.
+
+"Come!" said Lewis, "we must do something. We must get into the house
+and see what is wrong."
+
+"Yes, but suppose they are at us while we are getting in," said the
+sergeant. "Where shall we be then, Doctor Lewis?"
+
+The corporal put one of his men by the gate at the top of the farmyard,
+another at the gate by the bottom of the farmyard, and told them to
+challenge and shoot. The doctor and the rest opened the little gate of
+the front garden and went up to the porch and stood listening by the
+door. It was all dead silence. Lewis took an ash stick from one of the
+farmers and beat heavily three times on the old, black, oaken door
+studded with antique nails.
+
+He struck three thundering blows, and then they all waited. There was no
+answer from within. He beat again, and still silence. He shouted to the
+people within, but there was no answer. They all turned and looked at
+one another, that party of quest and rescue who knew not what they
+sought, what enemy they were to encounter. There was an iron ring on the
+door. Lewis turned it but the door stood fast; it was evidently barred
+and bolted. The sergeant of police called out to open, but again there
+was no answer.
+
+They consulted together. There was nothing for it but to blow the door
+open, and some one of them called in a loud voice to anybody that might
+be within to stand away from the door, or they would be killed. And at
+this very moment the yellow sheepdog came bounding up the yard from the
+woods and licked their hands and fawned on them and barked joyfully.
+
+"Indeed now," said one of the farmers; "he did know that there was
+something amiss. A pity it was, Thomas Williams, that we did not follow
+him when he implored us last Sunday."
+
+The corporal motioned the rest of the party back, and they stood looking
+fearfully about them at the entrance to the porch. The corporal
+disengaged his bayonet and shot into the keyhole, calling out once more
+before he fired. He shot and shot again; so heavy and firm was the
+ancient door, so stout its bolts and fastenings. At last he had to fire
+at the massive hinges, and then they all pushed together and the door
+lurched open and fell forward. The corporal raised his left hand and
+stepped back a few paces. He hailed his two men at the top and bottom of
+the farmyard. They were all right, they said. And so the party climbed
+and struggled over the fallen door into the passage, and into the
+kitchen of the farmhouse.
+
+Young Griffith was lying dead before the hearth, before a dead fire of
+white wood ashes. They went on towards the "parlor," and in the doorway
+of the room was the body of the artist, Secretan, as if he had fallen in
+trying to get to the kitchen. Upstairs the two women, Mrs. Griffith and
+her daughter, a girl of eighteen, were lying together on the bed in the
+big bedroom, clasped in each others' arms.
+
+They went about the house, searched the pantries, the back kitchen and
+the cellars; there was no life in it.
+
+"Look!" said Dr. Lewis, when they came back to the big kitchen, "look!
+It is as if they had been besieged. Do you see that piece of bacon, half
+gnawed through?"
+
+Then they found these pieces of bacon, cut from the sides on the kitchen
+wall, here and there about the house. There was no bread in the place,
+no milk, no water.
+
+"And," said one of the farmers, "they had the best water here in all
+Meirion. The well is down there in the wood; it is most famous water.
+The old people did use to call it Ffynnon Teilo; it was Saint Teilo's
+Well, they did say."
+
+"They must have died of thirst," said Lewis. "They have been dead for
+days and days."
+
+The group of men stood in the big kitchen and stared at one another, a
+dreadful perplexity in their eyes. The dead were all about them, within
+the house and without it; and it was in vain to ask why they had died
+thus. The old man had been killed with the piercing thrust of some sharp
+weapon; the rest had perished, it seemed probable, of thirst; but what
+possible enemy was this that besieged the farm and shut in its
+inhabitants? There was no answer.
+
+The sergeant of police spoke of getting a cart and taking the bodies
+into Porth, and Dr. Lewis went into the parlor that Secretan had used
+as a sitting-room, intending to gather any possessions or effects of the
+dead artist that he might find there. Half a dozen portfolios were piled
+up in one corner, there were some books on a side table, a fishing-rod
+and basket behind the door--that seemed all. No doubt there would be
+clothes and such matters upstairs, and Lewis was about to rejoin the
+rest of the party in the kitchen, when he looked down at some scattered
+papers lying with the books on the side table. On one of the sheets he
+read to his astonishment the words: "Dr. James Lewis, Porth." This was
+written in a staggering trembling scrawl, and examining the other leaves
+he saw that they were covered with writing.
+
+The table stood in a dark corner of the room, and Lewis gathered up the
+sheets of paper and took them to the window-ledge and began to read,
+amazed at certain phrases that had caught his eye. But the manuscript
+was in disorder; as if the dead man who had written it had not been
+equal to the task of gathering the leaves into their proper sequence; it
+was some time before the doctor had each page in its place. This was the
+statement that he read, with ever-growing wonder, while a couple of the
+farmers were harnessing one of the horses in the yard to a cart, and the
+others were bringing down the dead women.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I do not think that I can last much longer. We shared out the last
+drops of water a long time ago. I do not know how many days ago. We fall
+asleep and dream and walk about the house in our dreams, and I am often
+not sure whether I am awake or still dreaming, and so the days and
+nights are confused in my mind. I awoke not long ago, at least I suppose
+I awoke and found I was lying in the passage. I had a confused feeling
+that I had had an awful dream which seemed horribly real, and I thought
+for a moment what a relief it was to know that it wasn't true, whatever
+it might have been. I made up my mind to have a good long walk to
+freshen myself up, and then I looked round and found that I had been
+lying on the stones of the passage; and it all came back to me. There
+was no walk for me.
+
+"I have not seen Mrs. Griffith or her daughter for a long while. They
+said they were going upstairs to have a rest. I heard them moving about
+the room at first, now I can hear nothing. Young Griffith is lying in
+the kitchen, before the hearth. He was talking to himself about the
+harvest and the weather when I last went into the kitchen. He didn't
+seem to know I was there, as he went gabbling on in a low voice very
+fast, and then he began to call the dog, Tiger.
+
+"There seems no hope for any of us. We are in the dream of death...."
+
+Here the manuscript became unintelligible for half a dozen lines.
+Secretan had written the words "dream of death" three or four times
+over. He had begun a fresh word and had scratched it out and then
+followed strange, unmeaning characters, the script, as Lewis thought, of
+a terrible language. And then the writing became clear, clearer than it
+was at the beginning of the manuscript, and the sentences flowed more
+easily, as if the cloud on Secretan's mind had lifted for a while. There
+was a fresh start, as it were, and the writer began again, in ordinary
+letter-form:
+
+
+"DEAR LEWIS,
+
+"I hope you will excuse all this confusion and wandering. I intended to
+begin a proper letter to you, and now I find all that stuff that you
+have been reading--if this ever gets into your hands. I have not the
+energy even to tear it up. If you read it you will know to what a sad
+pass I had come when it was written. It looks like delirium or a bad
+dream, and even now, though my mind seems to have cleared up a good
+deal, I have to hold myself in tightly to be sure that the experiences
+of the last days in this awful place are true, real things, not a long
+nightmare from which I shall wake up presently and find myself in my
+rooms at Chelsea.
+
+"I have said of what I am writing, 'if it ever gets into your hands,'
+and I am not at all sure that it ever will. If what is happening here is
+happening everywhere else, then I suppose, the world is coming to an
+end. I cannot understand it, even now I can hardly believe it. I know
+that I dream such wild dreams and walk in such mad fancies that I have
+to look out and look about me to make sure that I am not still dreaming.
+
+"Do you remember that talk we had about two months ago when I dined with
+you? We got on, somehow or other, to space and time, and I think we
+agreed that as soon as one tried to reason about space and time one was
+landed in a maze of contradictions. You said something to the effect
+that it was very curious but this was just like a dream. 'A man will
+sometimes wake himself from his crazy dream,' you said, 'by realizing
+that he is thinking nonsense.' And we both wondered whether these
+contradictions that one can't avoid if one begins to think of time and
+space may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a dream, and
+the moon and the stars bits of nightmare. I have often thought over that
+lately. I kick at the walls as Dr. Johnson kicked at the stone, to make
+sure that the things about me are there. And then that other question
+gets into my mind--is the world really coming to an end, the world as we
+have always known it; and what on earth will this new world be like? I
+can't imagine it; it's a story like Noah's Ark and the Flood. People
+used to talk about the end of the world and fire, but no one ever
+thought of anything like this.
+
+"And then there's another thing that bothers me. Now and then I wonder
+whether we are not all mad together in this house. In spite of what I
+see and know, or, perhaps, I should say, because what I see and know is
+so impossible, I wonder whether we are not all suffering from a
+delusion. Perhaps we are our own gaolers, and we are really free to go
+out and live. Perhaps what we think we see is not there at all. I
+believe I have heard of whole families going mad together, and I may
+have come under the influence of the house, having lived in it for the
+last four months. I know there have been people who have been kept alive
+by their keepers forcing food down their throats, because they are quite
+sure that their throats are closed, so that they feel they are unable to
+swallow a morsel. I wonder now and then whether we are all like this in
+Treff Loyne; yet in my heart I feel sure that it is not so.
+
+"Still, I do not want to leave a madman's letter behind me, and so I
+will not tell you the full story of what I have seen, or believe I have
+seen. If I am a sane man you will be able to fill in the blanks for
+yourself from your own knowledge. If I am mad, burn the letter and say
+nothing about it. Or perhaps--and indeed, I am not quite sure--I may
+wake up and hear Mary Griffith calling to me in her cheerful sing-song
+that breakfast will be ready 'directly, in a minute,' and I shall enjoy
+it and walk over to Porth and tell you the queerest, most horrible dream
+that a man ever had, and ask what I had better take.
+
+"I think that it was on a Tuesday that we first noticed that there was
+something queer about, only at the time we didn't know that there was
+anything really queer in what we noticed. I had been out since nine
+o'clock in the morning trying to paint the marsh, and I found it a very
+tough job. I came home about five or six o'clock and found the family at
+Treff Loyne laughing at old Tiger, the sheepdog. He was making short
+runs from the farmyard to the door of the house, barking, with quick,
+short yelps. Mrs. Griffith and Miss Griffith were standing by the
+porch, and the dog would go to them, look in their faces, and then run
+up the farmyard to the gate, and then look back with that eager yelping
+bark, as if he were waiting for the women to follow him. Then, again and
+again, he ran up to them and tugged at their skirts as if he would pull
+them by main force away from the house.
+
+"Then the men came home from the fields and he repeated this
+performance. The dog was running all up and down the farmyard, in and
+out of the barn and sheds yelping, barking; and always with that eager
+run to the person he addressed, and running away directly, and looking
+back as, if to see whether we were following him. When the house door
+was shut and they all sat down to supper, he would give them no peace,
+till at last they turned him out of doors. And then he sat in the porch
+and scratched at the door with his claws, barking all the while. When
+the daughter brought in my meal, she said: 'We can't think what is come
+to old Tiger, and indeed, he has always been a good dog, too.'
+
+"The dog barked and yelped and whined and scratched at the door all
+through the evening. They let him in once, but he seemed to have become
+quite frantic. He ran up to one member of the family after another; his
+eyes were bloodshot and his mouth was foaming, and he tore at their
+clothes till they drove him out again into the darkness. Then he broke
+into a long, lamentable howl of anguish, and we heard no more of him."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+_The Last Words of Mr. Secretan_
+
+
+"I slept ill that night I awoke again and again from uneasy M dreams,
+and I seemed in my sleep to hear strange calls and noises and a sound of
+murmurs and beatings on the door. There were deep, hollow voices, too,
+that echoed in my sleep, and when I woke I could hear the autumn wind,
+mournful, on the hills above us. I started up once with a dreadful
+scream in my ears; but then the house was all still, and I fell again
+into uneasy sleep.
+
+"It was soon after dawn when I finally roused myself. The people in the
+house were talking to each other in high voices, arguing about something
+that I did not understand.
+
+"'It is those damned gipsies, I tell you,' said old Griffith.
+
+"'What would they do a thing like that for?' asked Mrs. Griffith. 'If it
+was stealing now--'"
+
+"'It is more likely that John Jenkins has done it out of spite,' said
+the son. 'He said that he would remember you when we did catch him
+poaching.'"
+
+"They seemed puzzled and angry, so far as I could make out, but not at
+all frightened. I got up and began to dress. I don't think I looked out
+of the window. The glass on my dressing-table is high and broad, and the
+window is small; one would have to poke one's head round the glass to
+see anything.
+
+"The voices were still arguing downstairs. I heard the old man say,
+'Well, here's for a beginning anyhow,' and then the door slammed.
+
+"A minute later the old man shouted, I think, to his son. Then there was
+a great noise which I will not describe more particularly, and a
+dreadful screaming and crying inside the house and a sound of rushing
+feet. They all cried out at once to each other. I heard the daughter
+crying, 'it is no good, mother, he is dead, indeed they have killed
+him,' and Mrs. Griffith screaming to the girl to let her go. And then
+one of them rushed out of the kitchen and shot the great bolts of oak
+across the door, just as something beat against it with a thundering
+crash.
+
+"I ran downstairs. I found them all in wild confusion, in an agony of
+grief and horror and amazement. They were like people who had seen
+something so awful that they had gone mad.
+
+"I went to the window looking out on the farmyard. I won't tell you all
+that I saw. But I saw poor old Griffith lying by the pond, with the
+blood pouring out of his side.
+
+"I wanted to go out to him and bring him in. But they told me that he
+must be stone dead, and such things also that it was quite plain that
+any one who went out of the house would not live more than a moment. We
+could not believe it, even as we gazed at the body of the dead man; but
+it was there. I used to wonder sometimes what one would feel like if one
+saw an apple drop from the tree and shoot up into the air and disappear.
+I think I know now how one would feel.
+
+"Even then we couldn't believe that it would last. We were not seriously
+afraid for ourselves. We spoke of getting out in an hour or two, before
+dinner anyhow. It couldn't last, because it was impossible. Indeed, at
+twelve o'clock young Griffith said he would go down to the well by the
+back way and draw another pail of water. I went to the door and stood by
+it. He had not gone a dozen yards before they were on him. He ran for
+his life, and we had all we could do to bar the door in time. And then I
+began to get frightened.
+
+"Still we could not believe in it. Somebody would come along shouting in
+an hour or two and it would all melt away and vanish. There could not be
+any real danger. There was plenty of bacon in the house, and half the
+weekly baking of loaves and some beer in the cellar and a pound or so of
+tea, and a whole pitcher of water that had been drawn from the well the
+night before. We could do all right for the day and in the morning it
+would have all gone away.
+
+"But day followed day and it was still there. I knew Treff Loyne was a
+lonely place--that was why I had gone there, to have a long rest from
+all the jangle and rattle and turmoil of London, that makes a man alive
+and kills him too. I went to Treff Loyne because it was buried in the
+narrow valley under the ash trees, far away from any track. There was
+not so much as a footpath that was near it; no one ever came that way.
+Young Griffith had told me that it was a mile and a half to the nearest
+house, and the thought of the silent peace and retirement of the farm
+used to be a delight to me.
+
+"And now this thought came back without delight, with terror. Griffith
+thought that a shout might be heard on a still night up away on the
+Allt, 'if a man was listening for it,' he added, doubtfully. My voice
+was clearer and stronger than his, and on the second night I said I
+would go up to my bedroom and call for help through the open window. I
+waited till it was all dark and still, and looked out through the window
+before opening it. And then I saw over the ridge of the long barn across
+the yard what looked like a tree, though I knew there was no tree there.
+It was a dark mass against the sky, with wide-spread boughs, a tree of
+thick, dense growth. I wondered what this could be, and I threw open the
+window, not only because I was going to call for help, but because I
+wanted to see more clearly what the dark growth over the barn really
+was.
+
+"I saw in the depth of the dark of it points of fire, and colors in
+light, all glowing and moving, and the air trembled. I stared out into
+the night, and the dark tree lifted over the roof of the barn and rose
+up in the air and floated towards me. I did not move till at the last
+moment when it was close to the house; and then I saw what it was and
+banged the window down only just in time. I had to fight, and I saw the
+tree that was like a burning cloud rise up in the night and sink again
+and settle over the barn.
+
+"I told them downstairs of this. They sat with white faces, and Mrs.
+Griffith said that ancient devils were let loose and had come out of the
+trees and out of the old hills because of the wickedness that was on the
+earth. She began to, murmur something to herself, something that sounded
+to me like broken-down Latin.
+
+"I went up to my room again an hour later, but the dark tree swelled
+over the barn. Another day went by, and at dusk I looked out, but the
+eyes of fire were watching me. I dared not open the window.
+
+"And then I thought of another plan. There was the great old fireplace,
+with the round Flemish chimney going high above the house. If I stood
+beneath it and shouted I thought perhaps the sound might be carried
+better than if I called out of the window; for all I knew the round
+chimney might act as a sort of megaphone. Night after night, then, I
+stood in the hearth and called for help from nine o'clock to eleven. I
+thought of the lonely place, deep in the valley of the ashtrees, of the
+lonely hills and lands about it. I thought of the little cottages far
+away and hoped that my voice might reach to those within them. I thought
+of the winding lane high on the Allt, and of the few men that came there
+of nights; but I hoped that my cry might come to one of them.
+
+"But we had drunk up the beer, and we would only let ourselves have
+water by little drops, and on the fourth night my throat was dry, and I
+began to feel strange and weak; I knew that all the voice I had in my
+lungs would hardly reach the length of the field by the farm.
+
+"It was then we began to dream of wells and fountains, and water coming
+very cold, in little drops, out of rocky places in the middle of a cool
+wood. We had given up all meals; now and then one would cut a lump from
+the sides of bacon on the kitchen wall and chew a bit of it, but the
+saltness was like fire.
+
+"There was a great shower of rain one night. The girl said we might open
+a window and hold out bowls and basins and catch the rain. I spoke of
+the cloud with burning eyes. She said 'we will go to the window in the
+dairy at the back, and one of us can get some water at all events,' She
+stood up with her basin on the stone slab in the dairy and looked out
+and heard the plashing of the rain, falling very fast. And she
+unfastened the catch of the window and had just opened it gently with
+one hand, for about an inch, and had her basin in the other hand. 'And
+then,' said she, 'there was something that began to tremble and shudder
+and shake as it did when we went to the Choral Festival at St. Teilo's,
+and the organ played, and there was the cloud and the burning close
+before me.'
+
+"And then we began to dream, as I say. I woke up in my sitting-room one
+hot afternoon when the sun was shining, and I had been looking and
+searching in my dream all through the house, and I had gone down to the
+old cellar that wasn't used, the cellar with the pillars and the vaulted
+room, with an iron pike in my hand. Something said to me that there was
+water there, and in my dream I went to a heavy stone by the middle
+pillar and raised it up, and there beneath was a bubbling well of cold,
+clear water, and I had just hollowed my hand to drink it when I woke. I
+went into the kitchen and told young Griffith. I said I was sure there
+was water there. He shook his head, but he took up the great kitchen
+poker and we went down to the old cellar. I showed him the stone by the
+pillar, and he raised it up. But there was no well.
+
+"Do you know, I reminded myself of many people whom I have met in life?
+I would not be convinced. I was sure that, after all, there was a well
+there. They had a butcher's cleaver in the kitchen and I took it down to
+the old cellar and hacked at the ground with it. The others didn't
+interfere with me. We were getting past that. We hardly ever spoke to
+one another. Each one would be wandering about the house, upstairs and
+downstairs, each one of us, I suppose, bent on his own foolish plan and
+mad design, but we hardly ever spoke. Years ago, I was an actor for a
+bit, and I remember how it was on first nights; the actors treading
+softly up and down the wings, by their entrance, their lips moving and
+muttering over the words of their parts, but without a word for one
+another. So it was with us. I came upon young Griffith one evening
+evidently trying to make a subterranean passage under one of the walls
+of the house. I knew he was mad, as he knew I was mad when he saw me
+digging for a well in the cellar; but neither said anything to the
+other.
+
+"Now we are past all this. We are too weak. We dream when we are awake
+and when we dream we think we wake. Night and day come and go and we
+mistake one for another; I hear Griffith murmuring to himself about the
+stars when the sun is high at noonday, and at midnight I have found
+myself thinking that I walked in bright sunlit meadows beside cold,
+rushing streams that flowed from high rocks.
+
+"Then at the dawn figures in black robes, carrying lighted tapers in
+their hands pass slowly about and about; and I hear great rolling organ
+music that sounds as if some tremendous rite were to begin, and voices
+crying in an ancient song shrill from the depths of the earth.
+
+"Only a little while ago I heard a voice which sounded as if it were at
+my very ears, but rang and echoed and resounded as if it were rolling
+and reverberated from the vault of some cathedral, chanting in terrible
+modulations. I heard the words quite clearly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"_Incipit liber irae Domini Dei nostri._ (Here beginneth The Book of the
+Wrath of the Lord our God.)
+
+"And then the voice sang the word _Aleph,_ prolonging it, it seemed
+through ages, and a light was extinguished as it began the chapter:
+
+"_In that day, saith the Lord, there shall be a cloud over the land, and
+in the cloud a burning and a shape of fire, and out of the cloud shall
+issue forth my messengers; they shall run all together, they shall not
+turn aside; this shall be a day of exceeding bitterness, without
+salvation. And on every high hill, saith the Lord of Hosts, I will set
+my sentinels, and my armies shall encamp in the place of every valley;
+in the house that is amongst rushes I will execute judgment, and in vain
+shall they fly for refuge to the munitions of the rocks. In the groves
+of the woods, in the places where the leaves are as a tent above them,
+they shall find the sword of the slayer; and they that put their trust
+in walled cities shall be confounded. Woe unto the armed man, woe unto
+him that taketh pleasure in the strength of his artillery, for a little
+thing shall smite him, and by one that hath no might shall he be brought
+down into the dust. That which is low shall be set on high; I will make
+the lamb and the young sheep to be as the lion from the swellings of
+Jordan; they shall not spare, saith the Lord, and the doves shall be as
+eagles on the hill Engedi; none shall be found that may abide the onset
+of their battle._
+
+"Even now I can hear the voice rolling far away, as if it came from the
+altar of a great church and I stood at the door. There are lights very
+far away in the hollow of a vast darkness, and one by one they are put
+out. I hear a voice chanting again with that endless modulation that
+climbs and aspires to the stars, and shines there, and rushes down to
+the dark depths of the earth, again to ascend; the word is _Zain._"
+
+Here the manuscript lapsed again, and finally into utter, lamentable
+confusion. There were scrawled lines wavering across the page on which
+Secretan seemed to have been trying to note the unearthly music that
+swelled in his dying ears. As the scrapes and scratches of ink showed,
+he had tried hard to begin a new sentence. The pen had dropped at last
+out of his hand upon the paper, leaving a blot and a smear upon it.
+
+Lewis heard the tramp of feet along the passage; they were carrying out
+the dead to the cart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+_The End of the Terror_
+
+
+Dr. Lewis maintained that we should never begin to understand the real
+significance of life until we began to study just those aspects of it
+which we now dismiss and overlook as utterly inexplicable, and
+therefore, unimportant.
+
+We were discussing a few months ago the awful shadow of the terror which
+at length had passed away from the land. I had formed my opinion, partly
+from observation, partly from certain facts which had been communicated
+to me, and the pass-words having been exchanged, I found that Lewis had
+come by very different ways to the same end.
+
+"And yet," he said, "it is not a true end, or rather, it is like all
+the ends of human inquiry, it leads one to a great mystery. We must
+confess that what has happened might have happened at any time in the
+history of the world. It did not happen till a year ago as a matter of
+fact, and therefore we made up our minds that it never could happen; or,
+one would better say, it was outside the range even of imagination. But
+this is our way. Most people are quite sure that the Black
+Death--otherwise the Plague--will never invade Europe again. They have
+made up their complacent minds that it was due to dirt and bad drainage.
+As a matter of fact the Plague had nothing to do with dirt or with
+drains; and there is nothing to prevent its ravaging England to-morrow.
+But if you tell people so, they won't believe you. They won't believe in
+anything that isn't there at the particular moment when you are talking
+to them. As with the Plague, so with the Terror. We could not believe
+that such a thing could ever happen. Remnant said, truly enough, that
+whatever it was, it was outside theory, outside our theory. Flatland
+cannot believe in the cube or the sphere."
+
+I agreed with all this. I added that sometimes the world was incapable
+of seeing, much less believing, that which was before its own eyes.
+
+"Look," I said, "at any eighteenth century print of a Gothic cathedral.
+You will find that the trained artistic eye even could not behold in any
+true sense the building that was before it. I have seen an old print of
+Peterborough Cathedral that looks as if the artist had drawn it from a
+clumsy model, constructed of bent wire and children's bricks.
+
+"Exactly; because Gothic was outside the aesthetic theory (and therefore
+vision) of the time. You can't believe what you don't see: rather, you
+can't see what you don't believe. It was so during the time of the
+Terror. All this bears out what Coleridge said as to the necessity of
+having the idea before the facts could be of any service to one. Of
+course, he was right; mere facts, without the correlating idea, are
+nothing and lead to no conclusion. We had plenty of facts, but we could
+make nothing of them. I went home at the tail of that dreadful
+procession from Treff Loyne in a state of mind very near to madness. I
+heard one of the soldiers saying to the other: 'There's no rat that'll
+spike a man to the heart, Bill.' I don't know why, but I felt that if I
+heard any more of such talk as that I should go crazy; it seemed to me
+that the anchors of reason were parting. I left the party and took the
+short cut across the fields into Porth. I looked up Davies in the High
+Street and arranged with him that he should take on any cases I might
+have that evening, and then I went home and gave my man his instructions
+to send people on. And then I shut myself up to think it all out--if I
+could.
+
+"You must not suppose that my experiences of that afternoon had afforded
+me the slightest illumination. Indeed, if it had not been that I had
+seen poor old Griffith's body lying pierced in his own farmyard, I think
+I should have been inclined to accept one of Secretan's hints, and to
+believe that the whole family had fallen a victim to a collective
+delusion or hallucination, and had shut themselves up and died of thirst
+through sheer madness. I think there have been such cases. It's the
+insanity of inhibition, the belief that you can't do something which you
+are really perfectly capable of doing. But; I had seen the body of the
+murdered man and the wound that had killed him.
+
+"Did the manuscript left by Secretan give me no hint? Well, it seemed to
+me to make confusion worse confounded. You have seen it; you know that
+in certain places it is evidently mere delirium, the wanderings of a
+dying mind. How was I to separate the facts from the phantasms--lacking
+the key to the whole enigma. Delirium is often a sort of cloud-castle,
+a sort of magnified and distorted shadow of actualities, but it is a
+very difficult thing, almost an impossible thing, to reconstruct the
+real house from the distortion of it, thrown on the clouds of the
+patient's brain. You see, Secretan in writing that extraordinary
+document almost insisted on the fact that he was not in his proper
+sense; that for days he had been part asleep, part awake, part
+delirious. How was one to judge his statement, to separate delirium from
+fact? In one thing he stood confirmed; you remember he speaks of calling
+for help up the old chimney of Treff Loyne; that did seem to fit in with
+the tales of a hollow, moaning cry that had been heard upon the Allt: so
+far one could take him as a recorder of actual experiences. And I looked
+in the old cellars of the farm and found a frantic sort of rabbit-hole
+dug by one of the pillars; again he was confirmed. But what was one to
+make of that story of the chanting voice, and the letters of the Hebrew
+alphabet, and the chapter out of some unknown Minor Prophet? When one
+has the key it is easy enough to sort out the facts, or the hints of
+facts from the delusions; but I hadn't the key on that September
+evening. I was forgetting the 'tree' with lights and fires in it; that,
+I think, impressed me more than anything with the feeling that
+Secretan's story was, in the main, a true story. I had seen a like
+appearance down there in my own garden; but what was it?
+
+"Now, I was saying that, paradoxically, it is only by the inexplicable
+things that life can be explained. We are apt to say, you know, 'a very
+odd coincidence' and pass the matter by, as if there were no more to be
+said, or as if that were the end of it. Well, I believe that the only
+real path lies through the blind alleys."
+
+"How do you mean?"
+
+"Well, this is an instance of what I mean. I told you about Merritt, my
+brother-in-law, and the capsizing of that boat, the _Mary Ann_. He had
+seen, he said, signal lights flashing from one of the farms on the
+coast, and he was quite certain that the two things were intimately
+connected as cause and effect. I thought it all nonsense, and I was
+wondering how I was going to shut him up when a big moth flew into the
+room through that window, fluttered about, and succeeded in burning
+itself alive in the lamp. That gave me my cue; I asked Merritt if he
+knew why moths made for lamps or something of the kind; I thought it
+would be a hint to him that I was sick of his flashlights and his
+half-baked theories. So it was--he looked sulky and held his tongue.
+
+"But a few minutes later I was called out by a man who had found his
+little boy dead in a field near his cottage about an hour before. The
+child was so still, they said, that a great moth had settled on his
+forehead and only fluttered away when they lifted up the body. It was
+absolutely illogical; but it was this odd 'coincidence' of the moth in
+my lamp and the moth on the dead boy's forehead that first set me on the
+track. I can't say that it guided me in any real sense; it was more like
+a great flare of red paint on a wall; it rang up my attention, if I may
+say so; it was a sort of shock like a bang on the big drum. No doubt
+Merritt was talking great nonsense that evening so far as his particular
+instance went; the flashes of light from the farm had nothing to do with
+the wreck of the boat. But his general principle was sound; when you
+hear a gun go off and see a man fall it is idle to talk of 'a mere
+coincidence.' I think a very interesting book might be written on this
+question: I would call it 'A Grammar of Coincidence.'
+
+"But as you will remember, from having read my notes on the matter, I
+was called in about ten days later to see a man named Cradock, who had
+been found in a field near his farm quite dead. This also was at night.
+His wife found him, and there were some very queer things in her story.
+She said that the hedge of the field looked as if it were changed; she
+began to be afraid that she had lost her way and got into the wrong
+field. Then she said the hedge was lighted up as if there were a lot of
+glow-worms in it, and when she peered over the stile there seemed to be
+some kind of glimmering upon the ground, and then the glimmering melted
+away, and she found her husband's body near where this light had been.
+Now this man Cradock had been suffocated just as the little boy Roberts
+had been suffocated, and as that man in the Midlands who took a short
+cut one night had been suffocated. Then I remembered that poor Johnnie
+Roberts had called out about 'something shiny' over the stile just
+before he played truant. Then, on my part, I had to contribute the very
+remarkable sight I witnessed here, as I looked down over the garden; the
+appearance as of a spreading tree where I knew there was no such tree,
+and then the shining and burning of lights and moving colors. Like the
+poor child and Mrs. Cradock, I had seen something shiny, just as some
+man in Stratfordshire had seen a dark cloud with points of fire in it
+floating over the trees. And Mrs. Cradock thought that the shape of the
+trees in the hedge had changed.
+
+"My mind almost uttered the word that was wanted; but you see the
+difficulties. This set of circumstances could not, so far as I could
+see, have any relation with the other circumstances of the Terror. How
+could I connect all this with the bombs and machine-guns of the
+Midlands, with the armed men who kept watch about the munition shops by
+day and night. Then there was the long list of people here who had
+fallen over the cliffs or into the quarry; there were the cases of the
+men stifled in the slime of the marshes; there was the affair of the
+family murdered in front of their cottage on the Highway; there was the
+capsized _Mary Ann_. I could not see any thread that could bring all
+these incidents together; they seemed to me to be hopelessly
+disconnected. I could not make out any relation between the agency that
+beat out the brains of the Williams's and the agency, that overturned
+the boat. I don't know, but I think it's very likely if nothing more had
+happened that I should have put the whole thing down as an unaccountable
+series of crimes and accidents which chanced to occur in Meirion in the
+summer of 1915. Well, of course, that would have been an impossible
+standpoint in view of certain incidents in Merritt's story. Still, if
+one is confronted by the insoluble, one lets it go at last. If the
+mystery is inexplicable, one pretends that there isn't any mystery. That
+is the justification for what is called free thinking.
+
+"Then came that extraordinary business of Treff Loyne. I couldn't put
+that on one side. I couldn't pretend that nothing strange or out of the
+way had happened. There was no getting over it or getting round it. I
+had seen with my eyes that there was a mystery, and a most horrible
+mystery. I have forgotten my logic, but one might say that Treff Loyne
+demonstrated the existence of a mystery in the figure of Death.
+
+"I took it all home, as I have told you, and sat down for the evening
+before it. It appalled me, not only by its horror, but here again by the
+discrepancy between its terms. Old Griffith, so far as I could judge,
+had been killed by the thrust of a pike or perhaps of a sharpened stake:
+how could one relate this to the burning tree that had floated over the
+ridge of the barn. It was as if I said to you: 'here is a man drowned,
+and here is a man burned alive: show that each death was caused by the
+same agency!' And the moment that I left this particular case of Treff
+Loyne, and tried to get some light on it from other instances of the
+Terror, I would think of the man in the midlands who heard the feet of
+a thousand men rustling in the wood, and their voices as if dead men sat
+up in their bones and talked. And then I would say to myself, 'and how
+about that boat overturned in a calm sea?' There seemed no end to it, no
+hope of any solution.
+
+"It was, I believe, a sudden leap of the mind that liberated me from the
+tangle. It was quite beyond logic. I went back to that evening when
+Merritt was boring me with his flashlights, to the moth in the candle,
+and to the moth on the forehead of poor Johnnie Roberts. There was no
+sense in it; but I suddenly determined that the child and Joseph Cradock
+the farmer, and that unnamed Stratfordshire man, all found at night, all
+asphyxiated, had been choked by vast swarms of moths. I don't pretend
+even now that this is demonstrated, but I'm sure it's true.
+
+"Now suppose you encounter a swarm of these creatures in the dark.
+Suppose the smaller ones fly up your nostrils. You will gasp for breath
+and open your mouth. Then, suppose some hundreds of them fly into your
+mouth, into your gullet, into your windpipe, what will happen to you?
+You will be dead in a very short time, choked, asphyxiated."
+
+"But the moths would be dead too. They would be found in the bodies."
+
+"The moths? Do you know that it is extremely difficult to kill a moth
+with cyanide of potassium? Take a frog, kill it, open its stomach. There
+you will find its dinner of moths and small beetles, and the 'dinner'
+will shake itself and walk off cheerily, to resume an entirely active
+existence. No; that is no difficulty.
+
+"Well, now I came to this. I was shutting out all the other cases. I was
+confining myself to those that came under the one formula. I got to the
+assumption or conclusion, whichever you like, that certain people had
+been asphyxiated by the action of moths. I had accounted for that
+extraordinary appearance of burning or colored lights that I had
+witnessed myself, when I saw the growth of that strange tree in my
+garden. That was clearly the cloud with points of fire in it that the
+Stratfordshire man took for a new and terrible kind of poison gas, that
+was the shiny something that poor little Johnnie Roberts had seen over
+the stile, that was the glimmering light that had led Mrs. Cradock to
+her husband's dead body, that was the assemblage of terrible eyes that
+had watched over Treff Loyne by night. Once on the right track I
+understood all this, for coming into this room in the dark, I have been
+amazed by the wonderful burning and the strange fiery colors of the eyes
+of a single moth, as it crept up the pane of glass, outside. Imagine the
+effect of myriads of such eyes, of the movement of these lights and
+fires in a vast swarm of moths, each insect being in constant motion
+while it kept its place in the mass: I felt that all this was clear and
+certain.
+
+"Then the next step. Of course, we know nothing really about moths;
+rather, we know nothing of moth reality. For all I know there may be
+hundreds of books which treat of moth and nothing but moth. But these
+are scientific books, and science only deals with surfaces; it has
+nothing to do with realities--it is impertinent if it attempts to do
+with realities. To take a very minor matter; we don't even know why the
+moth desires the flame. But we do know what the moth does not do; it
+does not gather itself into swarms with the object of destroying human
+life. But here, by the hypothesis, were cases in which the moth had done
+this very thing; the moth race had entered, it seemed, into a malignant
+conspiracy against the human race. It was quite impossible, no
+doubt--that is to say, it had never happened before--but I could see no
+escape from this conclusion.
+
+"These insects, then, were definitely hostile to man; and then I
+stopped, for I could not see the next step, obvious though it seems to
+me now. I believe that the soldiers' scraps of talk on the way to Treff
+Loyne and back flung the next plank over the gulf. They had spoken of
+'rat poison,' of no rat being able to spike a man through the heart; and
+then, suddenly, I saw my way clear. If the moths were infected with
+hatred of men, and possessed the design and the power of combining
+against him; why not suppose this hatred, this design, this power shared
+by other non-human creatures.
+
+"The secret of the Terror might be condensed into a sentence: the
+animals had revolted against men.
+
+"Now, the puzzle became easy enough; one had only to classify. Take the
+cases of the people who met their deaths by falling over cliffs or over
+the edge of quarries. We think of sheep as timid creatures, who always
+ran away. But suppose sheep that don't run away; and, after all, in
+reason why should they run away? Quarry or no quarry, cliff or no
+cliff; what would happen to you if a hundred sheep ran after you instead
+of running from you? There would be no help for it; they would have you
+down and beat you to death or stifle you. Then suppose man, woman, or
+child near a cliff's edge or a quarry-side, and a sudden rush of sheep.
+Clearly there is no help; there is nothing for it but to go over. There
+can be no doubt that that, is what happened in all these cases.
+
+"And again; you know the country and you know how a herd of cattle will
+sometimes pursue people through the fields in a solemn, stolid sort of
+way. They behave as if they wanted to close in on you. Townspeople
+sometimes get frightened and scream and run; you or I would take no
+notice, or at the utmost, wave our sticks at the herd, which will stop
+dead or lumber off. But suppose they don't lumber off. The mildest old
+cow, remember, is stronger than any man. What can one man or half a
+dozen men do against half a hundred of these beasts no longer
+restrained by that mysterious inhibition, which has made for ages the
+strong the humble slaves of the weak? But if you are botanizing in the
+marsh, like that poor fellow who was staying at Porth, and forty or
+fifty young cattle gradually close round you, and refuse to move when
+you shout and wave your stick, but get closer and closer instead, and
+get you into the slime. Again, where is your help? If you haven't got an
+automatic pistol, you must go down and stay down, while the beasts lie
+quietly on you for five minutes. It was a quicker death for poor
+Griffith of Treff Loyne--one of his own beasts gored him to death with
+one sharp thrust of its horn into his heart. And from that morning those
+within the house were closely besieged by their own cattle and horses
+and sheep; and when those unhappy people within opened a window to call
+for help or to catch a few drops of rain water to relieve their burning
+thirst, the cloud waited for them with its myriad eyes of fire. Can you
+wonder that Secretan's statement reads in places like mania? You
+perceive the horrible position of those people in Treff Loyne; not only
+did they see death advancing on them, but advancing with incredible
+steps, as if one were to die not only in nightmare but by nightmare. But
+no one in his wildest, most fiery dreams had ever imagined such a fate.
+I am not astonished that Secretan at one moment suspected the evidence
+of his own senses, at another surmised that the world's end had come."
+
+"And how about the Williams's who were murdered on the Highway near
+here?"
+
+"The horses were the murderers; the horses that afterwards stampeded the
+camp below. By some means which is still obscure to me they lured that
+family into the road and beat their brains out; their shod hoofs were
+the instruments of execution. And, as for the _Mary Ann_, the boat that
+was capsized, I have no doubt that it was overturned by a sudden rush
+of the porpoises that were gamboling about in the water of Larnac Bay. A
+porpoise is a heavy beast--half a dozen of them could easily upset a
+light rowing-boat. The munition works? Their enemy was rats. I believe
+that it has been calculated that in 'greater London' the number of rats
+is about equal to the number of human beings, that is, there are about
+seven millions of them. The proportion would be about the same in all
+the great centers of population; and the rat, moreover, is, on occasion,
+migratory in its habits. You can understand now that story of the
+_Semiramis_, beating about the mouth of the Thames, and at last cast
+away by Arcachon, her only crew dry heaps of bones. The rat is an expert
+boarder of ships. And so one can understand the tale told by the
+frightened man who took the path by the wood that led up from the new
+munition works. He thought he heard a thousand men treading softly
+through the wood and chattering to one another in some horrible tongue;
+what he did hear was the marshaling of an army of rats--their array
+before the battle.
+
+"And conceive the terror of such an attack. Even one rat in a fury is
+said to be an ugly customer to meet; conceive then, the irruption of
+these terrible, swarming myriads, rushing upon the helpless, unprepared,
+astonished workers in the munition shops."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There can be no doubt, I think, that Dr. Lewis was entirely justified in
+these extraordinary conclusions. As I say, I had arrived at pretty much
+the same end, by different ways; but this rather as to the general
+situation, while Lewis had made his own particular study of those
+circumstances of the Terror that were within his immediate purview, as a
+physician in large practice in the southern part of Meirion. Of some of
+the cases which he reviewed he had, no doubt, no immediate or first-hand
+knowledge; but he judged these instances by their similarity to the
+facts which had come under his personal notice. He spoke of the affairs
+of the quarry at Llanfihangel on the analogy of the people who were
+found dead at the bottom of the cliffs near Porth, and he was no doubt
+justified in doing so. He told me that, thinking the whole matter over,
+he was hardly more astonished by the Terror in itself than by the
+strange way in which he had arrived at his conclusions.
+
+"You know," he said, "those certain evidences of animal malevolence
+which we knew of, the bees that stung the child to death, the trusted
+sheepdog's turning savage, and so forth. Well, I got no light whatever
+from all this; it suggested nothing to me--simply because I had not got
+that 'idea' which Coleridge rightly holds necessary in all inquiry;
+facts _qua_ facts, as we said, mean nothing and, come to nothing. You do
+not believe, therefore you cannot see.
+
+"And then, when the truth at last appeared it was through the whimsical
+'coincidence' as we call such signs, of the moth in my lamp and the
+moth on the dead child's forehead. This, I think, is very
+extraordinary."
+
+"And there seems to have been one beast that remained faithful; the dog
+at Treff Loyne. That is strange."
+
+"That remains a mystery."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It would not be wise, even now, to describe too closely the terrible
+scenes that were to be seen in the munition areas of the north and the
+midlands during the black months of the Terror. Out of the factories
+issued at black midnight the shrouded dead in their coffins, and their
+very kinsfolk did not know how they had come by their deaths. All the
+towns were full of houses of mourning, were full of dark and terrible
+rumors; incredible, as the incredible reality. There were things done
+and suffered that perhaps never will be brought to light, memories and
+secret traditions of these things will be whispered in families,
+delivered from father to son, growing wilder with the passage of the
+years, but never growing wilder than the truth.
+
+It is enough to say that the cause of the Allies was for awhile in
+deadly peril. The men at the front called in their extremity for guns
+and shells. No one told them what was happening in the places where
+these munitions were made.
+
+At first the position was nothing less than desperate; men in high
+places were almost ready to cry "mercy" to the enemy. But, after the
+first panic, measures were taken such as those described by Merritt in
+his account of the matter. The workers were armed with special weapons,
+guards were mounted, machine-guns were placed in position, bombs and
+liquid flame were ready against the obscene hordes of the enemy, and the
+"burning clouds" found a fire fiercer than their own. Many deaths
+occurred amongst the airmen; but they, too, were given special guns,
+arms that scattered shot broadcast, and so drove away the dark flights
+that threatened the airplanes.
+
+And, then, in the winter of 1915-16, the Terror ended suddenly as it had
+begun. Once more a sheep was a frightened beast that ran instinctively
+from a little child; the cattle were again solemn, stupid creatures,
+void of harm; the spirit and the convention of malignant design passed
+out of the hearts of all the animals. The chains that they had cast off
+for awhile were thrown again about them.
+
+And, finally, there comes the inevitable "why?" Why did the beasts who
+had been humbly and patiently subject to man, or affrighted by his
+presence, suddenly know their strength and learn how to league together,
+and declare bitter war against their ancient master?
+
+It is a most difficult and obscure question. I give what explanation I
+have to give with very great diffidence, and an eminent disposition to
+be corrected, if a clearer light can be found.
+
+Some friends of mine, for whose judgment I have very great respect, are
+inclined to think that there was a certain contagion of hate. They hold
+that the fury of the whole world at war, the great passion of death that
+seems driving all humanity to destruction, infected at last these lower
+creatures, and in place of their native instinct of submission, gave
+them rage and wrath and ravening.
+
+This may be the explanation. I cannot say that it is not so, because I
+do not profess to understand the working of the universe. But I confess
+that the theory strikes me as fanciful. There may be a contagion of hate
+as there is a contagion of smallpox; I do not know, but I hardly believe
+it.
+
+In my opinion, and it is only an opinion, the source of the great revolt
+of the beasts is to be sought in a much subtler region of inquiry. I
+believe that the subjects revolted because the king abdicated. Man has
+dominated the beasts throughout the ages, the spiritual has reigned over
+the rational through the peculiar quality and grace of spirituality that
+men possess, that makes a man to be that which he is. And when he
+maintained this power and grace, I think it is pretty clear that between
+him and the animals there was a certain treaty and alliance. There was
+supremacy on the one hand, and submission on the other; but at the same
+time there was between the two that cordiality which exists between
+lords and subjects in a well-organized state. I know a socialist who
+maintains that Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" give a picture of true
+democracy. I do not know about that, but I see that knight and miller
+were able to get on quite pleasantly together, just because the knight
+knew that he was a knight and the miller knew that he was a miller. If
+the knight had had conscientious objections to his knightly grade,
+while the miller saw no reason why he should not be a knight, I am sure
+that their intercourse would have been difficult, unpleasant, and
+perhaps murderous.
+
+So with man. I believe in the strength and truth of tradition. A learned
+man said to me a few weeks ago: "When I have to choose between the
+evidence of tradition and the evidence of a document, I always believe
+the evidence of tradition. Documents may be falsified, and often are
+falsified; tradition is never falsified." This is true; and, therefore,
+I think, one may put trust in the vast body of folklore which asserts
+that there was once a worthy and friendly alliance between man and the
+beasts. Our popular tale of Dick Whittington and his Cat no doubt
+represents the adaptation of a very ancient legend to a comparatively
+modern personage, but we may go back into the ages and find the popular
+tradition asserting that not only are the animals the subjects, but
+also the friends of man.
+
+All that was in virtue of that singular spiritual element in man which
+the rational animals do not possess. Spiritual does not mean
+respectable, it does not even mean moral, it does not mean "good" in the
+ordinary acceptation of the word. It signifies the royal prerogative of
+man, differentiating him from the beasts.
+
+For long ages he has been putting off this royal robe, he has been
+wiping the balm of consecration from his own breast. He has declared,
+again and again, that he is not spiritual, but rational, that is, the
+equal of the beasts over whom he was once sovereign. He has vowed that
+he is not Orpheus but Caliban.
+
+But the beasts also have within them something which corresponds to the
+spiritual quality in men--we are content to call it instinct. They
+perceived that the throne was vacant--not even friendship was possible
+between them and the self-deposed monarch. If he were not king he was a
+sham, an imposter, a thing to be destroyed.
+
+Hence, I think, the Terror. They have risen once--they may rise again.
+
+
+
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