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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Door in the Wall And Other Stories, by H. G. Wells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world 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. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: The Door in the Wall And Other Stories
+
+Author: H. G. Wells
+
+Release Date: March, 1996 [eBook #456]
+[Most recently updated: April 12, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Judith Boss
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DOOR IN THE WALL AND OTHER STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+The Door in the Wall
+
+And Other Stories
+
+by H. G. Wells
+
+
+Contents
+
+ THE DOOR IN THE WALL
+ THE STAR
+ A DREAM OF ARMAGEDDON
+ THE CONE
+ A MOONLIGHT FABLE
+ THE DIAMOND MAKER
+ THE LORD OF THE DYNAMOS
+ THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
+
+
+
+
+THE DOOR IN THE WALL
+
+I
+
+One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me
+this story of the Door in the Wall. And at the time I thought that so
+far as he was concerned it was a true story.
+
+He told it me with such a direct simplicity of conviction that I could
+not do otherwise than believe in him. But in the morning, in my own
+flat, I woke to a different atmosphere, and as I lay in bed and
+recalled the things he had told me, stripped of the glamour of his
+earnest slow voice, denuded of the focussed shaded table light, the
+shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him and the pleasant bright
+things, the dessert and glasses and napery of the dinner we had shared,
+making them for the time a bright little world quite cut off from
+every-day realities, I saw it all as frankly incredible. “He was
+mystifying!” I said, and then: “How well he did it!. . . . . It isn’t
+quite the thing I should have expected him, of all people, to do well.”
+
+Afterwards, as I sat up in bed and sipped my morning tea, I found
+myself trying to account for the flavour of reality that perplexed me
+in his impossible reminiscences, by supposing they did in some way
+suggest, present, convey—I hardly know which word to use—experiences it
+was otherwise impossible to tell.
+
+Well, I don’t resort to that explanation now. I have got over my
+intervening doubts. I believe now, as I believed at the moment of
+telling, that Wallace did to the very best of his ability strip the
+truth of his secret for me. But whether he himself saw, or only thought
+he saw, whether he himself was the possessor of an inestimable
+privilege, or the victim of a fantastic dream, I cannot pretend to
+guess. Even the facts of his death, which ended my doubts forever,
+throw no light on that. That much the reader must judge for himself.
+
+I forget now what chance comment or criticism of mine moved so reticent
+a man to confide in me. He was, I think, defending himself against an
+imputation of slackness and unreliability I had made in relation to a
+great public movement in which he had disappointed me. But he plunged
+suddenly. “I have” he said, “a preoccupation—”
+
+“I know,” he went on, after a pause that he devoted to the study of his
+cigar ash, “I have been negligent. The fact is—it isn’t a case of
+ghosts or apparitions—but—it’s an odd thing to tell of, Redmond—I am
+haunted. I am haunted by something—that rather takes the light out of
+things, that fills me with longings . . . . .”
+
+He paused, checked by that English shyness that so often overcomes us
+when we would speak of moving or grave or beautiful things. “You were
+at Saint Athelstan’s all through,” he said, and for a moment that
+seemed to me quite irrelevant. “Well”—and he paused. Then very
+haltingly at first, but afterwards more easily, he began to tell of the
+thing that was hidden in his life, the haunting memory of a beauty and
+a happiness that filled his heart with insatiable longings that made
+all the interests and spectacle of worldly life seem dull and tedious
+and vain to him.
+
+Now that I have the clue to it, the thing seems written visibly in his
+face. I have a photograph in which that look of detachment has been
+caught and intensified. It reminds me of what a woman once said of
+him—a woman who had loved him greatly. “Suddenly,” she said, “the
+interest goes out of him. He forgets you. He doesn’t care a rap for
+you—under his very nose . . . . .”
+
+Yet the interest was not always out of him, and when he was holding his
+attention to a thing Wallace could contrive to be an extremely
+successful man. His career, indeed, is set with successes. He left me
+behind him long ago; he soared up over my head, and cut a figure in the
+world that I couldn’t cut—anyhow. He was still a year short of forty,
+and they say now that he would have been in office and very probably in
+the new Cabinet if he had lived. At school he always beat me without
+effort—as it were by nature. We were at school together at Saint
+Athelstan’s College in West Kensington for almost all our school time.
+He came into the school as my co-equal, but he left far above me, in a
+blaze of scholarships and brilliant performance. Yet I think I made a
+fair average running. And it was at school I heard first of the Door in
+the Wall—that I was to hear of a second time only a month before his
+death.
+
+To him at least the Door in the Wall was a real door leading through a
+real wall to immortal realities. Of that I am now quite assured.
+
+And it came into his life early, when he was a little fellow between
+five and six. I remember how, as he sat making his confession to me
+with a slow gravity, he reasoned and reckoned the date of it. “There
+was,” he said, “a crimson Virginia creeper in it—all one bright uniform
+crimson in a clear amber sunshine against a white wall. That came into
+the impression somehow, though I don’t clearly remember how, and there
+were horse-chestnut leaves upon the clean pavement outside the green
+door. They were blotched yellow and green, you know, not brown nor
+dirty, so that they must have been new fallen. I take it that means
+October. I look out for horse-chestnut leaves every year, and I ought
+to know.
+
+“If I’m right in that, I was about five years and four months old.”
+
+He was, he said, rather a precocious little boy—he learned to talk at
+an abnormally early age, and he was so sane and “old-fashioned,” as
+people say, that he was permitted an amount of initiative that most
+children scarcely attain by seven or eight. His mother died when he was
+born, and he was under the less vigilant and authoritative care of a
+nursery governess. His father was a stern, preoccupied lawyer, who gave
+him little attention, and expected great things of him. For all his
+brightness he found life a little grey and dull I think. And one day he
+wandered.
+
+He could not recall the particular neglect that enabled him to get
+away, nor the course he took among the West Kensington roads. All that
+had faded among the incurable blurs of memory. But the white wall and
+the green door stood out quite distinctly.
+
+As his memory of that remote childish experience ran, he did at the
+very first sight of that door experience a peculiar emotion, an
+attraction, a desire to get to the door and open it and walk in. And at
+the same time he had the clearest conviction that either it was unwise
+or it was wrong of him—he could not tell which—to yield to this
+attraction. He insisted upon it as a curious thing that he knew from
+the very beginning—unless memory has played him the queerest trick—that
+the door was unfastened, and that he could go in as he chose.
+
+I seem to see the figure of that little boy, drawn and repelled. And it
+was very clear in his mind, too, though why it should be so was never
+explained, that his father would be very angry if he went through that
+door.
+
+Wallace described all these moments of hesitation to me with the utmost
+particularity. He went right past the door, and then, with his hands in
+his pockets, and making an infantile attempt to whistle, strolled right
+along beyond the end of the wall. There he recalls a number of mean,
+dirty shops, and particularly that of a plumber and decorator, with a
+dusty disorder of earthenware pipes, sheet lead ball taps, pattern
+books of wall paper, and tins of enamel. He stood pretending to examine
+these things, and coveting, passionately desiring the green door.
+
+Then, he said, he had a gust of emotion. He made a run for it, lest
+hesitation should grip him again, he went plump with outstretched hand
+through the green door and let it slam behind him. And so, in a trice,
+he came into the garden that has haunted all his life.
+
+It was very difficult for Wallace to give me his full sense of that
+garden into which he came.
+
+There was something in the very air of it that exhilarated, that gave
+one a sense of lightness and good happening and well being; there was
+something in the sight of it that made all its colour clean and perfect
+and subtly luminous. In the instant of coming into it one was
+exquisitely glad—as only in rare moments and when one is young and
+joyful one can be glad in this world. And everything was beautiful
+there . . . . .
+
+Wallace mused before he went on telling me. “You see,” he said, with
+the doubtful inflection of a man who pauses at incredible things,
+“there were two great panthers there . . . Yes, spotted panthers. And I
+was not afraid. There was a long wide path with marble-edged flower
+borders on either side, and these two huge velvety beasts were playing
+there with a ball. One looked up and came towards me, a little curious
+as it seemed. It came right up to me, rubbed its soft round ear very
+gently against the small hand I held out and purred. It was, I tell
+you, an enchanted garden. I know. And the size? Oh! it stretched far
+and wide, this way and that. I believe there were hills far away.
+Heaven knows where West Kensington had suddenly got to. And somehow it
+was just like coming home.
+
+“You know, in the very moment the door swung to behind me, I forgot the
+road with its fallen chestnut leaves, its cabs and tradesmen’s carts, I
+forgot the sort of gravitational pull back to the discipline and
+obedience of home, I forgot all hesitations and fear, forgot
+discretion, forgot all the intimate realities of this life. I became in
+a moment a very glad and wonder-happy little boy—in another world. It
+was a world with a different quality, a warmer, more penetrating and
+mellower light, with a faint clear gladness in its air, and wisps of
+sun-touched cloud in the blueness of its sky. And before me ran this
+long wide path, invitingly, with weedless beds on either side, rich
+with untended flowers, and these two great panthers. I put my little
+hands fearlessly on their soft fur, and caressed their round ears and
+the sensitive corners under their ears, and played with them, and it
+was as though they welcomed me home. There was a keen sense of
+home-coming in my mind, and when presently a tall, fair girl appeared
+in the pathway and came to meet me, smiling, and said Well?’ to me, and
+lifted me, and kissed me, and put me down, and led me by the hand,
+there was no amazement, but only an impression of delightful rightness,
+of being reminded of happy things that had in some strange way been
+overlooked. There were broad steps, I remember, that came into view
+between spikes of delphinium, and up these we went to a great avenue
+between very old and shady dark trees. All down this avenue, you know,
+between the red chapped stems, were marble seats of honour and
+statuary, and very tame and friendly white doves . . . . .
+
+“And along this avenue my girl-friend led me, looking down—I recall the
+pleasant lines, the finely-modelled chin of her sweet kind face—asking
+me questions in a soft, agreeable voice, and telling me things,
+pleasant things I know, though what they were I was never able to
+recall . . . And presently a little Capuchin monkey, very clean, with a
+fur of ruddy brown and kindly hazel eyes, came down a tree to us and
+ran beside me, looking up at me and grinning, and presently leapt to my
+shoulder. So we went on our way in great happiness . . . .”
+
+He paused.
+
+“Go on,” I said.
+
+“I remember little things. We passed an old man musing among laurels, I
+remember, and a place gay with paroquets, and came through a broad
+shaded colonnade to a spacious cool palace, full of pleasant fountains,
+full of beautiful things, full of the quality and promise of heart’s
+desire. And there were many things and many people, some that still
+seem to stand out clearly and some that are a little vague, but all
+these people were beautiful and kind. In some way—I don’t know how—it
+was conveyed to me that they all were kind to me, glad to have me
+there, and filling me with gladness by their gestures, by the touch of
+their hands, by the welcome and love in their eyes. Yes—”
+
+He mused for awhile. “Playmates I found there. That was very much to
+me, because I was a lonely little boy. They played delightful games in
+a grass-covered court where there was a sun-dial set about with
+flowers. And as one played one loved . . . .
+
+“But—it’s odd—there’s a gap in my memory. I don’t remember the games we
+played. I never remembered. Afterwards, as a child, I spent long hours
+trying, even with tears, to recall the form of that happiness. I wanted
+to play it all over again—in my nursery—by myself. No! All I remember
+is the happiness and two dear playfellows who were most with me . . . .
+Then presently came a sombre dark woman, with a grave, pale face and
+dreamy eyes, a sombre woman wearing a soft long robe of pale purple,
+who carried a book and beckoned and took me aside with her into a
+gallery above a hall—though my playmates were loth to have me go, and
+ceased their game and stood watching as I was carried away. ‘Come back
+to us!’ they cried. ‘Come back to us soon!’ I looked up at her face,
+but she heeded them not at all. Her face was very gentle and grave. She
+took me to a seat in the gallery, and I stood beside her, ready to look
+at her book as she opened it upon her knee. The pages fell open. She
+pointed, and I looked, marvelling, for in the living pages of that book
+I saw myself; it was a story about myself, and in it were all the
+things that had happened to me since ever I was born . . . .
+
+“It was wonderful to me, because the pages of that book were not
+pictures, you understand, but realities.”
+
+Wallace paused gravely—looked at me doubtfully.
+
+“Go on,” I said. “I understand.”
+
+“They were realities—yes, they must have been; people moved and things
+came and went in them; my dear mother, whom I had near forgotten; then
+my father, stern and upright, the servants, the nursery, all the
+familiar things of home. Then the front door and the busy streets, with
+traffic to and fro: I looked and marvelled, and looked half doubtfully
+again into the woman’s face and turned the pages over, skipping this
+and that, to see more of this book, and more, and so at last I came to
+myself hovering and hesitating outside the green door in the long white
+wall, and felt again the conflict and the fear.
+
+“‘And next?’ I cried, and would have turned on, but the cool hand of
+the grave woman delayed me.
+
+“‘Next?’ I insisted, and struggled gently with her hand, pulling up her
+fingers with all my childish strength, and as she yielded and the page
+came over she bent down upon me like a shadow and kissed my brow.
+
+“But the page did not show the enchanted garden, nor the panthers, nor
+the girl who had led me by the hand, nor the playfellows who had been
+so loth to let me go. It showed a long grey street in West Kensington,
+on that chill hour of afternoon before the lamps are lit, and I was
+there, a wretched little figure, weeping aloud, for all that I could do
+to restrain myself, and I was weeping because I could not return to my
+dear play-fellows who had called after me, ‘Come back to us! Come back
+to us soon!’ I was there. This was no page in a book, but harsh
+reality; that enchanted place and the restraining hand of the grave
+mother at whose knee I stood had gone—whither have they gone?”
+
+He halted again, and remained for a time, staring into the fire.
+
+“Oh! the wretchedness of that return!” he murmured.
+
+“Well?” I said after a minute or so.
+
+“Poor little wretch I was—brought back to this grey world again! As I
+realised the fulness of what had happened to me, I gave way to quite
+ungovernable grief. And the shame and humiliation of that public
+weeping and my disgraceful homecoming remain with me still. I see again
+the benevolent-looking old gentleman in gold spectacles who stopped and
+spoke to me—prodding me first with his umbrella. ‘Poor little chap,’
+said he; ‘and are you lost then?’—and me a London boy of five and more!
+And he must needs bring in a kindly young policeman and make a crowd of
+me, and so march me home. Sobbing, conspicuous and frightened, I came
+from the enchanted garden to the steps of my father’s house.
+
+“That is as well as I can remember my vision of that garden—the garden
+that haunts me still. Of course, I can convey nothing of that
+indescribable quality of translucent unreality, that difference from
+the common things of experience that hung about it all; but that—that
+is what happened. If it was a dream, I am sure it was a day-time and
+altogether extraordinary dream . . . . . . H’m!—naturally there
+followed a terrible questioning, by my aunt, my father, the nurse, the
+governess—everyone . . . . . .
+
+“I tried to tell them, and my father gave me my first thrashing for
+telling lies. When afterwards I tried to tell my aunt, she punished me
+again for my wicked persistence. Then, as I said, everyone was
+forbidden to listen to me, to hear a word about it. Even my fairy tale
+books were taken away from me for a time—because I was ‘too
+imaginative.’ Eh? Yes, they did that! My father belonged to the old
+school . . . . . And my story was driven back upon myself. I whispered
+it to my pillow—my pillow that was often damp and salt to my whispering
+lips with childish tears. And I added always to my official and less
+fervent prayers this one heartfelt request: ‘Please God I may dream of
+the garden. Oh! take me back to my garden! Take me back to my garden!’
+
+“I dreamt often of the garden. I may have added to it, I may have
+changed it; I do not know . . . . . All this you understand is an
+attempt to reconstruct from fragmentary memories a very early
+experience. Between that and the other consecutive memories of my
+boyhood there is a gulf. A time came when it seemed impossible I should
+ever speak of that wonder glimpse again.”
+
+I asked an obvious question.
+
+“No,” he said. “I don’t remember that I ever attempted to find my way
+back to the garden in those early years. This seems odd to me now, but
+I think that very probably a closer watch was kept on my movements
+after this misadventure to prevent my going astray. No, it wasn’t until
+you knew me that I tried for the garden again. And I believe there was
+a period—incredible as it seems now—when I forgot the garden
+altogether—when I was about eight or nine it may have been. Do you
+remember me as a kid at Saint Athelstan’s?”
+
+“Rather!”
+
+“I didn’t show any signs did I in those days of having a secret dream?”
+
+II
+
+He looked up with a sudden smile.
+
+“Did you ever play North-West Passage with me? . . . . . No, of course
+you didn’t come my way!”
+
+“It was the sort of game,” he went on, “that every imaginative child
+plays all day. The idea was the discovery of a North-West Passage to
+school. The way to school was plain enough; the game consisted in
+finding some way that wasn’t plain, starting off ten minutes early in
+some almost hopeless direction, and working one’s way round through
+unaccustomed streets to my goal. And one day I got entangled among some
+rather low-class streets on the other side of Campden Hill, and I began
+to think that for once the game would be against me and that I should
+get to school late. I tried rather desperately a street that seemed a
+_cul de sac_, and found a passage at the end. I hurried through that
+with renewed hope. ‘I shall do it yet,’ I said, and passed a row of
+frowsy little shops that were inexplicably familiar to me, and behold!
+there was my long white wall and the green door that led to the
+enchanted garden!
+
+“The thing whacked upon me suddenly. Then, after all, that garden, that
+wonderful garden, wasn’t a dream!” . . . .
+
+He paused.
+
+“I suppose my second experience with the green door marks the world of
+difference there is between the busy life of a schoolboy and the
+infinite leisure of a child. Anyhow, this second time I didn’t for a
+moment think of going in straight away. You see . . . For one thing my
+mind was full of the idea of getting to school in time—set on not
+breaking my record for punctuality. I must surely have felt _some_
+little desire at least to try the door—yes, I must have felt that . . .
+. . But I seem to remember the attraction of the door mainly as another
+obstacle to my overmastering determination to get to school. I was
+immediately interested by this discovery I had made, of course—I went
+on with my mind full of it—but I went on. It didn’t check me. I ran
+past tugging out my watch, found I had ten minutes still to spare, and
+then I was going downhill into familiar surroundings. I got to school,
+breathless, it is true, and wet with perspiration, but in time. I can
+remember hanging up my coat and hat . . . Went right by it and left it
+behind me. Odd, eh?”
+
+He looked at me thoughtfully. “Of course, I didn’t know then that it
+wouldn’t always be there. School boys have limited imaginations. I
+suppose I thought it was an awfully jolly thing to have it there, to
+know my way back to it, but there was the school tugging at me. I
+expect I was a good deal distraught and inattentive that morning,
+recalling what I could of the beautiful strange people I should
+presently see again. Oddly enough I had no doubt in my mind that they
+would be glad to see me . . . Yes, I must have thought of the garden
+that morning just as a jolly sort of place to which one might resort in
+the interludes of a strenuous scholastic career.
+
+“I didn’t go that day at all. The next day was a half holiday, and that
+may have weighed with me. Perhaps, too, my state of inattention brought
+down impositions upon me and docked the margin of time necessary for
+the detour. I don’t know. What I do know is that in the meantime the
+enchanted garden was so much upon my mind that I could not keep it to
+myself.
+
+“I told—What was his name?—a ferrety-looking youngster we used to call
+Squiff.”
+
+“Young Hopkins,” said I.
+
+“Hopkins it was. I did not like telling him, I had a feeling that in
+some way it was against the rules to tell him, but I did. He was
+walking part of the way home with me; he was talkative, and if we had
+not talked about the enchanted garden we should have talked of
+something else, and it was intolerable to me to think about any other
+subject. So I blabbed.
+
+“Well, he told my secret. The next day in the play interval I found
+myself surrounded by half a dozen bigger boys, half teasing and wholly
+curious to hear more of the enchanted garden. There was that big
+Fawcett—you remember him?—and Carnaby and Morley Reynolds. You weren’t
+there by any chance? No, I think I should have remembered if you were .
+. . . .
+
+“A boy is a creature of odd feelings. I was, I really believe, in spite
+of my secret self-disgust, a little flattered to have the attention of
+these big fellows. I remember particularly a moment of pleasure caused
+by the praise of Crawshaw—you remember Crawshaw major, the son of
+Crawshaw the composer?—who said it was the best lie he had ever heard.
+But at the same time there was a really painful undertow of shame at
+telling what I felt was indeed a sacred secret. That beast Fawcett made
+a joke about the girl in green—.”
+
+Wallace’s voice sank with the keen memory of that shame. “I pretended
+not to hear,” he said. “Well, then Carnaby suddenly called me a young
+liar and disputed with me when I said the thing was true. I said I knew
+where to find the green door, could lead them all there in ten minutes.
+Carnaby became outrageously virtuous, and said I’d have to—and bear out
+my words or suffer. Did you ever have Carnaby twist your arm? Then
+perhaps you’ll understand how it went with me. I swore my story was
+true. There was nobody in the school then to save a chap from Carnaby
+though Crawshaw put in a word or so. Carnaby had got his game. I grew
+excited and red-eared, and a little frightened, I behaved altogether
+like a silly little chap, and the outcome of it all was that instead of
+starting alone for my enchanted garden, I led the way presently—cheeks
+flushed, ears hot, eyes smarting, and my soul one burning misery and
+shame—for a party of six mocking, curious and threatening
+school-fellows.
+
+“We never found the white wall and the green door . . .”
+
+“You mean?—”
+
+“I mean I couldn’t find it. I would have found it if I could.
+
+“And afterwards when I could go alone I couldn’t find it. I never found
+it. I seem now to have been always looking for it through my school-boy
+days, but I’ve never come upon it again.”
+
+“Did the fellows—make it disagreeable?”
+
+“Beastly . . . . . Carnaby held a council over me for wanton lying. I
+remember how I sneaked home and upstairs to hide the marks of my
+blubbering. But when I cried myself to sleep at last it wasn’t for
+Carnaby, but for the garden, for the beautiful afternoon I had hoped
+for, for the sweet friendly women and the waiting playfellows and the
+game I had hoped to learn again, that beautiful forgotten game . . . .
+.
+
+“I believed firmly that if I had not told— . . . . . I had bad times
+after that—crying at night and wool-gathering by day. For two terms I
+slackened and had bad reports. Do you remember? Of course you would! It
+was _you_—your beating me in mathematics that brought me back to the
+grind again.”
+
+III
+
+For a time my friend stared silently into the red heart of the fire.
+Then he said: “I never saw it again until I was seventeen.
+
+“It leapt upon me for the third time—as I was driving to Paddington on
+my way to Oxford and a scholarship. I had just one momentary glimpse. I
+was leaning over the apron of my hansom smoking a cigarette, and no
+doubt thinking myself no end of a man of the world, and suddenly there
+was the door, the wall, the dear sense of unforgettable and still
+attainable things.
+
+“We clattered by—I too taken by surprise to stop my cab until we were
+well past and round a corner. Then I had a queer moment, a double and
+divergent movement of my will: I tapped the little door in the roof of
+the cab, and brought my arm down to pull out my watch. ‘Yes, sir!’ said
+the cabman, smartly. ‘Er—well—it’s nothing,’ I cried. ‘_My_ mistake! We
+haven’t much time! Go on!’ and he went on . . .
+
+“I got my scholarship. And the night after I was told of that I sat
+over my fire in my little upper room, my study, in my father’s house,
+with his praise—his rare praise—and his sound counsels ringing in my
+ears, and I smoked my favourite pipe—the formidable bulldog of
+adolescence—and thought of that door in the long white wall. ‘If I had
+stopped,’ I thought, ‘I should have missed my scholarship, I should
+have missed Oxford—muddled all the fine career before me! I begin to
+see things better!’ I fell musing deeply, but I did not doubt then this
+career of mine was a thing that merited sacrifice.
+
+“Those dear friends and that clear atmosphere seemed very sweet to me,
+very fine, but remote. My grip was fixing now upon the world. I saw
+another door opening—the door of my career.”
+
+He stared again into the fire. Its red lights picked out a stubborn
+strength in his face for just one flickering moment, and then it
+vanished again.
+
+“Well”, he said and sighed, “I have served that career. I have
+done—much work, much hard work. But I have dreamt of the enchanted
+garden a thousand dreams, and seen its door, or at least glimpsed its
+door, four times since then. Yes—four times. For a while this world was
+so bright and interesting, seemed so full of meaning and opportunity
+that the half-effaced charm of the garden was by comparison gentle and
+remote. Who wants to pat panthers on the way to dinner with pretty
+women and distinguished men? I came down to London from Oxford, a man
+of bold promise that I have done something to redeem. Something—and yet
+there have been disappointments . . . . .
+
+“Twice I have been in love—I will not dwell on that—but once, as I went
+to someone who, I know, doubted whether I dared to come, I took a short
+cut at a venture through an unfrequented road near Earl’s Court, and so
+happened on a white wall and a familiar green door. ‘Odd!’ said I to
+myself, ‘but I thought this place was on Campden Hill. It’s the place I
+never could find somehow—like counting Stonehenge—the place of that
+queer day dream of mine.’ And I went by it intent upon my purpose. It
+had no appeal to me that afternoon.
+
+“I had just a moment’s impulse to try the door, three steps aside were
+needed at the most—though I was sure enough in my heart that it would
+open to me—and then I thought that doing so might delay me on the way
+to that appointment in which I thought my honour was involved.
+Afterwards I was sorry for my punctuality—I might at least have peeped
+in I thought, and waved a hand to those panthers, but I knew enough by
+this time not to seek again belatedly that which is not found by
+seeking. Yes, that time made me very sorry . . . . .
+
+“Years of hard work after that and never a sight of the door. It’s only
+recently it has come back to me. With it there has come a sense as
+though some thin tarnish had spread itself over my world. I began to
+think of it as a sorrowful and bitter thing that I should never see
+that door again. Perhaps I was suffering a little from overwork—perhaps
+it was what I’ve heard spoken of as the feeling of forty. I don’t know.
+But certainly the keen brightness that makes effort easy has gone out
+of things recently, and that just at a time with all these new
+political developments—when I ought to be working. Odd, isn’t it? But I
+do begin to find life toilsome, its rewards, as I come near them,
+cheap. I began a little while ago to want the garden quite badly.
+Yes—and I’ve seen it three times.”
+
+“The garden?”
+
+“No—the door! And I haven’t gone in!”
+
+He leaned over the table to me, with an enormous sorrow in his voice as
+he spoke. “Thrice I have had my chance—_thrice!_ If ever that door
+offers itself to me again, I swore, I will go in out of this dust and
+heat, out of this dry glitter of vanity, out of these toilsome
+futilities. I will go and never return. This time I will stay . . . . .
+I swore it and when the time came—_I didn’t go_.
+
+“Three times in one year have I passed that door and failed to enter.
+Three times in the last year.
+
+“The first time was on the night of the snatch division on the Tenants’
+Redemption Bill, on which the Government was saved by a majority of
+three. You remember? No one on our side—perhaps very few on the
+opposite side—expected the end that night. Then the debate collapsed
+like eggshells. I and Hotchkiss were dining with his cousin at
+Brentford, we were both unpaired, and we were called up by telephone,
+and set off at once in his cousin’s motor. We got in barely in time,
+and on the way we passed my wall and door—livid in the moonlight,
+blotched with hot yellow as the glare of our lamps lit it, but
+unmistakable. ‘My God!’ cried I. ‘What?’ said Hotchkiss. ‘Nothing!’ I
+answered, and the moment passed.
+
+“‘I’ve made a great sacrifice,’ I told the whip as I got in. They all
+have,’ he said, and hurried by.
+
+“I do not see how I could have done otherwise then. And the next
+occasion was as I rushed to my father’s bedside to bid that stern old
+man farewell. Then, too, the claims of life were imperative. But the
+third time was different; it happened a week ago. It fills me with hot
+remorse to recall it. I was with Gurker and Ralphs—it’s no secret now
+you know that I’ve had my talk with Gurker. We had been dining at
+Frobisher’s, and the talk had become intimate between us. The question
+of my place in the reconstructed ministry lay always just over the
+boundary of the discussion. Yes—yes. That’s all settled. It needn’t be
+talked about yet, but there’s no reason to keep a secret from you . . .
+. . Yes—thanks! thanks! But let me tell you my story.
+
+“Then, on that night things were very much in the air. My position was
+a very delicate one. I was keenly anxious to get some definite word
+from Gurker, but was hampered by Ralphs’ presence. I was using the best
+power of my brain to keep that light and careless talk not too
+obviously directed to the point that concerns me. I had to. Ralphs’
+behaviour since has more than justified my caution . . . . . Ralphs, I
+knew, would leave us beyond the Kensington High Street, and then I
+could surprise Gurker by a sudden frankness. One has sometimes to
+resort to these little devices. . . . . And then it was that in the
+margin of my field of vision I became aware once more of the white
+wall, the green door before us down the road.
+
+“We passed it talking. I passed it. I can still see the shadow of
+Gurker’s marked profile, his opera hat tilted forward over his
+prominent nose, the many folds of his neck wrap going before my shadow
+and Ralphs’ as we sauntered past.
+
+“I passed within twenty inches of the door. ‘If I say good-night to
+them, and go in,’ I asked myself, ‘what will happen?’ And I was all
+a-tingle for that word with Gurker.
+
+“I could not answer that question in the tangle of my other problems.
+‘They will think me mad,’ I thought. ‘And suppose I vanish now!—Amazing
+disappearance of a prominent politician!’ That weighed with me. A
+thousand inconceivably petty worldlinesses weighed with me in that
+crisis.”
+
+Then he turned on me with a sorrowful smile, and, speaking slowly;
+“Here I am!” he said.
+
+“Here I am!” he repeated, “and my chance has gone from me. Three times
+in one year the door has been offered me—the door that goes into peace,
+into delight, into a beauty beyond dreaming, a kindness no man on earth
+can know. And I have rejected it, Redmond, and it has gone—”
+
+“How do you know?”
+
+“I know. I know. I am left now to work it out, to stick to the tasks
+that held me so strongly when my moments came. You say, I have
+success—this vulgar, tawdry, irksome, envied thing. I have it.” He had
+a walnut in his big hand. “If that was my success,” he said, and
+crushed it, and held it out for me to see.
+
+“Let me tell you something, Redmond. This loss is destroying me. For
+two months, for ten weeks nearly now, I have done no work at all,
+except the most necessary and urgent duties. My soul is full of
+inappeasable regrets. At nights—when it is less likely I shall be
+recognised—I go out. I wander. Yes. I wonder what people would think of
+that if they knew. A Cabinet Minister, the responsible head of that
+most vital of all departments, wandering alone—grieving—sometimes near
+audibly lamenting—for a door, for a garden!”
+
+IV
+
+I can see now his rather pallid face, and the unfamiliar sombre fire
+that had come into his eyes. I see him very vividly to-night. I sit
+recalling his words, his tones, and last evening’s _Westminster
+Gazette_ still lies on my sofa, containing the notice of his death. At
+lunch to-day the club was busy with him and the strange riddle of his
+fate.
+
+They found his body very early yesterday morning in a deep excavation
+near East Kensington Station. It is one of two shafts that have been
+made in connection with an extension of the railway southward. It is
+protected from the intrusion of the public by a hoarding upon the high
+road, in which a small doorway has been cut for the convenience of some
+of the workmen who live in that direction. The doorway was left
+unfastened through a misunderstanding between two gangers, and through
+it he made his way . . . . .
+
+My mind is darkened with questions and riddles.
+
+It would seem he walked all the way from the House that night—he has
+frequently walked home during the past Session—and so it is I figure
+his dark form coming along the late and empty streets, wrapped up,
+intent. And then did the pale electric lights near the station cheat
+the rough planking into a semblance of white? Did that fatal unfastened
+door awaken some memory?
+
+Was there, after all, ever any green door in the wall at all?
+
+I do not know. I have told his story as he told it to me. There are
+times when I believe that Wallace was no more than the victim of the
+coincidence between a rare but not unprecedented type of hallucination
+and a careless trap, but that indeed is not my profoundest belief. You
+may think me superstitious if you will, and foolish; but, indeed, I am
+more than half convinced that he had in truth, an abnormal gift, and a
+sense, something—I know not what—that in the guise of wall and door
+offered him an outlet, a secret and peculiar passage of escape into
+another and altogether more beautiful world. At any rate, you will say,
+it betrayed him in the end. But did it betray him? There you touch the
+inmost mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and the
+imagination. We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the
+pit. By our daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness,
+danger and death. But did he see like that?
+
+
+
+
+THE STAR
+
+
+It was on the first day of the New Year that the announcement was made,
+almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the motion of the
+planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that wheel about the
+sun, had become very erratic. Ogilvy had already called attention to a
+suspected retardation in its velocity in December. Such a piece of news
+was scarcely calculated to interest a world the greater portion of
+whose inhabitants were unaware of the existence of the planet Neptune,
+nor outside the astronomical profession did the subsequent discovery of
+a faint remote speck of light in the region of the perturbed planet
+cause any very great excitement. Scientific people, however, found the
+intelligence remarkable enough, even before it became known that the
+new body was rapidly growing larger and brighter, that its motion was
+quite different from the orderly progress of the planets, and that the
+deflection of Neptune and its satellite was becoming now of an
+unprecedented kind.
+
+Few people without a training in science can realise the huge isolation
+of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of
+planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that
+almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is
+space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without
+warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a
+million miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be
+traversed before the very nearest of the stars is attained. And, saving
+a few comets more unsubstantial than the thinnest flame, no matter had
+ever to human knowledge crossed this gulf of space, until early in the
+twentieth century this strange wanderer appeared. A vast mass of matter
+it was, bulky, heavy, rushing without warning out of the black mystery
+of the sky into the radiance of the sun. By the second day it was
+clearly visible to any decent instrument, as a speck with a barely
+sensible diameter, in the constellation Leo near Regulus. In a little
+while an opera glass could attain it.
+
+On the third day of the new year the newspaper readers of two
+hemispheres were made aware for the first time of the real importance
+of this unusual apparition in the heavens. “A Planetary Collision,” one
+London paper headed the news, and proclaimed Duchaine’s opinion that
+this strange new planet would probably collide with Neptune. The leader
+writers enlarged upon the topic; so that in most of the capitals of the
+world, on January 3rd, there was an expectation, however vague of some
+imminent phenomenon in the sky; and as the night followed the sunset
+round the globe, thousands of men turned their eyes skyward to see—the
+old familiar stars just as they had always been.
+
+Until it was dawn in London and Pollux setting and the stars overhead
+grown pale. The Winter’s dawn it was, a sickly filtering accumulation
+of daylight, and the light of gas and candles shone yellow in the
+windows to show where people were astir. But the yawning policeman saw
+the thing, the busy crowds in the markets stopped agape, workmen going
+to their work betimes, milkmen, the drivers of news-carts, dissipation
+going home jaded and pale, homeless wanderers, sentinels on their
+beats, and in the country, labourers trudging afield, poachers slinking
+home, all over the dusky quickening country it could be seen—and out at
+sea by seamen watching for the day—a great white star, come suddenly
+into the westward sky!
+
+Brighter it was than any star in our skies; brighter than the evening
+star at its brightest. It still glowed out white and large, no mere
+twinkling spot of light, but a small round clear shining disc, an hour
+after the day had come. And where science has not reached, men stared
+and feared, telling one another of the wars and pestilences that are
+foreshadowed by these fiery signs in the Heavens. Sturdy Boers, dusky
+Hottentots, Gold Coast Negroes, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, stood
+in the warmth of the sunrise watching the setting of this strange new
+star.
+
+And in a hundred observatories there had been suppressed excitement,
+rising almost to shouting pitch, as the two remote bodies had rushed
+together; and a hurrying to and fro, to gather photographic apparatus
+and spectroscope, and this appliance and that, to record this novel
+astonishing sight, the destruction of a world. For it was a world, a
+sister planet of our earth, far greater than our earth indeed, that had
+so suddenly flashed into flaming death. Neptune it was, had been
+struck, fairly and squarely, by the strange planet from outer space and
+the heat of the concussion had incontinently turned two solid globes
+into one vast mass of incandescence. Round the world that day, two
+hours before the dawn, went the pallid great white star, fading only as
+it sank westward and the sun mounted above it. Everywhere men marvelled
+at it, but of all those who saw it none could have marvelled more than
+those sailors, habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had
+heard nothing of its advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and
+climb zenithward and hang overhead and sink westward with the passing
+of the night.
+
+And when next it rose over Europe everywhere were crowds of watchers on
+hilly slopes, on house-roofs, in open spaces, staring eastward for the
+rising of the great new star. It rose with a white glow in front of it,
+like the glare of a white fire, and those who had seen it come into
+existence the night before cried out at the sight of it. “It is
+larger,” they cried. “It is brighter!” And, indeed the moon a quarter
+full and sinking in the west was in its apparent size beyond
+comparison, but scarcely in all its breadth had it as much brightness
+now as the little circle of the strange new star.
+
+“It is brighter!” cried the people clustering in the streets. But in
+the dim observatories the watchers held their breath and peered at one
+another. “_It is nearer_,” they said. “_Nearer!_”
+
+And voice after voice repeated, “It is nearer,” and the clicking
+telegraph took that up, and it trembled along telephone wires, and in a
+thousand cities grimy compositors fingered the type. “It is nearer.”
+Men writing in offices, struck with a strange realisation, flung down
+their pens, men talking in a thousand places suddenly came upon a
+grotesque possibility in those words, “It is nearer.” It hurried along
+wakening streets, it was shouted down the frost-stilled ways of quiet
+villages; men who had read these things from the throbbing tape stood
+in yellow-lit doorways shouting the news to the passersby. “It is
+nearer.” Pretty women, flushed and glittering, heard the news told
+jestingly between the dances, and feigned an intelligent interest they
+did not feel. “Nearer! Indeed. How curious! How very, very clever
+people must be to find out things like that!”
+
+Lonely tramps faring through the wintry night murmured those words to
+comfort themselves—looking skyward. “It has need to be nearer, for the
+night’s as cold as charity. Don’t seem much warmth from it if it _is_
+nearer, all the same.”
+
+“What is a new star to me?” cried the weeping woman kneeling beside her
+dead.
+
+The schoolboy, rising early for his examination work, puzzled it out
+for himself—with the great white star shining broad and bright through
+the frost-flowers of his window. “Centrifugal, centripetal,” he said,
+with his chin on his fist. “Stop a planet in its flight, rob it of its
+centrifugal force, what then? Centripetal has it, and down it falls
+into the sun! And this—!
+
+“Do _we_ come in the way? I wonder—”
+
+The light of that day went the way of its brethren, and with the later
+watches of the frosty darkness rose the strange star again. And it was
+now so bright that the waxing moon seemed but a pale yellow ghost of
+itself, hanging huge in the sunset. In a South African City a great man
+had married, and the streets were alight to welcome his return with his
+bride. “Even the skies have illuminated,” said the flatterer. Under
+Capricorn, two negro lovers, daring the wild beasts and evil spirits,
+for love of one another, crouched together in a cane brake where the
+fire-flies hovered. “That is our star,” they whispered, and felt
+strangely comforted by the sweet brilliance of its light.
+
+The master mathematician sat in his private room and pushed the papers
+from him. His calculations were already finished. In a small white
+phial there still remained a little of the drug that had kept him awake
+and active for four long nights. Each day, serene, explicit, patient as
+ever, he had given his lecture to his students, and then had come back
+at once to this momentous calculation. His face was grave, a little
+drawn and hectic from his drugged activity. For some time he seemed
+lost in thought. Then he went to the window, and the blind went up with
+a click. Half way up the sky, over the clustering roofs, chimneys and
+steeples of the city, hung the star.
+
+He looked at it as one might look into the eyes of a brave enemy. “You
+may kill me,” he said after a silence. “But I can hold you—and all the
+universe for that matter—in the grip of this little brain. I would not
+change. Even now.”
+
+He looked at the little phial. “There will be no need of sleep again,”
+he said. The next day at noon—punctual to the minute, he entered his
+lecture theatre, put his hat on the end of the table as his habit was,
+and carefully selected a large piece of chalk. It was a joke among his
+students that he could not lecture without that piece of chalk to
+fumble in his fingers, and once he had been stricken to impotence by
+their hiding his supply. He came and looked under his grey eyebrows at
+the rising tiers of young fresh faces, and spoke with his accustomed
+studied commonness of phrasing. “Circumstances have
+arisen—circumstances beyond my control,” he said and paused, “which
+will debar me from completing the course I had designed. It would seem,
+gentlemen, if I may put the thing clearly and briefly, that—Man has
+lived in vain.”
+
+The students glanced at one another. Had they heard aright? Mad? Raised
+eyebrows and grinning lips there were, but one or two faces remained
+intent upon his calm grey-fringed face. “It will be interesting,” he
+was saying, “to devote this morning to an exposition, so far as I can
+make it clear to you, of the calculations that have led me to this
+conclusion. Let us assume—”
+
+He turned towards the blackboard, meditating a diagram in the way that
+was usual to him. “What was that about ‘lived in vain?’” whispered one
+student to another. “Listen,” said the other, nodding towards the
+lecturer.
+
+And presently they began to understand.
+
+That night the star rose later, for its proper eastward motion had
+carried it some way across Leo towards Virgo, and its brightness was so
+great that the sky became a luminous blue as it rose, and every star
+was hidden in its turn, save only Jupiter near the zenith, Capella,
+Aldebaran, Sirius and the pointers of the Bear. It was very white and
+beautiful. In many parts of the world that night a pallid halo
+encircled it about. It was perceptibly larger; in the clear refractive
+sky of the tropics it seemed as if it were nearly a quarter the size of
+the moon. The frost was still on the ground in England, but the world
+was as brightly lit as if it were midsummer moonlight. One could see to
+read quite ordinary print by that cold clear light, and in the cities
+the lamps burnt yellow and wan.
+
+And everywhere the world was awake that night, and throughout
+Christendom a sombre murmur hung in the keen air over the country side
+like the belling of bees in the heather, and this murmurous tumult grew
+to a clangour in the cities. It was the tolling of the bells in a
+million belfry towers and steeples, summoning the people to sleep no
+more, to sin no more, but to gather in their churches and pray. And
+overhead, growing larger and brighter as the earth rolled on its way
+and the night passed, rose the dazzling star.
+
+And the streets and houses were alight in all the cities, the shipyards
+glared, and whatever roads led to high country were lit and crowded all
+night long. And in all the seas about the civilised lands, ships with
+throbbing engines, and ships with bellying sails, crowded with men and
+living creatures, were standing out to ocean and the north. For already
+the warning of the master mathematician had been telegraphed all over
+the world, and translated into a hundred tongues. The new planet and
+Neptune, locked in a fiery embrace, were whirling headlong, ever faster
+and faster towards the sun. Already every second this blazing mass flew
+a hundred miles, and every second its terrific velocity increased. As
+it flew now, indeed, it must pass a hundred million of miles wide of
+the earth and scarcely affect it. But near its destined path, as yet
+only slightly perturbed, spun the mighty planet Jupiter and his moons
+sweeping splendid round the sun. Every moment now the attraction
+between the fiery star and the greatest of the planets grew stronger.
+And the result of that attraction? Inevitably Jupiter would be
+deflected from its orbit into an elliptical path, and the burning star,
+swung by his attraction wide of its sunward rush, would “describe a
+curved path” and perhaps collide with, and certainly pass very close
+to, our earth. “Earthquakes, volcanic outbreaks, cyclones, sea waves,
+floods, and a steady rise in temperature to I know not what limit”—so
+prophesied the master mathematician.
+
+And overhead, to carry out his words, lonely and cold and livid, blazed
+the star of the coming doom.
+
+To many who stared at it that night until their eyes ached, it seemed
+that it was visibly approaching. And that night, too, the weather
+changed, and the frost that had gripped all Central Europe and France
+and England softened towards a thaw.
+
+But you must not imagine because I have spoken of people praying
+through the night and people going aboard ships and people fleeing
+toward mountainous country that the whole world was already in a terror
+because of the star. As a matter of fact, use and wont still ruled the
+world, and save for the talk of idle moments and the splendour of the
+night, nine human beings out of ten were still busy at their common
+occupations. In all the cities the shops, save one here and there,
+opened and closed at their proper hours, the doctor and the undertaker
+plied their trades, the workers gathered in the factories, soldiers
+drilled, scholars studied, lovers sought one another, thieves lurked
+and fled, politicians planned their schemes. The presses of the
+newspapers roared through the night, and many a priest of this church
+and that would not open his holy building to further what he considered
+a foolish panic. The newspapers insisted on the lesson of the year
+1000—for then, too, people had anticipated the end. The star was no
+star—mere gas—a comet; and were it a star it could not possibly strike
+the earth. There was no precedent for such a thing. Common sense was
+sturdy everywhere, scornful, jesting, a little inclined to persecute
+the obdurate fearful. That night, at seven-fifteen by Greenwich time,
+the star would be at its nearest to Jupiter. Then the world would see
+the turn things would take. The master mathematician’s grim warnings
+were treated by many as so much mere elaborate self-advertisement.
+Common sense at last, a little heated by argument, signified its
+unalterable convictions by going to bed. So, too, barbarism and
+savagery, already tired of the novelty, went about their nightly
+business, and save for a howling dog here and there, the beast world
+left the star unheeded.
+
+And yet, when at last the watchers in the European States saw the star
+rise, an hour later it is true, but no larger than it had been the
+night before, there were still plenty awake to laugh at the master
+mathematician—to take the danger as if it had passed.
+
+But hereafter the laughter ceased. The star grew—it grew with a
+terrible steadiness hour after hour, a little larger each hour, a
+little nearer the midnight zenith, and brighter and brighter, until it
+had turned night into a second day. Had it come straight to the earth
+instead of in a curved path, had it lost no velocity to Jupiter, it
+must have leapt the intervening gulf in a day, but as it was it took
+five days altogether to come by our planet. The next night it had
+become a third the size of the moon before it set to English eyes, and
+the thaw was assured. It rose over America near the size of the moon,
+but blinding white to look at, and _hot_; and a breath of hot wind blew
+now with its rising and gathering strength, and in Virginia, and
+Brazil, and down the St. Lawrence valley, it shone intermittently
+through a driving reek of thunder-clouds, flickering violet lightning,
+and hail unprecedented. In Manitoba was a thaw and devastating floods.
+And upon all the mountains of the earth the snow and ice began to melt
+that night, and all the rivers coming out of high country flowed thick
+and turbid, and soon—in their upper reaches—with swirling trees and the
+bodies of beasts and men. They rose steadily, steadily in the ghostly
+brilliance, and came trickling over their banks at last, behind the
+flying population of their valleys.
+
+And along the coast of Argentina and up the South Atlantic the tides
+were higher than had ever been in the memory of man, and the storms
+drove the waters in many cases scores of miles inland, drowning whole
+cities. And so great grew the heat during the night that the rising of
+the sun was like the coming of a shadow. The earthquakes began and grew
+until all down America from the Arctic Circle to Cape Horn, hillsides
+were sliding, fissures were opening, and houses and walls crumbling to
+destruction. The whole side of Cotopaxi slipped out in one vast
+convulsion, and a tumult of lava poured out so high and broad and swift
+and liquid that in one day it reached the sea.
+
+So the star, with the wan moon in its wake, marched across the Pacific,
+trailed the thunderstorms like the hem of a robe, and the growing tidal
+wave that toiled behind it, frothing and eager, poured over island and
+island and swept them clear of men. Until that wave came at last—in a
+blinding light and with the breath of a furnace, swift and terrible it
+came—a wall of water, fifty feet high, roaring hungrily, upon the long
+coasts of Asia, and swept inland across the plains of China. For a
+space the star, hotter now and larger and brighter than the sun in its
+strength, showed with pitiless brilliance the wide and populous
+country; towns and villages with their pagodas and trees, roads, wide
+cultivated fields, millions of sleepless people staring in helpless
+terror at the incandescent sky; and then, low and growing, came the
+murmur of the flood. And thus it was with millions of men that night—a
+flight nowhither, with limbs heavy with heat and breath fierce and
+scant, and the flood like a wall swift and white behind. And then
+death.
+
+China was lit glowing white, but over Japan and Java and all the
+islands of Eastern Asia the great star was a ball of dull red fire
+because of the steam and smoke and ashes the volcanoes were spouting
+forth to salute its coming. Above was the lava, hot gases and ash, and
+below the seething floods, and the whole earth swayed and rumbled with
+the earthquake shocks. Soon the immemorial snows of Thibet and the
+Himalaya were melting and pouring down by ten million deepening
+converging channels upon the plains of Burmah and Hindostan. The
+tangled summits of the Indian jungles were aflame in a thousand places,
+and below the hurrying waters around the stems were dark objects that
+still struggled feebly and reflected the blood-red tongues of fire. And
+in a rudderless confusion a multitude of men and women fled down the
+broad river-ways to that one last hope of men—the open sea.
+
+Larger grew the star, and larger, hotter, and brighter with a terrible
+swiftness now. The tropical ocean had lost its phosphorescence, and the
+whirling steam rose in ghostly wreaths from the black waves that
+plunged incessantly, speckled with storm-tossed ships.
+
+And then came a wonder. It seemed to those who in Europe watched for
+the rising of the star that the world must have ceased its rotation. In
+a thousand open spaces of down and upland the people who had fled
+thither from the floods and the falling houses and sliding slopes of
+hill watched for that rising in vain. Hour followed hour through a
+terrible suspense, and the star rose not. Once again men set their eyes
+upon the old constellations they had counted lost to them forever. In
+England it was hot and clear overhead, though the ground quivered
+perpetually, but in the tropics, Sirius and Capella and Aldebaran
+showed through a veil of steam. And when at last the great star rose
+near ten hours late, the sun rose close upon it, and in the centre of
+its white heart was a disc of black.
+
+Over Asia it was the star had begun to fall behind the movement of the
+sky, and then suddenly, as it hung over India, its light had been
+veiled. All the plain of India from the mouth of the Indus to the
+mouths of the Ganges was a shallow waste of shining water that night,
+out of which rose temples and palaces, mounds and hills, black with
+people. Every minaret was a clustering mass of people, who fell one by
+one into the turbid waters, as heat and terror overcame them. The whole
+land seemed a-wailing and suddenly there swept a shadow across that
+furnace of despair, and a breath of cold wind, and a gathering of
+clouds, out of the cooling air. Men looking up, near blinded, at the
+star, saw that a black disc was creeping across the light. It was the
+moon, coming between the star and the earth. And even as men cried to
+God at this respite, out of the East with a strange inexplicable
+swiftness sprang the sun. And then star, sun and moon rushed together
+across the heavens.
+
+So it was that presently, to the European watchers, star and sun rose
+close upon each other, drove headlong for a space and then slower, and
+at last came to rest, star and sun merged into one glare of flame at
+the zenith of the sky. The moon no longer eclipsed the star but was
+lost to sight in the brilliance of the sky. And though those who were
+still alive regarded it for the most part with that dull stupidity that
+hunger, fatigue, heat and despair engender, there were still men who
+could perceive the meaning of these signs. Star and earth had been at
+their nearest, had swung about one another, and the star had passed.
+Already it was receding, swifter and swifter, in the last stage of its
+headlong journey downward into the sun.
+
+And then the clouds gathered, blotting out the vision of the sky, the
+thunder and lightning wove a garment round the world; all over the
+earth was such a downpour of rain as men had never before seen, and
+where the volcanoes flared red against the cloud canopy there descended
+torrents of mud. Everywhere the waters were pouring off the land,
+leaving mud-silted ruins, and the earth littered like a storm-worn
+beach with all that had floated, and the dead bodies of the men and
+brutes, its children. For days the water streamed off the land,
+sweeping away soil and trees and houses in the way, and piling huge
+dykes and scooping out Titanic gullies over the country side. Those
+were the days of darkness that followed the star and the heat. All
+through them, and for many weeks and months, the earthquakes continued.
+
+But the star had passed, and men, hunger-driven and gathering courage
+only slowly, might creep back to their ruined cities, buried granaries,
+and sodden fields. Such few ships as had escaped the storms of that
+time came stunned and shattered and sounding their way cautiously
+through the new marks and shoals of once familiar ports. And as the
+storms subsided men perceived that everywhere the days were hotter than
+of yore, and the sun larger, and the moon, shrunk to a third of its
+former size, took now fourscore days between its new and new.
+
+But of the new brotherhood that grew presently among men, of the saving
+of laws and books and machines, of the strange change that had come
+over Iceland and Greenland and the shores of Baffin’s Bay, so that the
+sailors coming there presently found them green and gracious, and could
+scarce believe their eyes, this story does not tell. Nor of the
+movement of mankind now that the earth was hotter, northward and
+southward towards the poles of the earth. It concerns itself only with
+the coming and the passing of the Star.
+
+The Martian astronomers—for there are astronomers on Mars, although
+they are very different beings from men—were naturally profoundly
+interested by these things. They saw them from their own standpoint of
+course. “Considering the mass and temperature of the missile that was
+flung through our solar system into the sun,” one wrote, “it is
+astonishing what a little damage the earth, which it missed so
+narrowly, has sustained. All the familiar continental markings and the
+masses of the seas remain intact, and indeed the only difference seems
+to be a shrinkage of the white discoloration (supposed to be frozen
+water) round either pole.” Which only shows how small the vastest of
+human catastrophes may seem, at a distance of a few million miles.
+
+
+
+
+A DREAM OF ARMAGEDDON
+
+
+The man with the white face entered the carriage at Rugby. He moved
+slowly in spite of the urgency of his porter, and even while he was
+still on the platform I noted how ill he seemed. He dropped into the
+corner over against me with a sigh, made an incomplete attempt to
+arrange his travelling shawl, and became motionless, with his eyes
+staring vacantly. Presently he was moved by a sense of my observation,
+looked up at me, and put out a spiritless hand for his newspaper. Then
+he glanced again in my direction.
+
+I feigned to read. I feared I had unwittingly embarrassed him, and in a
+moment I was surprised to find him speaking.
+
+“I beg your pardon?” said I.
+
+“That book,” he repeated, pointing a lean finger, “is about dreams.”
+
+“Obviously,” I answered, for it was Fortnum Roscoe’s Dream States, and
+the title was on the cover.
+
+He hung silent for a space as if he sought words. “Yes,” he said at
+last, “but they tell you nothing.”
+
+I did not catch his meaning for a second.
+
+“They don’t know,” he added.
+
+I looked a little more attentively at his face.
+
+“There are dreams,” he said, “and dreams.”
+
+That sort of proposition I never dispute.
+
+“I suppose—” he hesitated. “Do you ever dream? I mean vividly.”
+
+“I dream very little,” I answered. “I doubt if I have three vivid
+dreams in a year.”
+
+“Ah!” he said, and seemed for a moment to collect his thoughts.
+
+“Your dreams don’t mix with your memories?” he asked abruptly. “You
+don’t find yourself in doubt; did this happen or did it not?”
+
+“Hardly ever. Except just for a momentary hesitation now and then. I
+suppose few people do.”
+
+“Does he say—?” He indicated the book.
+
+“Says it happens at times and gives the usual explanation about
+intensity of impression and the like to account for its not happening
+as a rule. I suppose you know something of these theories—”
+
+“Very little—except that they are wrong.”
+
+His emaciated hand played with the strap of the window for a time. I
+prepared to resume reading, and that seemed to precipitate his next
+remark. He leant forward almost as though he would touch me.
+
+“Isn’t there something called consecutive dreaming—that goes on night
+after night?”
+
+“I believe there is. There are cases given in most books on mental
+trouble.”
+
+“Mental trouble! Yes. I daresay there are. It’s the right place for
+them. But what I mean—” He looked at his bony knuckles. “Is that sort
+of thing always dreaming? Is it dreaming? Or is it something else?
+Mightn’t it be something else?”
+
+I should have snubbed his persistent conversation but for the drawn
+anxiety of his face. I remember now the look of his faded eyes and the
+lids red stained—perhaps you know that look.
+
+“I’m not just arguing about a matter of opinion,” he said. “The thing’s
+killing me.”
+
+“Dreams?”
+
+“If you call them dreams. Night after night. Vivid!—so vivid . . . .
+this—” (he indicated the landscape that went streaming by the window)
+“seems unreal in comparison! I can scarcely remember who I am, what
+business I am on . . . .”
+
+He paused. “Even now—”
+
+“The dream is always the same—do you mean?” I asked.
+
+“It’s over.”
+
+“You mean?”
+
+“I died.”
+
+“Died?”
+
+“Smashed and killed, and now, so much of me as that dream was, is dead.
+Dead forever. I dreamt I was another man, you know, living in a
+different part of the world and in a different time. I dreamt that
+night after night. Night after night I woke into that other life. Fresh
+scenes and fresh happenings—until I came upon the last—”
+
+“When you died?”
+
+“When I died.”
+
+“And since then—”
+
+“No,” he said. “Thank God! That was the end of the dream . . .”
+
+It was clear I was in for this dream. And after all, I had an hour
+before me, the light was fading fast, and Fortnum Roscoe has a dreary
+way with him. “Living in a different time,” I said: “do you mean in
+some different age?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Past?”
+
+“No, to come—to come.”
+
+“The year three thousand, for example?”
+
+“I don’t know what year it was. I did when I was asleep, when I was
+dreaming, that is, but not now—not now that I am awake. There’s a lot
+of things I have forgotten since I woke out of these dreams, though I
+knew them at the time when I was—I suppose it was dreaming. They called
+the year differently from our way of calling the year . . . What did
+they call it?” He put his hand to his forehead. “No,” said he, “I
+forget.”
+
+He sat smiling weakly. For a moment I feared he did not mean to tell me
+his dream. As a rule I hate people who tell their dreams, but this
+struck me differently. I proffered assistance even. “It began—” I
+suggested.
+
+“It was vivid from the first. I seemed to wake up in it suddenly. And
+it’s curious that in these dreams I am speaking of I never remembered
+this life I am living now. It seemed as if the dream life was enough
+while it lasted. Perhaps—But I will tell you how I find myself when I
+do my best to recall it all. I don’t remember anything clearly until I
+found myself sitting in a sort of loggia looking out over the sea. I
+had been dozing, and suddenly I woke up—fresh and vivid—not a bit
+dreamlike—because the girl had stopped fanning me.”
+
+“The girl?”
+
+“Yes, the girl. You must not interrupt or you will put me out.”
+
+He stopped abruptly. “You won’t think I’m mad?” he said.
+
+“No,” I answered. “You’ve been dreaming. Tell me your dream.”
+
+“I woke up, I say, because the girl had stopped fanning me. I was not
+surprised to find myself there or anything of that sort, you
+understand. I did not feel I had fallen into it suddenly. I simply took
+it up at that point. Whatever memory I had of this life, this
+nineteenth-century life, faded as I woke, vanished like a dream. I knew
+all about myself, knew that my name was no longer Cooper but Hedon, and
+all about my position in the world. I’ve forgotten a lot since I
+woke—there’s a want of connection—but it was all quite clear and matter
+of fact then.”
+
+He hesitated again, gripping the window strap, putting his face forward
+and looking up to me appealingly.
+
+“This seems bosh to you?”
+
+“No, no!” I cried. “Go on. Tell me what this loggia was like!”
+
+“It was not really a loggia—I don’t know what to call it. It faced
+south. It was small. It was all in shadow except the semicircle above
+the balcony that showed the sky and sea and the corner where the girl
+stood. I was on a couch—it was a metal couch with light striped
+cushions—and the girl was leaning over the balcony with her back to me.
+The light of the sunrise fell on her ear and cheek. Her pretty white
+neck and the little curls that nestled there, and her white shoulder
+were in the sun, and all the grace of her body was in the cool blue
+shadow. She was dressed—how can I describe it? It was easy and flowing.
+And altogether there she stood, so that it came to me how beautiful and
+desirable she was, as though I had never seen her before. And when at
+last I sighed and raised myself upon my arm she turned her face to me—”
+
+He stopped.
+
+“I have lived three-and-fifty years in this world. I have had mother,
+sisters, friends, wife and daughters—all their faces, the play of their
+faces, I know. But the face of this girl—it is much more real to me. I
+can bring it back into memory so that I see it again—I could draw it or
+paint it. And after all—”
+
+He stopped—but I said nothing.
+
+“The face of a dream—the face of a dream. She was beautiful. Not that
+beauty which is terrible, cold, and worshipful, like the beauty of a
+saint; nor that beauty that stirs fierce passions; but a sort of
+radiation, sweet lips that softened into smiles, and grave gray eyes.
+And she moved gracefully, she seemed to have part with all pleasant and
+gracious things—”
+
+He stopped, and his face was downcast and hidden. Then he looked up at
+me and went on, making no further attempt to disguise his absolute
+belief in the reality of his story.
+
+“You see, I had thrown up my plans and ambitions, thrown up all I had
+ever worked for or desired for her sake. I had been a master man away
+there in the north, with influence and property and a great reputation,
+but none of it had seemed worth having beside her. I had come to the
+place, this city of sunny pleasures with her, and left all those things
+to wreck and ruin just to save a remnant at least of my life. While I
+had been in love with her before I knew that she had any care for me,
+before I had imagined that she would dare—that we should dare, all my
+life had seemed vain and hollow, dust and ashes. It was dust and ashes.
+Night after night and through the long days I had longed and desired—my
+soul had beaten against the thing forbidden!
+
+“But it is impossible for one man to tell another just these things.
+It’s emotion, it’s a tint, a light that comes and goes. Only while it’s
+there, everything changes, everything. The thing is I came away and
+left them in their Crisis to do what they could.”
+
+“Left whom?” I asked, puzzled.
+
+“The people up in the north there. You see—in this dream, anyhow—I had
+been a big man, the sort of man men come to trust in, to group
+themselves about. Millions of men who had never seen me were ready to
+do things and risk things because of their confidence in me. I had been
+playing that game for years, that big laborious game, that vague,
+monstrous political game amidst intrigues and betrayals, speech and
+agitation. It was a vast weltering world, and at last I had a sort of
+leadership against the Gang—you know it was called the Gang—a sort of
+compromise of scoundrelly projects and base ambitions and vast public
+emotional stupidities and catch-words—the Gang that kept the world
+noisy and blind year by year, and all the while that it was drifting,
+drifting towards infinite disaster. But I can’t expect you to
+understand the shades and complications of the year—the year something
+or other ahead. I had it all—down to the smallest details—in my dream.
+I suppose I had been dreaming of it before I awoke, and the fading
+outline of some queer new development I had imagined still hung about
+me as I rubbed my eyes. It was some grubby affair that made me thank
+God for the sunlight. I sat up on the couch and remained looking at the
+woman and rejoicing—rejoicing that I had come away out of all that
+tumult and folly and violence before it was too late. After all, I
+thought, this is life—love and beauty, desire and delight, are they not
+worth all those dismal struggles for vague, gigantic ends? And I blamed
+myself for having ever sought to be a leader when I might have given my
+days to love. But then, thought I, if I had not spent my early days
+sternly and austerely, I might have wasted myself upon vain and
+worthless women, and at the thought all my being went out in love and
+tenderness to my dear mistress, my dear lady, who had come at last and
+compelled me—compelled me by her invincible charm for me—to lay that
+life aside.
+
+“‘You are worth it,’ I said, speaking without intending her to hear;
+‘you are worth it, my dearest one; worth pride and praise and all
+things. Love! to have you is worth them all together.’ And at the
+murmur of my voice she turned about.
+
+“‘Come and see,’ she cried—I can hear her now—‘come and see the sunrise
+upon Monte Solaro.’
+
+“I remember how I sprang to my feet and joined her at the balcony. She
+put a white hand upon my shoulder and pointed towards great masses of
+limestone, flushing, as it were, into life. I looked. But first I noted
+the sunlight on her face caressing the lines of her cheeks and neck.
+How can I describe to you the scene we had before us? We were at
+Capri—”
+
+“I have been there,” I said. “I have clambered up Monte Solaro and
+drunk vero Capri—muddy stuff like cider—at the summit.”
+
+“Ah!” said the man with the white face; “then perhaps you can tell
+me—you will know if this is indeed Capri. For in this life I have never
+been there. Let me describe it. We were in a little room, one of a vast
+multitude of little rooms, very cool and sunny, hollowed out of the
+limestone of a sort of cape, very high above the sea. The whole island,
+you know, was one enormous hotel, complex beyond explaining, and on the
+other side there were miles of floating hotels, and huge floating
+stages to which the flying machines came. They called it a pleasure
+city. Of course, there was none of that in your time—rather, I should
+say, is none of that now. Of course. Now!—yes.
+
+“Well, this room of ours was at the extremity of the cape, so that one
+could see east and west. Eastward was a great cliff—a thousand feet
+high perhaps—coldly gray except for one bright edge of gold, and beyond
+it the Isle of the Sirens, and a falling coast that faded and passed
+into the hot sunrise. And when one turned to the west, distinct and
+near was a little bay, a little beach still in shadow. And out of that
+shadow rose Solaro straight and tall, flushed and golden crested, like
+a beauty throned, and the white moon was floating behind her in the
+sky. And before us from east to west stretched the many-tinted sea all
+dotted with little sailing boats.
+
+“To the eastward, of course, these little boats were gray and very
+minute and clear, but to the westward they were little boats of
+gold—shining gold—almost like little flames. And just below us was a
+rock with an arch worn through it. The blue sea-water broke to green
+and foam all round the rock, and a galley came gliding out of the
+arch.”
+
+“I know that rock.” I said. “I was nearly drowned there. It is called
+the Faraglioni.”
+
+“I Faraglioni? Yes, she called it that,” answered the man with the
+white face. “There was some story—but that—”
+
+He put his hand to his forehead again. “No,” he said, “I forget that
+story.”
+
+“Well, that is the first thing I remember, the first dream I had, that
+little shaded room and the beautiful air and sky and that dear lady of
+mine, with her shining arms and her graceful robe, and how we sat and
+talked in half whispers to one another. We talked in whispers not
+because there was any one to hear, but because there was still such a
+freshness of mind between us that our thoughts were a little
+frightened, I think, to find themselves at last in words. And so they
+went softly.
+
+“Presently we were hungry and we went from our apartment, going by a
+strange passage with a moving floor, until we came to the great
+breakfast room—there was a fountain and music. A pleasant and joyful
+place it was, with its sunlight and splashing, and the murmur of
+plucked strings. And we sat and ate and smiled at one another, and I
+would not heed a man who was watching me from a table near by.
+
+“And afterwards we went on to the dancing-hall. But I cannot describe
+that hall. The place was enormous—larger than any building you have
+ever seen—and in one place there was the old gate of Capri, caught into
+the wall of a gallery high overhead. Light girders, stems and threads
+of gold, burst from the pillars like fountains, streamed like an Aurora
+across the roof and interlaced, like—like conjuring tricks. All about
+the great circle for the dancers there were beautiful figures, strange
+dragons, and intricate and wonderful grotesques bearing lights. The
+place was inundated with artificial light that shamed the newborn day.
+And as we went through the throng the people turned about and looked at
+us, for all through the world my name and face were known, and how I
+had suddenly thrown up pride and struggle to come to this place. And
+they looked also at the lady beside me, though half the story of how at
+last she had come to me was unknown or mistold. And few of the men who
+were there, I know, but judged me a happy man, in spite of all the
+shame and dishonour that had come upon my name.
+
+“The air was full of music, full of harmonious scents, full of the
+rhythm of beautiful motions. Thousands of beautiful people swarmed
+about the hall, crowded the galleries, sat in a myriad recesses; they
+were dressed in splendid colours and crowned with flowers; thousands
+danced about the great circle beneath the white images of the ancient
+gods, and glorious processions of youths and maidens came and went. We
+two danced, not the dreary monotonies of your days—of this time, I
+mean—but dances that were beautiful, intoxicating. And even now I can
+see my lady dancing—dancing joyously. She danced, you know, with a
+serious face; she danced with a serious dignity, and yet she was
+smiling at me and caressing me—smiling and caressing with her eyes.
+
+“The music was different,” he murmured. “It went—I cannot describe it;
+but it was infinitely richer and more varied than any music that has
+ever come to me awake.
+
+“And then—it was when we had done dancing—a man came to speak to me. He
+was a lean, resolute man, very soberly clad for that place, and already
+I had marked his face watching me in the breakfasting hall, and
+afterwards as we went along the passage I had avoided his eye. But now,
+as we sat in a little alcove, smiling at the pleasure of all the people
+who went to and fro across the shining floor, he came and touched me,
+and spoke to me so that I was forced to listen. And he asked that he
+might speak to me for a little time apart.
+
+“‘No,’ I said. ‘I have no secrets from this lady. What do you want to
+tell me?’
+
+“He said it was a trivial matter, or at least a dry matter, for a lady
+to hear.
+
+“‘Perhaps for me to hear,’ said I.
+
+“He glanced at her, as though almost he would appeal to her. Then he
+asked me suddenly if I had heard of a great and avenging declaration
+that Evesham had made? Now, Evesham had always before been the man next
+to myself in the leadership of that great party in the north. He was a
+forcible, hard, and tactless man, and only I had been able to control
+and soften him. It was on his account even more than my own, I think,
+that the others had been so dismayed at my retreat. So this question
+about what he had done reawakened my old interest in the life I had put
+aside just for a moment.
+
+“‘I have taken no heed of any news for many days,’ I said. What has
+Evesham been saying?’
+
+“And with that the man began, nothing loth, and I must confess even I
+was struck by Evesham’s reckless folly in the wild and threatening
+words he had used. And this messenger they had sent to me not only told
+me of Evesham’s speech, but went on to ask counsel and to point out
+what need they had of me. While he talked, my lady sat a little forward
+and watched his face and mine.
+
+“My old habits of scheming and organising reasserted themselves. I
+could even see myself suddenly returning to the north, and all the
+dramatic effect of it. All that this man said witnessed to the disorder
+of the party indeed, but not to its damage. I should go back stronger
+than I had come. And then I thought of my lady. You see—how can I tell
+you? There were certain peculiarities of our relationship—as things are
+I need not tell you about that—which would render her presence with me
+impossible. I should have had to leave her; indeed, I should have had
+to renounce her clearly and openly, if I was to do all that I could do
+in the north. And the man knew that, even as he talked to her and me,
+knew it as well as she did, that my steps to duty were—first,
+separation, then abandonment. At the touch of that thought my dream of
+a return was shattered. I turned on the man suddenly, as he was
+imagining his eloquence was gaining ground with me.
+
+“‘What have I to do with these things now?’ I said. ‘I have done with
+them. Do you think I am coquetting with your people in coming here?’
+
+“‘No,’ he said. ‘But—’
+
+“‘Why cannot you leave me alone. I have done with these things. I have
+ceased to be anything but a private man.’
+
+“‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘But have you thought?—this talk of war, these
+reckless challenges, these wild aggressions—’
+
+“I stood up.
+
+“‘No,’ I cried. ‘I won’t hear you. I took count of all those things, I
+weighed them—and I have come away.’
+
+“He seemed to consider the possibility of persistence. He looked from
+me to where the lady sat regarding us.
+
+“‘War,’ he said, as if he were speaking to himself, and then turned
+slowly from me and walked away.
+
+“I stood, caught in the whirl of thoughts his appeal had set going.
+
+“I heard my lady’s voice.
+
+“‘Dear,’ she said; ‘but if they had need of you—’
+
+“She did not finish her sentence, she let it rest there. I turned to
+her sweet face, and the balance of my mood swayed and reeled.
+
+“‘They want me only to do the thing they dare not do themselves,’ I
+said. ‘If they distrust Evesham they must settle with him themselves.’
+
+“She looked at me doubtfully.
+
+“‘But war—’ she said.
+
+“I saw a doubt on her face that I had seen before, a doubt of herself
+and me, the first shadow of the discovery that, seen strongly and
+completely, must drive us apart for ever.
+
+“Now, I was an older mind than hers, and I could sway her to this
+belief or that.
+
+“‘My dear one,’ I said, ‘you must not trouble over these things. There
+will be no war. Certainly there will be no war. The age of wars is
+past. Trust me to know the justice of this case. They have no right
+upon me, dearest, and no one has a right upon me. I have been free to
+choose my life, and I have chosen this.’
+
+“‘But war—,’ she said.
+
+“I sat down beside her. I put an arm behind her and took her hand in
+mine. I set myself to drive that doubt away—I set myself to fill her
+mind with pleasant things again. I lied to her, and in lying to her I
+lied also to myself. And she was only too ready to believe me, only too
+ready to forget.
+
+“Very soon the shadow had gone again, and we were hastening to our
+bathing-place in the Grotta del Bovo Marino, where it was our custom to
+bathe every day. We swam and splashed one another, and in that buoyant
+water I seemed to become something lighter and stronger than a man. And
+at last we came out dripping and rejoicing and raced among the rocks.
+And then I put on a dry bathing-dress, and we sat to bask in the sun,
+and presently I nodded, resting my head against her knee, and she put
+her hand upon my hair and stroked it softly and I dozed. And behold! as
+it were with the snapping of the string of a violin, I was awakening,
+and I was in my own bed in Liverpool, in the life of to-day.
+
+“Only for a time I could not believe that all these vivid moments had
+been no more than the substance of a dream.
+
+“In truth, I could not believe it a dream for all the sobering reality
+of things about me. I bathed and dressed as it were by habit, and as I
+shaved I argued why I of all men should leave the woman I loved to go
+back to fantastic politics in the hard and strenuous north. Even if
+Evesham did force the world back to war, what was that to me? I was a
+man with the heart of a man, and why should I feel the responsibility
+of a deity for the way the world might go?
+
+“You know that is not quite the way I think about affairs, about my
+real affairs. I am a solicitor, you know, with a point of view.
+
+“The vision was so real, you must understand, so utterly unlike a dream
+that I kept perpetually recalling little irrelevant details; even the
+ornament of the book-cover that lay on my wife’s sewing-machine in the
+breakfast-room recalled with the utmost vividness the gilt line that
+ran about the seat in the alcove where I had talked with the messenger
+from my deserted party. Have you ever heard of a dream that had a
+quality like that?”
+
+“Like—?”
+
+“So that afterwards you remembered little details you had forgotten.”
+
+I thought. I had never noticed the point before, but he was right.
+
+“Never,” I said. “That is what you never seem to do with dreams.”
+
+“No,” he answered. “But that is just what I did. I am a solicitor, you
+must understand, in Liverpool, and I could not help wondering what the
+clients and business people I found myself talking to in my office
+would think if I told them suddenly I was in love with a girl who would
+be born a couple of hundred years or so hence, and worried about the
+politics of my great-great-great-grandchildren. I was chiefly busy that
+day negotiating a ninety-nine-year building lease. It was a private
+builder in a hurry, and we wanted to tie him in every possible way. I
+had an interview with him, and he showed a certain want of temper that
+sent me to bed still irritated. That night I had no dream. Nor did I
+dream the next night, at least, to remember.
+
+“Something of that intense reality of conviction vanished. I began to
+feel sure it was a dream. And then it came again.
+
+“When the dream came again, nearly four days later, it was very
+different. I think it certain that four days had also elapsed in the
+dream. Many things had happened in the north, and the shadow of them
+was back again between us, and this time it was not so easily
+dispelled. I began I know with moody musings. Why, in spite of all,
+should I go back, go back for all the rest of my days to toil and
+stress, insults and perpetual dissatisfaction, simply to save hundreds
+of millions of common people, whom I did not love, whom too often I
+could do no other than despise, from the stress and anguish of war and
+infinite misrule? And after all I might fail. They all sought their own
+narrow ends, and why should not I—why should not I also live as a man?
+And out of such thoughts her voice summoned me, and I lifted my eyes.
+
+“I found myself awake and walking. We had come out above the Pleasure
+City, we were near the summit of Monte Solaro and looking towards the
+bay. It was the late afternoon and very clear. Far away to the left
+Ischia hung in a golden haze between sea and sky, and Naples was coldly
+white against the hills, and before us was Vesuvius with a tall and
+slender streamer feathering at last towards the south, and the ruins of
+Torre dell’ Annunziata and Castellammare glittering and near.”
+
+I interrupted suddenly: “You have been to Capri, of course?”
+
+“Only in this dream,” he said, “only in this dream. All across the bay
+beyond Sorrento were the floating palaces of the Pleasure City moored
+and chained. And northward were the broad floating stages that received
+the aeroplanes. Aeroplanes fell out of the sky every afternoon, each
+bringing its thousands of pleasure-seekers from the uttermost parts of
+the earth to Capri and its delights. All these things, I say, stretched
+below.
+
+“But we noticed them only incidentally because of an unusual sight that
+evening had to show. Five war aeroplanes that had long slumbered
+useless in the distant arsenals of the Rhinemouth were manoeuvring now
+in the eastward sky. Evesham had astonished the world by producing them
+and others, and sending them to circle here and there. It was the
+threat material in the great game of bluff he was playing, and it had
+taken even me by surprise. He was one of those incredibly stupid
+energetic people who seem sent by heaven to create disasters. His
+energy to the first glance seemed so wonderfully like capacity! But he
+had no imagination, no invention, only a stupid, vast, driving force of
+will, and a mad faith in his stupid idiot ‘luck’ to pull him through. I
+remember how we stood upon the headland watching the squadron circling
+far away, and how I weighed the full meaning of the sight, seeing
+clearly the way things must go. And then even it was not too late. I
+might have gone back, I think, and saved the world. The people of the
+north would follow me, I knew, granted only that in one thing I
+respected their moral standards. The east and south would trust me as
+they would trust no other northern man. And I knew I had only to put it
+to her and she would have let me go . . . . Not because she did not
+love me!
+
+“Only I did not want to go; my will was all the other way about. I had
+so newly thrown off the incubus of responsibility: I was still so fresh
+a renegade from duty that the daylight clearness of what I ought to do
+had no power at all to touch my will. My will was to live, to gather
+pleasures and make my dear lady happy. But though this sense of vast
+neglected duties had no power to draw me, it could make me silent and
+preoccupied, it robbed the days I had spent of half their brightness
+and roused me into dark meditations in the silence of the night. And as
+I stood and watched Evesham’s aeroplanes sweep to and fro—those birds
+of infinite ill omen—she stood beside me watching me, perceiving the
+trouble indeed, but not perceiving it clearly—her eyes questioning my
+face, her expression shaded with perplexity. Her face was gray because
+the sunset was fading out of the sky. It was no fault of hers that she
+held me. She had asked me to go from her, and again in the night time
+and with tears she had asked me to go.
+
+“At last it was the sense of her that roused me from my mood. I turned
+upon her suddenly and challenged her to race down the mountain slopes.
+‘No,’ she said, as if I had jarred with her gravity, but I was resolved
+to end that gravity, and make her run—no one can be very gray and sad
+who is out of breath—and when she stumbled I ran with my hand beneath
+her arm. We ran down past a couple of men, who turned back staring in
+astonishment at my behaviour—they must have recognised my face. And
+half way down the slope came a tumult in the air, clang-clank,
+clang-clank, and we stopped, and presently over the hill-crest those
+war things came flying one behind the other.”
+
+The man seemed hesitating on the verge of a description.
+
+“What were they like?” I asked.
+
+“They had never fought,” he said. “They were just like our ironclads
+are nowadays; they had never fought. No one knew what they might do,
+with excited men inside them; few even cared to speculate. They were
+great driving things shaped like spear-heads without a shaft, with a
+propeller in the place of the shaft.”
+
+“Steel?”
+
+“Not steel.”
+
+“Aluminum?”
+
+“No, no, nothing of that sort. An alloy that was very common—as common
+as brass, for example. It was called—let me see—” He squeezed his
+forehead with the fingers of one hand. “I am forgetting everything,” he
+said.
+
+“And they carried guns?”
+
+“Little guns, firing high explosive shells. They fired the guns
+backwards, out of the base of the leaf, so to speak, and rammed with
+the beak. That was the theory, you know, but they had never been
+fought. No one could tell exactly what was going to happen. And
+meanwhile I suppose it was very fine to go whirling through the air
+like a flight of young swallows, swift and easy. I guess the captains
+tried not to think too clearly what the real thing would be like. And
+these flying war machines, you know, were only one sort of the endless
+war contrivances that had been invented and had fallen into abeyance
+during the long peace. There were all sorts of these things that people
+were routing out and furbishing up; infernal things, silly things;
+things that had never been tried; big engines, terrible explosives,
+great guns. You know the silly way of these ingenious sort of men who
+make these things; they turn ‘em out as beavers build dams, and with no
+more sense of the rivers they’re going to divert and the lands they’re
+going to flood!
+
+“As we went down the winding stepway to our hotel again, in the
+twilight, I foresaw it all: I saw how clearly and inevitably things
+were driving for war in Evesham’s silly, violent hands, and I had some
+inkling of what war was bound to be under these new conditions. And
+even then, though I knew it was drawing near the limit of my
+opportunity, I could find no will to go back.”
+
+He sighed.
+
+“That was my last chance.
+
+“We didn’t go into the city until the sky was full of stars, so we
+walked out upon the high terrace, to and fro, and—she counselled me to
+go back.
+
+“‘My dearest,’ she said, and her sweet face looked up to me, this is
+Death. This life you lead is Death. Go back to them, go back to your
+duty—’
+
+“She began to weep, saying, between her sobs, and clinging to my arm as
+she said it, ‘Go back—Go back.’
+
+“Then suddenly she fell mute, and, glancing down at her face, I read in
+an instant the thing she had thought to do. It was one of those moments
+when one sees.
+
+“‘No!’ I said.
+
+“‘No?’ she asked, in surprise and I think a little fearful at the
+answer to her thought.
+
+“‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘shall send me back. Nothing! I have chosen. Love,
+I have chosen, and the world must go. Whatever happens I will live this
+life—I will live for you! It—nothing shall turn me aside; nothing, my
+dear one. Even if you died—even if you died—’
+
+“‘Yes?’ she murmured, softly.
+
+“‘Then—I also would die.’
+
+“And before she could speak again I began to talk, talking
+eloquently—as I could do in that life—talking to exalt love, to make
+the life we were living seem heroic and glorious; and the thing I was
+deserting something hard and enormously ignoble that it was a fine
+thing to set aside. I bent all my mind to throw that glamour upon it,
+seeking not only to convert her but myself to that. We talked, and she
+clung to me, torn too between all that she deemed noble and all that
+she knew was sweet. And at last I did make it heroic, made all the
+thickening disaster of the world only a sort of glorious setting to our
+unparalleled love, and we two poor foolish souls strutted there at
+last, clad in that splendid delusion, drunken rather with that glorious
+delusion, under the still stars.
+
+“And so my moment passed.
+
+“It was my last chance. Even as we went to and fro there, the leaders
+of the south and east were gathering their resolve, and the hot answer
+that shattered Evesham’s bluffing for ever, took shape and waited. And,
+all over Asia, and the ocean, and the South, the air and the wires were
+throbbing with their warnings to prepare—prepare.
+
+“No one living, you know, knew what war was; no one could imagine, with
+all these new inventions, what horror war might bring. I believe most
+people still believed it would be a matter of bright uniforms and
+shouting charges and triumphs and flags and bands—in a time when half
+the world drew its food supply from regions ten thousand miles away—”
+
+The man with the white face paused. I glanced at him, and his face was
+intent on the floor of the carriage. A little railway station, a string
+of loaded trucks, a signal-box, and the back of a cottage, shot by the
+carriage window, and a bridge passed with a clap of noise, echoing the
+tumult of the train.
+
+“After that,” he said, “I dreamt often. For three weeks of nights that
+dream was my life. And the worst of it was there were nights when I
+could not dream, when I lay tossing on a bed in this accursed life; and
+there—somewhere lost to me—things were happening—momentous, terrible
+things . . . I lived at nights—my days, my waking days, this life I am
+living now, became a faded, far-away dream, a drab setting, the cover
+of the book.”
+
+He thought.
+
+“I could tell you all, tell you every little thing in the dream, but as
+to what I did in the daytime—no. I could not tell—I do not remember. My
+memory—my memory has gone. The business of life slips from me—”
+
+He leant forward, and pressed his hands upon his eyes. For a long time
+he said nothing.
+
+“And then?” said I.
+
+“The war burst like a hurricane.”
+
+He stared before him at unspeakable things.
+
+“And then?” I urged again.
+
+“One touch of unreality,” he said, in the low tone of a man who speaks
+to himself, “and they would have been nightmares. But they were not
+nightmares—they were not nightmares. No!”
+
+He was silent for so long that it dawned upon me that there was a
+danger of losing the rest of the story. But he went on talking again in
+the same tone of questioning self-communion.
+
+“What was there to do but flight? I had not thought the war would touch
+Capri—I had seemed to see Capri as being out of it all, as the contrast
+to it all; but two nights after the whole place was shouting and
+bawling, every woman almost and every other man wore a badge—Evesham’s
+badge—and there was no music but a jangling war-song over and over
+again, and everywhere men enlisting, and in the dancing halls they were
+drilling. The whole island was awhirl with rumours; it was said, again
+and again, that fighting had begun. I had not expected this. I had seen
+so little of the life of pleasure that I had failed to reckon with this
+violence of the amateurs. And as for me, I was out of it. I was like
+the man who might have prevented the firing of a magazine. The time had
+gone. I was no one; the vainest stripling with a badge counted for more
+than I. The crowd jostled us and bawled in our ears; that accursed song
+deafened us; a woman shrieked at my lady because no badge was on her,
+and we two went back to our own place again, ruffled and insulted—my
+lady white and silent, and I aquiver with rage. So furious was I, I
+could have quarrelled with her if I could have found one shade of
+accusation in her eyes.
+
+“All my magnificence had gone from me. I walked up and down our rock
+cell, and outside was the darkling sea and a light to the southward
+that flared and passed and came again.
+
+“‘We must get out of this place,’ I said over and over. ‘I have made my
+choice, and I will have no hand in these troubles. I will have nothing
+of this war. We have taken our lives out of all these things. This is
+no refuge for us. Let us go.’
+
+“And the next day we were already in flight from the war that covered
+the world.
+
+“And all the rest was Flight—all the rest was Flight.”
+
+He mused darkly.
+
+“How much was there of it?”
+
+He made no answer.
+
+“How many days?”
+
+His face was white and drawn and his hands were clenched. He took no
+heed of my curiosity.
+
+I tried to draw him back to his story with questions.
+
+“Where did you go?” I said.
+
+“When?”
+
+“When you left Capri.”
+
+“South-west,” he said, and glanced at me for a second. “We went in a
+boat.”
+
+“But I should have thought an aeroplane?”
+
+“They had been seized.”
+
+I questioned him no more. Presently I thought he was beginning again.
+He broke out in an argumentative monotone:
+
+“But why should it be? If, indeed, this battle, this slaughter and
+stress is life, why have we this craving for pleasure and beauty? If
+there is no refuge, if there is no place of peace, and if all our
+dreams of quiet places are a folly and a snare, why have we such
+dreams? Surely it was no ignoble cravings, no base intentions, had
+brought us to this; it was Love had isolated us. Love had come to me
+with her eyes and robed in her beauty, more glorious than all else in
+life, in the very shape and colour of life, and summoned me away. I had
+silenced all the voices, I had answered all the questions—I had come to
+her. And suddenly there was nothing but War and Death!”
+
+I had an inspiration. “After all,” I said, “it could have been only a
+dream.”
+
+“A dream!” he cried, flaming upon me, “a dream—when, even now—”
+
+For the first time he became animated. A faint flush crept into his
+cheek. He raised his open hand and clenched it, and dropped it to his
+knee. He spoke, looking away from me, and for all the rest of the time
+he looked away. “We are but phantoms!” he said, “and the phantoms of
+phantoms, desires like cloud-shadows and wills of straw that eddy in
+the wind; the days pass, use and wont carry us through as a train
+carries the shadow of its lights—so be it! But one thing is real and
+certain, one thing is no dream-stuff, but eternal and enduring. It is
+the centre of my life, and all other things about it are subordinate or
+altogether vain. I loved her, that woman of a dream. And she and I are
+dead together!
+
+“A dream! How can it be a dream, when it drenched a living life with
+unappeasable sorrow, when it makes all that I have lived for and cared
+for, worthless and unmeaning?
+
+“Until that very moment when she was killed I believed we had still a
+chance of getting away,” he said. “All through the night and morning
+that we sailed across the sea from Capri to Salerno, we talked of
+escape. We were full of hope, and it clung about us to the end, hope
+for the life together we should lead, out of it all, out of the battle
+and struggle, the wild and empty passions, the empty arbitrary ‘thou
+shalt’ and ‘thou shalt not’ of the world. We were uplifted, as though
+our quest was a holy thing, as though love for another was a mission .
+. . .
+
+“Even when from our boat we saw the fair face of that great rock
+Capri—already scarred and gashed by the gun emplacements and
+hiding-places that were to make it a fastness—we reckoned nothing of
+the imminent slaughter, though the fury of preparation hung about in
+the puffs and clouds of dust at a hundred points amidst the gray; but,
+indeed, I made a text of that and talked. There, you know, was the
+rock, still beautiful for all its scars, with its countless windows and
+arches and ways, tier upon tier, for a thousand feet, a vast carving of
+gray, broken by vine-clad terraces, and lemon and orange groves, and
+masses of agave and prickly pear, and puffs of almond blossom. And out
+under the archway that is built over the Piccola Marina other boats
+were coming; and as we came round the cape and within sight of the
+mainland, another little string of boats came into view, driving before
+the wind towards the south-west. In a little while a multitude had come
+out, the remoter just little specks of ultramarine in the shadow of the
+eastward cliff.
+
+“‘It is love and reason,’ I said, ‘fleeing from all this madness of
+war.’
+
+“And though we presently saw a squadron of aeroplanes flying across the
+southern sky we did not heed it. There it was—a line of little dots in
+the sky—and then more, dotting the south-eastern horizon, and then
+still more, until all that quarter of the sky was stippled with blue
+specks. Now they were all thin little strokes of blue, and now one and
+now a multitude would heel and catch the sun and become short flashes
+of light. They came, rising and falling and growing larger, like some
+huge flight of gulls or rooks or such-like birds, moving with a
+marvellous uniformity, and ever as they drew nearer they spread over a
+greater width of sky. The southward wind flung itself in an
+arrow-headed cloud athwart the sun. And then suddenly they swept round
+to the eastward and streamed eastward, growing smaller and smaller and
+clearer and clearer again until they vanished from the sky. And after
+that we noted to the northward and very high Evesham’s fighting
+machines hanging high over Naples like an evening swarm of gnats.
+
+“It seemed to have no more to do with us than a flight of birds.
+
+“Even the mutter of guns far away in the south-east seemed to us to
+signify nothing . . .
+
+“Each day, each dream after that, we were still exalted, still seeking
+that refuge where we might live and love. Fatigue had come upon us,
+pain and many distresses. For though we were dusty and stained by our
+toilsome tramping, and half starved and with the horror of the dead men
+we had seen and the flight of the peasants—for very soon a gust of
+fighting swept up the peninsula—with these things haunting our minds it
+still resulted only in a deepening resolution to escape. Oh, but she
+was brave and patient! She who had never faced hardship and exposure
+had courage for herself and me. We went to and fro seeking an outlet,
+over a country all commandeered and ransacked by the gathering hosts of
+war. Always we went on foot. At first there were other fugitives, but
+we did not mingle with them. Some escaped northward, some were caught
+in the torrent of peasantry that swept along the main roads; many gave
+themselves into the hands of the soldiery and were sent northward. Many
+of the men were impressed. But we kept away from these things; we had
+brought no money to bribe a passage north, and I feared for my lady at
+the hands of these conscript crowds. We had landed at Salerno, and we
+had been turned back from Cava, and we had tried to cross towards
+Taranto by a pass over Mount Alburno, but we had been driven back for
+want of food, and so we had come down among the marshes by Paestum,
+where those great temples stand alone. I had some vague idea that by
+Paestum it might be possible to find a boat or something, and take once
+more to sea. And there it was the battle overtook us.
+
+“A sort of soul-blindness had me. Plainly I could see that we were
+being hemmed in; that the great net of that giant Warfare had us in its
+toils. Many times we had seen the levies that had come down from the
+north going to and fro, and had come upon them in the distance amidst
+the mountains making ways for the ammunition and preparing the mounting
+of the guns. Once we fancied they had fired at us, taking us for
+spies—at any rate a shot had gone shuddering over us. Several times we
+had hidden in woods from hovering aeroplanes.
+
+“But all these things do not matter now, these nights of flight and
+pain . . . We were in an open place near those great temples at
+Paestum, at last, on a blank stony place dotted with spiky bushes,
+empty and desolate and so flat that a grove of eucalyptus far away
+showed to the feet of its stems. How I can see it! My lady was sitting
+down under a bush resting a little, for she was very weak and weary,
+and I was standing up watching to see if I could tell the distance of
+the firing that came and went. They were still, you know, fighting far
+from each other, with those terrible new weapons that had never before
+been used: guns that would carry beyond sight, and aeroplanes that
+would do—What they would do no man could foretell.
+
+“I knew that we were between the two armies, and that they drew
+together. I knew we were in danger, and that we could not stop there
+and rest!
+
+“Though all these things were in my mind, they were in the background.
+They seemed to be affairs beyond our concern. Chiefly, I was thinking
+of my lady. An aching distress filled me. For the first time she had
+owned herself beaten and had fallen a-weeping. Behind me I could hear
+her sobbing, but I would not turn round to her because I knew she had
+need of weeping, and had held herself so far and so long for me. It was
+well, I thought, that she would weep and rest and then we would toil on
+again, for I had no inkling of the thing that hung so near. Even now I
+can see her as she sat there, her lovely hair upon her shoulder, can
+mark again the deepening hollow of her cheek.
+
+“‘If we had parted,’ she said, ‘if I had let you go.’
+
+“‘No,’ said I. ‘Even now, I do not repent. I will not repent; I made my
+choice, and I will hold on to the end.’
+
+“And then—
+
+“Overhead in the sky flashed something and burst, and all about us I
+heard the bullets making a noise like a handful of peas suddenly
+thrown. They chipped the stones about us, and whirled fragments from
+the bricks and passed . . . .”
+
+He put his hand to his mouth, and then moistened his lips.
+
+“At the flash I had turned about . . .
+
+“You know—she stood up—
+
+“She stood up, you know, and moved a step towards me—as though she
+wanted to reach me—
+
+“And she had been shot through the heart.”
+
+He stopped and stared at me. I felt all that foolish incapacity an
+Englishman feels on such occasions. I met his eyes for a moment, and
+then stared out of the window. For a long space we kept silence. When
+at last I looked at him he was sitting back in his corner, his arms
+folded, and his teeth gnawing at his knuckles.
+
+He bit his nail suddenly, and stared at it.
+
+“I carried her,” he said, “towards the temples, in my arms—as though it
+mattered. I don’t know why. They seemed a sort of sanctuary, you know,
+they had lasted so long, I suppose.
+
+“She must have died almost instantly. Only—I talked to her all the
+way.”
+
+Silence again.
+
+“I have seen those temples,” I said abruptly, and indeed he had brought
+those still, sunlit arcades of worn sandstone very vividly before me.
+
+“It was the brown one, the big brown one. I sat down on a fallen pillar
+and held her in my arms . . . Silent after the first babble was over.
+And after a little while the lizards came out and ran about again, as
+though nothing unusual was going on, as though nothing had changed . .
+. It was tremendously still there, the sun high and the shadows still;
+even the shadows of the weeds upon the entablature were still—in spite
+of the thudding and banging that went all about the sky.
+
+“I seem to remember that the aeroplanes came up out of the south, and
+that the battle went away to the west. One aeroplane was struck, and
+overset and fell. I remember that—though it didn’t interest me in the
+least. It didn’t seem to signify. It was like a wounded gull, you
+know—flapping for a time in the water. I could see it down the aisle of
+the temple—a black thing in the bright blue water.
+
+“Three or four times shells burst about the beach, and then that
+ceased. Each time that happened all the lizards scuttled in and hid for
+a space. That was all the mischief done, except that once a stray
+bullet gashed the stone hard by—made just a fresh bright surface.
+
+“As the shadows grew longer, the stillness seemed greater.
+
+“The curious thing,” he remarked, with the manner of a man who makes a
+trivial conversation, “is that I didn’t _think_—at all. I sat with her
+in my arms amidst the stones—in a sort of lethargy—stagnant.
+
+“And I don’t remember waking up. I don’t remember dressing that day. I
+know I found myself in my office, with my letters all slit open in
+front of me, and how I was struck by the absurdity of being there,
+seeing that in reality I was sitting, stunned, in that Paestum Temple
+with a dead woman in my arms. I read my letters like a machine. I have
+forgotten what they were about.”
+
+He stopped, and there was a long silence.
+
+Suddenly I perceived that we were running down the incline from Chalk
+Farm to Euston. I started at this passing of time. I turned on him with
+a brutal question, with the tone of “Now or never.”
+
+“And did you dream again?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+He seemed to force himself to finish. His voice was very low.
+
+“Once more, and as it were only for a few instants. I seemed to have
+suddenly awakened out of a great apathy, to have risen into a sitting
+position, and the body lay there on the stones beside me. A gaunt body.
+Not her, you know. So soon—it was not her . . . .
+
+“I may have heard voices. I do not know. Only I knew clearly that men
+were coming into the solitude and that that was a last outrage.
+
+“I stood up and walked through the temple, and then there came into
+sight—first one man with a yellow face, dressed in a uniform of dirty
+white, trimmed with blue, and then several, climbing to the crest of
+the old wall of the vanished city, and crouching there. They were
+little bright figures in the sunlight, and there they hung, weapon in
+hand, peering cautiously before them.
+
+“And further away I saw others and then more at another point in the
+wall. It was a long lax line of men in open order.
+
+“Presently the man I had first seen stood up and shouted a command, and
+his men came tumbling down the wall and into the high weeds towards the
+temple. He scrambled down with them and led them. He came facing
+towards me, and when he saw me he stopped.
+
+“At first I had watched these men with a mere curiosity, but when I had
+seen they meant to come to the temple I was moved to forbid them. I
+shouted to the officer.
+
+“‘You must not come here,’ I cried, ‘_I_ am here. I am here with my
+dead.’
+
+“He stared, and then shouted a question back to me in some unknown
+tongue.
+
+“I repeated what I had said.
+
+“He shouted again, and I folded my arms and stood still. Presently he
+spoke to his men and came forward. He carried a drawn sword.
+
+“I signed to him to keep away, but he continued to advance. I told him
+again very patiently and clearly: ‘You must not come here. These are
+old temples and I am here with my dead.’
+
+“Presently he was so close I could see his face clearly. It was a
+narrow face, with dull gray eyes, and a black moustache. He had a scar
+on his upper lip, and he was dirty and unshaven. He kept shouting
+unintelligible things, questions, perhaps, at me.
+
+“I know now that he was afraid of me, but at the time that did not
+occur to me. As I tried to explain to him, he interrupted me in
+imperious tones, bidding me, I suppose, stand aside.
+
+“He made to go past me, and I caught hold of him.
+
+“I saw his face change at my grip.
+
+“‘You fool,’ I cried. ‘Don’t you know? She is dead!’
+
+“He started back. He looked at me with cruel eyes. I saw a sort of
+exultant resolve leap into them—delight. Then, suddenly, with a scowl,
+he swept his sword back—_so_—and thrust.”
+
+He stopped abruptly.
+
+I became aware of a change in the rhythm of the train. The brakes
+lifted their voices and the carriage jarred and jerked. This present
+world insisted upon itself, became clamourous. I saw through the steamy
+window huge electric lights glaring down from tall masts upon a fog,
+saw rows of stationary empty carriages passing by, and then a
+signal-box hoisting its constellation of green and red into the murky
+London twilight, marched after them. I looked again at his drawn
+features.
+
+“He ran me through the heart. It was with a sort of astonishment—no
+fear, no pain—but just amazement, that I felt it pierce me, felt the
+sword drive home into my body. It didn’t hurt, you know. It didn’t hurt
+at all.”
+
+The yellow platform lights came into the field of view, passing first
+rapidly, then slowly, and at last stopping with a jerk. Dim shapes of
+men passed to and fro without.
+
+“Euston!” cried a voice.
+
+“Do you mean—?”
+
+“There was no pain, no sting or smart. Amazement and then darkness
+sweeping over everything. The hot, brutal face before me, the face of
+the man who had killed me, seemed to recede. It swept out of
+existence—”
+
+“Euston!” clamoured the voices outside; “Euston!”
+
+The carriage door opened admitting a flood of sound, and a porter stood
+regarding us. The sounds of doors slamming, and the hoof-clatter of
+cab-horses, and behind these things the featureless remote roar of the
+London cobble-stones, came to my ears. A truckload of lighted lamps
+blazed along the platform.
+
+“A darkness, a flood of darkness that opened and spread and blotted out
+all things.”
+
+“Any luggage, sir?” said the porter.
+
+“And that was the end?” I asked.
+
+He seemed to hesitate. Then, almost inaudibly, he answered, “_no_.”
+
+“You mean?”
+
+“I couldn’t get to her. She was there on the other side of the temple—
+And then—”
+
+“Yes,” I insisted. “Yes?”
+
+“Nightmares,” he cried; “nightmares indeed! My God! Great birds that
+fought and tore.”
+
+
+
+
+THE CONE
+
+
+The night was hot and overcast, the sky red, rimmed with the lingering
+sunset of mid-summer. They sat at the open window, trying to fancy the
+air was fresher there. The trees and shrubs of the garden stood stiff
+and dark; beyond in the roadway a gas-lamp burnt, bright orange against
+the hazy blue of the evening. Farther were the three lights of the
+railway signal against the lowering sky. The man and woman spoke to one
+another in low tones.
+
+“He does not suspect?” said the man, a little nervously.
+
+“Not he,” she said peevishly, as though that too irritated her. “He
+thinks of nothing but the works and the prices of fuel. He has no
+imagination, no poetry.”
+
+“None of these men of iron have,” he said sententiously. “They have no
+hearts.”
+
+“_He_ has not,” she said. She turned her discontented face towards the
+window. The distant sound of a roaring and rushing drew nearer and grew
+in volume; the house quivered; one heard the metallic rattle of the
+tender. As the train passed, there was a glare of light above the
+cutting and a driving tumult of smoke; one, two, three, four, five,
+six, seven, eight black oblongs—eight trucks—passed across the dim grey
+of the embankment, and were suddenly extinguished one by one in the
+throat of the tunnel, which, with the last, seemed to swallow down
+train, smoke, and sound in one abrupt gulp.
+
+“This country was all fresh and beautiful once,” he said; “and now—it
+is Gehenna. Down that way—nothing but pot-banks and chimneys belching
+fire and dust into the face of heaven . . . . . But what does it
+matter? An end comes, an end to all this cruelty . . . . .
+_To-morrow_.” He spoke the last word in a whisper.
+
+“_To-morrow_,” she said, speaking in a whisper too, and still staring
+out of the window.
+
+“Dear!” he said, putting his hand on hers.
+
+She turned with a start, and their eyes searched one another’s. Hers
+softened to his gaze. “My dear one!” she said, and then: “It seems so
+strange—that you should have come into my life like this—to open—” She
+paused.
+
+“To open?” he said.
+
+“All this wonderful world—” she hesitated, and spoke still more
+softly—“this world of _love_ to me.”
+
+Then suddenly the door clicked and closed. They turned their heads, and
+he started violently back. In the shadow of the room stood a great
+shadowy figure—silent. They saw the face dimly in the half-light, with
+unexpressive dark patches under the penthouse brows. Every muscle in
+Raut’s body suddenly became tense. When could the door have opened?
+What had he heard? Had he heard all? What had he seen? A tumult of
+questions.
+
+The new-comer’s voice came at last, after a pause that seemed
+interminable. “Well?” he said.
+
+“I was afraid I had missed you, Horrocks,” said the man at the window,
+gripping the window-ledge with his hand. His voice was unsteady.
+
+The clumsy figure of Horrocks came forward out of the shadow. He made
+no answer to Raut’s remark. For a moment he stood above them.
+
+The woman’s heart was cold within her. “I told Mr. Raut it was just
+possible you might come back,” she said, in a voice that never
+quivered.
+
+Horrocks, still silent, sat down abruptly in the chair by her little
+work-table. His big hands were clenched; one saw now the fire of his
+eyes under the shadow of his brows. He was trying to get his breath.
+His eyes went from the woman he had trusted to the friend he had
+trusted, and then back to the woman.
+
+By this time and for the moment all three half understood one another.
+Yet none dared say a word to ease the pent-up things that choked them.
+
+It was the husband’s voice that broke the silence at last.
+
+“You wanted to see me?” he said to Raut.
+
+Raut started as he spoke. “I came to see you,” he said, resolved to lie
+to the last.
+
+“Yes,” said Horrocks.
+
+“You promised,” said Raut, “to show me some fine effects of moonlight
+and smoke.”
+
+“I promised to show you some fine effects of moonlight and smoke,”
+repeated Horrocks in a colourless voice.
+
+“And I thought I might catch you to-night before you went down to the
+works,” proceeded Raut, “and come with you.”
+
+There was another pause. Did the man mean to take the thing coolly? Did
+he after all know? How long had he been in the room? Yet even at the
+moment when they heard the door, their attitudes. . . . Horrocks
+glanced at the profile of the woman, shadowy pallid in the half-light.
+Then he glanced at Raut, and seemed to recover himself suddenly. “Of
+course,” he said, “I promised to show you the works under their proper
+dramatic conditions. It’s odd how I could have forgotten.”
+
+“If I am troubling you—” began Raut.
+
+Horrocks started again. A new light had suddenly come into the sultry
+gloom of his eyes. “Not in the least,” he said.
+
+“Have you been telling Mr. Raut of all these contrasts of flame and
+shadow you think so splendid?” said the woman, turning now to her
+husband for the first time, her confidence creeping back again, her
+voice just one half-note too high. “That dreadful theory of yours that
+machinery is beautiful, and everything else in the world ugly. I
+thought he would not spare you, Mr. Raut. It’s his great theory, his
+one discovery in art.”
+
+“I am slow to make discoveries,” said Horrocks grimly, damping her
+suddenly. “But what I discover . . . . .” He stopped.
+
+“Well?” she said.
+
+“Nothing;” and suddenly he rose to his feet.
+
+“I promised to show you the works,” he said to Raut, and put his big,
+clumsy hand on his friend’s shoulder. “And you are ready to go?”
+
+“Quite,” said Raut, and stood up also.
+
+There was another pause. Each of them peered through the indistinctness
+of the dusk at the other two. Horrocks’ hand still rested on Raut’s
+shoulder. Raut half fancied still that the incident was trivial after
+all. But Mrs. Horrocks knew her husband better, knew that grim quiet in
+his voice, and the confusion in her mind took a vague shape of physical
+evil. “Very well”, said Horrocks, and, dropping his hand, turned
+towards the door.
+
+“My hat?” Raut looked round in the half-light.
+
+“That’s my work-basket,” said Mrs. Horrocks, with a gust of hysterical
+laughter. Their hands came together on the back of the chair. “Here it
+is!” he said. She had an impulse to warn him in an undertone, but she
+could not frame a word. “Don’t go!” and “Beware of him!” struggled in
+her mind, and the swift moment passed.
+
+“Got it?” said Horrocks, standing with the door half open.
+
+Raut stepped towards him. “Better say good-bye to Mrs. Horrocks,” said
+the ironmaster, even more grimly quiet in his tone than before.
+
+Raut started and turned. “Good-evening, Mrs. Horrocks,” he said, and
+their hands touched.
+
+Horrocks held the door open with a ceremonial politeness unusual in him
+towards men. Raut went out, and then, after a wordless look at her, her
+husband followed. She stood motionless while Raut’s light footfall and
+her husband’s heavy tread, like bass and treble, passed down the
+passage together. The front door slammed heavily. She went to the
+window, moving slowly, and stood watching—leaning forward. The two men
+appeared for a moment at the gateway in the road, passed under the
+street lamp, and were hidden by the black masses of the shrubbery. The
+lamp-light fell for a moment on their faces, showing only unmeaning
+pale patches, telling nothing of what she still feared, and doubted,
+and craved vainly to know. Then she sank down into a crouching attitude
+in the big arm-chair, her eyes wide open and staring out at the red
+lights from the furnaces that flickered in the sky. An hour after she
+was still there, her attitude scarcely changed.
+
+The oppressive stillness of the evening weighed heavily upon Raut. They
+went side by side down the road in silence, and in silence turned into
+the cinder-made by-way that presently opened out the prospect of the
+valley.
+
+A blue haze, half dust, half mist, touched the long valley with
+mystery. Beyond were Hanley and Etruria, grey and dark masses, outlined
+thinly by the rare golden dots of the street lamps, and here and there
+a gaslit window, or the yellow glare of some late-working factory or
+crowded public-house. Out of the masses, clear and slender against the
+evening sky, rose a multitude of tall chimneys, many of them reeking, a
+few smokeless during a season of “play.” Here and there a pallid patch
+and ghostly stunted beehive shapes showed the position of a pot-bank,
+or a wheel, black and sharp against the hot lower sky, marked some
+colliery where they raise the iridescent coal of the place. Nearer at
+hand was the broad stretch of railway, and half invisible trains
+shunted—a steady puffing and rumbling, with every run a ringing
+concussion and a rhythmic series of impacts, and a passage of
+intermittent puffs of white steam across the further view. And to the
+left, between the railway and the dark mass of the low hill beyond,
+dominating the whole view, colossal, inky-black, and crowned with smoke
+and fitful flames, stood the great cylinders of the Jeddah Company
+Blast Furnaces, the central edifices of the big ironworks of which
+Horrocks was the manager. They stood heavy and threatening, full of an
+incessant turmoil of flames and seething molten iron, and about the
+feet of them rattled the rolling-mills, and the steam hammer beat
+heavily and splashed the white iron sparks hither and thither. Even as
+they looked, a truckful of fuel was shot into one of the giants, and
+the red flames gleamed out, and a confusion of smoke and black dust
+came boiling upwards towards the sky.
+
+“Certainly you get some fine effects of colour with your furnaces,”
+said Raut, breaking a silence that had become apprehensive.
+
+Horrocks grunted. He stood with his hands in his pockets, frowning down
+at the dim steaming railway and the busy ironworks beyond, frowning as
+if he were thinking out some knotty problem.
+
+Raut glanced at him and away again. “At present your moonlight effect
+is hardly ripe,” he continued, looking upward. “The moon is still
+smothered by the vestiges of daylight.”
+
+Horrocks stared at him with the expression of a man who has suddenly
+awakened. “Vestiges of daylight? . . . . Of course, of course.” He too
+looked up at the moon, pale still in the midsummer sky. “Come along,”
+he said suddenly, and, gripping Raut’s arm in his hand, made a move
+towards the path that dropped from them to the railway.
+
+Raut hung back. Their eyes met and saw a thousand things in a moment
+that their eyes came near to say. Horrocks’ hand tightened and then
+relaxed. He let go, and before Raut was aware of it, they were arm in
+arm, and walking, one unwillingly enough, down the path.
+
+“You see the fine effect of the railway signals towards Burslem,” said
+Horrocks, suddenly breaking into loquacity, striding fast, and
+tightening the grip of his elbow the while. “Little green lights and
+red and white lights, all against the haze. You have an eye for effect,
+Raut. It’s a fine effect. And look at those furnaces of mine, how they
+rise upon us as we come down the hill. That to the right is my
+pet—seventy feet of him. I packed him myself, and he’s boiled away
+cheerfully with iron in his guts for five long years. I’ve a particular
+fancy for _him_. That line of red there—a lovely bit of warm orange
+you’d call it, Raut—that’s the puddlers’ furnaces, and there, in the
+hot light, three black figures—did you see the white splash of the
+steam-hammer then?—that’s the rolling mills. Come along! Clang,
+clatter, how it goes rattling across the floor! Sheet tin,
+Raut,—amazing stuff. Glass mirrors are not in it when that stuff comes
+from the mill. And, squelch!—there goes the hammer again. Come along!”
+
+He had to stop talking to catch at his breath. His arm twisted into
+Raut’s with benumbing tightness. He had come striding down the black
+path towards the railway as though he was possessed. Raut had not
+spoken a word, had simply hung back against Horrocks’ pull with all his
+strength.
+
+“I say,” he said now, laughing nervously, but with an undernote of
+snarl in his voice, “why on earth are you nipping my arm off, Horrocks,
+and dragging me along like this?”
+
+At length Horrocks released him. His manner changed again. “Nipping
+your arm off?” he said. “Sorry. But it’s you taught me the trick of
+walking in that friendly way.”
+
+“You haven’t learnt the refinements of it yet then,” said Raut,
+laughing artificially again. “By Jove! I’m black and blue.” Horrocks
+offered no apology. They stood now near the bottom of the hill, close
+to the fence that bordered the railway. The ironworks had grown larger
+and spread out with their approach. They looked up to the blast
+furnaces now instead of down; the further view of Etruria and Hanley
+had dropped out of sight with their descent. Before them, by the stile
+rose a notice-board, bearing still dimly visible, the words, “BEWARE OF
+THE TRAINS,” half hidden by splashes of coaly mud.
+
+“Fine effects,” said Horrocks, waving his arm. “Here comes a train. The
+puffs of smoke, the orange glare, the round eye of light in front of
+it, the melodious rattle. Fine effects! But these furnaces of mine used
+to be finer, before we shoved cones in their throats, and saved the
+gas.”
+
+“How?” said Raut. “Cones?”
+
+“Cones, my man, cones. I’ll show you one nearer. The flames used to
+flare out of the open throats, great—what is it?—pillars of cloud by
+day, red and black smoke, and pillars of fire by night. Now we run it
+off in pipes, and burn it to heat the blast, and the top is shut by a
+cone. You’ll be interested in that cone.”
+
+“But every now and then,” said Raut, “you get a burst of fire and smoke
+up there.”
+
+“The cone’s not fixed, it’s hung by a chain from a lever, and balanced
+by an equipoise. You shall see it nearer. Else, of course, there’d be
+no way of getting fuel into the thing. Every now and then the cone
+dips, and out comes the flare.”
+
+“I see,” said Raut. He looked over his shoulder. “The moon gets
+brighter,” he said.
+
+“Come along,” said Horrocks abruptly, gripping his shoulder again, and
+moving him suddenly towards the railway crossing. And then came one of
+those swift incidents, vivid, but so rapid that they leave one doubtful
+and reeling. Halfway across, Horrocks’ hand suddenly clenched upon him
+like a vice, and swung him backward and through a half-turn, so that he
+looked up the line. And there a chain of lamp-lit carriage-windows
+telescoped swiftly as it came towards them, and the red and yellow
+lights of an engine grew larger and larger, rushing down upon them. As
+he grasped what this meant, he turned his face to Horrocks, and pushed
+with all his strength against the arm that held him back between the
+rails. The struggle did not last a moment. Just as certain as it was
+that Horrocks held him there, so certain was it that he had been
+violently lugged out of danger.
+
+“Out of the way,” said Horrocks, with a gasp, as the train came
+rattling by, and they stood panting by the gate into the ironworks.
+
+“I did not see it coming,” said Raut, still, even in spite of his own
+apprehensions, trying to keep up an appearance of ordinary intercourse.
+
+Horrocks answered with a grunt. “The cone,” he said, and then, as one
+who recovers himself, “I thought you did not hear.”
+
+“I didn’t,” said Raut.
+
+“I wouldn’t have had you run over then for the world,” said Horrocks.
+
+“For a moment I lost my nerve,” said Raut.
+
+Horrocks stood for half a minute, then turned abruptly towards the
+ironworks again. “See how fine these great mounds of mine, these
+clinker-heaps, look in the night! That truck yonder, up above there! Up
+it goes, and out-tilts the slag. See the palpitating red stuff go
+sliding down the slope. As we get nearer, the heap rises up and cuts
+the blast furnaces. See the quiver up above the big one. Not that way!
+This way, between the heaps. That goes to the puddling furnaces, but I
+want to show you the canal first.” He came and took Raut by the elbow,
+and so they went along side by side. Raut answered Horrocks vaguely.
+What, he asked himself, had really happened on the line? Was he
+deluding himself with his own fancies, or had Horrocks actually held
+him back in the way of the train? Had he just been within an ace of
+being murdered?
+
+Suppose this slouching, scowling monster _did_ know anything? For a
+minute or two then Raut was really afraid for his life, but the mood
+passed as he reasoned with himself. After all, Horrocks might have
+heard nothing. At any rate, he had pulled him out of the way in time.
+His odd manner might be due to the mere vague jealousy he had shown
+once before. He was talking now of the ash-heaps and the canal. “Eigh?”
+said Horrocks.
+
+“What?” said Raut. “Rather! The haze in the moonlight. Fine!”
+
+“Our canal,” said Horrocks, stopping suddenly. “Our canal by moonlight
+and firelight is an immense effect. You’ve never seen it? Fancy that!
+You’ve spent too many of your evenings philandering up in Newcastle
+there. I tell you, for real florid effects—But you shall see. Boiling
+water . . .”
+
+As they came out of the labyrinth of clinker-heaps and mounds of coal
+and ore, the noises of the rolling-mill sprang upon them suddenly,
+loud, near, and distinct. Three shadowy workmen went by and touched
+their caps to Horrocks. Their faces were vague in the darkness. Raut
+felt a futile impulse to address them, and before he could frame his
+words, they passed into the shadows. Horrocks pointed to the canal
+close before them now: a weird-looking place it seemed, in the
+blood-red reflections of the furnaces. The hot water that cooled the
+tuyeres came into it, some fifty yards up—a tumultuous, almost boiling
+affluent, and the steam rose up from the water in silent white wisps
+and streaks, wrapping damply about them, an incessant succession of
+ghosts coming up from the black and red eddies, a white uprising that
+made the head swim. The shining black tower of the larger blast-furnace
+rose overhead out of the mist, and its tumultuous riot filled their
+ears. Raut kept away from the edge of the water, and watched Horrocks.
+
+“Here it is red,” said Horrocks, “blood-red vapour as red and hot as
+sin; but yonder there, where the moonlight falls on it, and it drives
+across the clinker-heaps, it is as white as death.”
+
+Raut turned his head for a moment, and then came back hastily to his
+watch on Horrocks. “Come along to the rolling-mills,” said Horrocks.
+The threatening hold was not so evident that time, and Raut felt a
+little reassured. But all the same, what on earth did Horrocks mean
+about “white as death” and “red as sin?” Coincidence, perhaps?
+
+They went and stood behind the puddlers for a little while, and then
+through the rolling-mills, where amidst an incessant din the deliberate
+steam-hammer beat the juice out of the succulent iron, and black,
+half-naked Titans rushed the plastic bars, like hot sealing-wax,
+between the wheels. “Come on,” said Horrocks in Raut’s ear, and they
+went and peeped through the little glass hole behind the tuyeres, and
+saw the tumbled fire writhing in the pit of the blast-furnace. It left
+one eye blinded for a while. Then, with green and blue patches dancing
+across the dark, they went to the lift by which the trucks of ore and
+fuel and lime were raised to the top of the big cylinder.
+
+And out upon the narrow rail that overhung the furnace, Raut’s doubts
+came upon him again. Was it wise to be here? If Horrocks did
+know—everything! Do what he would, he could not resist a violent
+trembling. Right under foot was a sheer depth of seventy feet. It was a
+dangerous place. They pushed by a truck of fuel to get to the railing
+that crowned the place. The reek of the furnace, a sulphurous vapor
+streaked with pungent bitterness, seemed to make the distant hillside
+of Hanley quiver. The moon was riding out now from among a drift of
+clouds, halfway up the sky above the undulating wooded outlines of
+Newcastle. The steaming canal ran away from below them under an
+indistinct bridge, and vanished into the dim haze of the flat fields
+towards Burslem.
+
+“That’s the cone I’ve been telling you of,” shouted Horrocks; “and,
+below that, sixty feet of fire and molten metal, with the air of the
+blast frothing through it like gas in soda-water.”
+
+Raut gripped the hand-rail tightly, and stared down at the cone. The
+heat was intense. The boiling of the iron and the tumult of the blast
+made a thunderous accompaniment to Horrocks’ voice. But the thing had
+to be gone through now. Perhaps, after all . . .
+
+“In the middle,” bawled Horrocks, “temperature near a thousand degrees.
+If _you_ were dropped into it . . . . flash into flame like a pinch of
+gunpowder in a candle. Put your hand out and feel the heat of his
+breath. Why, even up here I’ve seen the rain-water boiling off the
+trucks. And that cone there. It’s a damned sight too hot for roasting
+cakes. The top side of it’s three hundred degrees.”
+
+“Three hundred degrees!” said Raut.
+
+“Three hundred centigrade, mind!” said Horrocks. “It will boil the
+blood out of you in no time.”
+
+“Eigh?” said Raut, and turned.
+
+“Boil the blood out of you in . . . No, you don’t!”
+
+“Let me go!” screamed Raut. “Let go my arm!”
+
+With one hand he clutched at the hand-rail, then with both. For a
+moment the two men stood swaying. Then suddenly, with a violent jerk,
+Horrocks had twisted him from his hold. He clutched at Horrocks and
+missed, his foot went back into empty air; in mid-air he twisted
+himself, and then cheek and shoulder and knee struck the hot cone
+together.
+
+He clutched the chain by which the cone hung, and the thing sank an
+infinitesimal amount as he struck it. A circle of glowing red appeared
+about him, and a tongue of flame, released from the chaos within,
+flickered up towards him. An intense pain assailed him at the knees,
+and he could smell the singeing of his hands. He raised himself to his
+feet, and tried to climb up the chain, and then something struck his
+head. Black and shining with the moonlight, the throat of the furnace
+rose about him.
+
+Horrocks, he saw, stood above him by one of the trucks of fuel on the
+rail. The gesticulating figure was bright and white in the moonlight,
+and shouting, “Fizzle, you fool! Fizzle, you hunter of women! You
+hot-blooded hound! Boil! boil! boil!”
+
+Suddenly he caught up a handful of coal out of the truck, and flung it
+deliberately, lump after lump, at Raut.
+
+“Horrocks!” cried Raut. “Horrocks!”
+
+He clung crying to the chain, pulling himself up from the burning of
+the cone. Each missile Horrocks flung hit him. His clothes charred and
+glowed, and as he struggled the cone dropped, and a rush of hot
+suffocating gas whooped out and burned round him in a swift breath of
+flame.
+
+His human likeness departed from him. When the momentary red had
+passed, Horrocks saw a charred, blackened figure, its head streaked
+with blood, still clutching and fumbling with the chain, and writhing
+in agony—a cindery animal, an inhuman, monstrous creature that began a
+sobbing intermittent shriek.
+
+Abruptly, at the sight, the ironmaster’s anger passed. A deadly
+sickness came upon him. The heavy odour of burning flesh came drifting
+up to his nostrils. His sanity returned to him.
+
+“God have mercy upon me!” he cried. “O God! what have I done?”
+
+He knew the thing below him, save that it still moved and felt, was
+already a dead man—that the blood of the poor wretch must be boiling in
+his veins. An intense realisation of that agony came to his mind, and
+overcame every other feeling. For a moment he stood irresolute, and
+then, turning to the truck, he hastily tilted its contents upon the
+struggling thing that had once been a man. The mass fell with a thud,
+and went radiating over the cone. With the thud the shriek ended, and a
+boiling confusion of smoke, dust, and flame came rushing up towards
+him. As it passed, he saw the cone clear again.
+
+Then he staggered back, and stood trembling, clinging to the rail with
+both hands. His lips moved, but no words came to them.
+
+Down below was the sound of voices and running steps. The clangour of
+rolling in the shed ceased abruptly.
+
+
+
+
+A MOONLIGHT FABLE
+
+
+There was once a little man whose mother made him a beautiful suit of
+clothes. It was green and gold and woven so that I cannot describe how
+delicate and fine it was, and there was a tie of orange fluffiness that
+tied up under his chin. And the buttons in their newness shone like
+stars. He was proud and pleased by his suit beyond measure, and stood
+before the long looking-glass when first he put it on, so astonished
+and delighted with it that he could hardly turn himself away.
+
+He wanted to wear it everywhere and show it to all sorts of people. He
+thought over all the places he had ever visited and all the scenes he
+had ever heard described, and tried to imagine what the feel of it
+would be if he were to go now to those scenes and places wearing his
+shining suit, and he wanted to go out forthwith into the long grass and
+the hot sunshine of the meadow wearing it. Just to wear it! But his
+mother told him, “No.” She told him he must take great care of his
+suit, for never would he have another nearly so fine; he must save it
+and save it and only wear it on rare and great occasions. It was his
+wedding suit, she said. And she took his buttons and twisted them up
+with tissue paper for fear their bright newness should be tarnished,
+and she tacked little guards over the cuffs and elbows and wherever the
+suit was most likely to come to harm. He hated and resisted these
+things, but what could he do? And at last her warnings and persuasions
+had effect and he consented to take off his beautiful suit and fold it
+into its proper creases and put it away. It was almost as though he
+gave it up again. But he was always thinking of wearing it and of the
+supreme occasion when some day it might be worn without the guards,
+without the tissue paper on the buttons, utterly and delightfully,
+never caring, beautiful beyond measure.
+
+One night when he was dreaming of it, after his habit, he dreamed he
+took the tissue paper from one of the buttons and found its brightness
+a little faded, and that distressed him mightily in his dream. He
+polished the poor faded button and polished it, and if anything it grew
+duller. He woke up and lay awake thinking of the brightness a little
+dulled and wondering how he would feel if perhaps when the great
+occasion (whatever it might be) should arrive, one button should chance
+to be ever so little short of its first glittering freshness, and for
+days and days that thought remained with him, distressingly. And when
+next his mother let him wear his suit, he was tempted and nearly gave
+way to the temptation just to fumble off one little bit of tissue paper
+and see if indeed the buttons were keeping as bright as ever.
+
+He went trimly along on his way to church full of this wild desire. For
+you must know his mother did, with repeated and careful warnings, let
+him wear his suit at times, on Sundays, for example, to and fro from
+church, when there was no threatening of rain, no dust nor anything to
+injure it, with its buttons covered and its protections tacked upon it
+and a sunshade in his hand to shadow it if there seemed too strong a
+sunlight for its colours. And always, after such occasions, he brushed
+it over and folded it exquisitely as she had taught him, and put it
+away again.
+
+Now all these restrictions his mother set to the wearing of his suit he
+obeyed, always he obeyed them, until one strange night he woke up and
+saw the moonlight shining outside his window. It seemed to him the
+moonlight was not common moonlight, nor the night a common night, and
+for a while he lay quite drowsily with this odd persuasion in his mind.
+Thought joined on to thought like things that whisper warmly in the
+shadows. Then he sat up in his little bed suddenly, very alert, with
+his heart beating very fast and a quiver in his body from top to toe.
+He had made up his mind. He knew now that he was going to wear his suit
+as it should be worn. He had no doubt in the matter. He was afraid,
+terribly afraid, but glad, glad.
+
+He got out of his bed and stood a moment by the window looking at the
+moonshine-flooded garden and trembling at the thing he meant to do. The
+air was full of a minute clamor of crickets and murmurings, of the
+infinitesimal shouting of little living things. He went very gently
+across the creaking boards, for fear that he might wake the sleeping
+house, to the big dark clothes-press wherein his beautiful suit lay
+folded, and he took it out garment by garment and softly and very
+eagerly tore off its tissue-paper covering and its tacked protections,
+until there it was, perfect and delightful as he had seen it when first
+his mother had given it to him—a long time it seemed ago. Not a button
+had tarnished, not a thread had faded on this dear suit of his; he was
+glad enough for weeping as in a noiseless hurry he put it on. And then
+back he went, soft and quick, to the window and looked out upon the
+garden and stood there for a minute, shining in the moonlight, with his
+buttons twinkling like stars, before he got out on the sill and, making
+as little of a rustling as he could, clambered down to the garden path
+below. He stood before his mother’s house, and it was white and nearly
+as plain as by day, with every window-blind but his own shut like an
+eye that sleeps. The trees cast still shadows like intricate black lace
+upon the wall.
+
+The garden in the moonlight was very different from the garden by day;
+moonshine was tangled in the hedges and stretched in phantom cobwebs
+from spray to spray. Every flower was gleaming white or crimson black,
+and the air was aquiver with the thridding of small crickets and
+nightingales singing unseen in the depths of the trees.
+
+There was no darkness in the world, but only warm, mysterious shadows;
+and all the leaves and spikes were edged and lined with iridescent
+jewels of dew. The night was warmer than any night had ever been, the
+heavens by some miracle at once vaster and nearer, and spite of the
+great ivory-tinted moon that ruled the world, the sky was full of
+stars.
+
+The little man did not shout nor sing for all his infinite gladness. He
+stood for a time like one awe-stricken, and then, with a queer small
+cry and holding out his arms, he ran out as if he would embrace at once
+the whole warm round immensity of the world. He did not follow the neat
+set paths that cut the garden squarely, but thrust across the beds and
+through the wet, tall, scented herbs, through the night stock and the
+nicotine and the clusters of phantom white mallow flowers and through
+the thickets of southern-wood and lavender, and knee-deep across a wide
+space of mignonette. He came to the great hedge and he thrust his way
+through it, and though the thorns of the brambles scored him deeply and
+tore threads from his wonderful suit, and though burs and goosegrass
+and havers caught and clung to him, he did not care. He did not care,
+for he knew it was all part of the wearing for which he had longed. “I
+am glad I put on my suit,” he said; “I am glad I wore my suit.”
+
+Beyond the hedge he came to the duck-pond, or at least to what was the
+duck-pond by day. But by night it was a great bowl of silver moonshine
+all noisy with singing frogs, of wonderful silver moonshine twisted and
+clotted with strange patternings, and the little man ran down into its
+waters between the thin black rushes, knee-deep and waist-deep and to
+his shoulders, smiting the water to black and shining wavelets with
+either hand, swaying and shivering wavelets, amid which the stars were
+netted in the tangled reflections of the brooding trees upon the bank.
+He waded until he swam, and so he crossed the pond and came out upon
+the other side, trailing, as it seemed to him, not duckweed, but very
+silver in long, clinging, dripping masses. And up he went through the
+transfigured tangles of the willow-herb and the uncut seeding grass of
+the farther bank. And so he came glad and breathless into the highroad.
+“I am glad,” he said, “beyond measure, that I had clothes that fitted
+this occasion.”
+
+The highroad ran straight as an arrow flies, straight into the deep
+blue pit of sky beneath the moon, a white and shining road between the
+singing nightingales, and along it he went, running now and leaping,
+and now walking and rejoicing, in the clothes his mother had made for
+him with tireless, loving hands. The road was deep in dust, but that
+for him was only soft whiteness, and as he went a great dim moth came
+fluttering round his wet and shimmering and hastening figure. At first
+he did not heed the moth, and then he waved his hands at it and made a
+sort of dance with it as it circled round his head. “Soft moth!” he
+cried, “dear moth! And wonderful night, wonderful night of the world!
+Do you think my clothes are beautiful, dear moth? As beautiful as your
+scales and all this silver vesture of the earth and sky?”
+
+And the moth circled closer and closer until at last its velvet wings
+just brushed his lips . . . . .
+
+And next morning they found him dead with his neck broken in the bottom
+of the stone pit, with his beautiful clothes a little bloody and foul
+and stained with the duckweed from the pond. But his face was a face of
+such happiness that, had you seen it, you would have understood indeed
+how that he had died happy, never knowing the cool and streaming silver
+for the duckweed in the pond.
+
+
+
+
+THE DIAMOND MAKER
+
+
+Some business had detained me in Chancery Lane until nine in the
+evening, and thereafter, having some inkling of a headache, I was
+disinclined either for entertainment or further work. So much of the
+sky as the high cliffs of that narrow canon of traffic left visible
+spoke of a serene night, and I determined to make my way down to the
+Embankment, and rest my eyes and cool my head by watching the
+variegated lights upon the river. Beyond comparison the night is the
+best time for this place; a merciful darkness hides the dirt of the
+waters, and the lights of this transitional age, red glaring orange,
+gas-yellow, and electric white, are set in shadowy outlines of every
+possible shade between grey and deep purple. Through the arches of
+Waterloo Bridge a hundred points of light mark the sweep of the
+Embankment, and above its parapet rise the towers of Westminster, warm
+grey against the starlight. The black river goes by with only a rare
+ripple breaking its silence, and disturbing the reflections of the
+lights that swim upon its surface.
+
+“A warm night,” said a voice at my side.
+
+I turned my head, and saw the profile of a man who was leaning over the
+parapet beside me. It was a refined face, not unhandsome, though
+pinched and pale enough, and the coat collar turned up and pinned round
+the throat marked his status in life as sharply as a uniform. I felt I
+was committed to the price of a bed and breakfast if I answered him.
+
+I looked at him curiously. Would he have anything to tell me worth the
+money, or was he the common incapable—incapable even of telling his own
+story? There was a quality of intelligence in his forehead and eyes,
+and a certain tremulousness in his nether lip that decided me.
+
+“Very warm,” said I; “but not too warm for us here.”
+
+“No,” he said, still looking across the water, “it is pleasant enough
+here . . . . just now.”
+
+“It is good,” he continued after a pause, “to find anything so restful
+as this in London. After one has been fretting about business all day,
+about getting on, meeting obligations, and parrying dangers, I do not
+know what one would do if it were not for such pacific corners.” He
+spoke with long pauses between the sentences. “You must know a little
+of the irksome labour of the world, or you would not be here. But I
+doubt if you can be so brain-weary and footsore as I am . . . . Bah!
+Sometimes I doubt if the game is worth the candle. I feel inclined to
+throw the whole thing over—name, wealth and position—and take to some
+modest trade. But I know if I abandoned my ambition—hardly as she uses
+me—I should have nothing but remorse left for the rest of my days.”
+
+He became silent. I looked at him in astonishment. If ever I saw a man
+hopelessly hard-up it was the man in front of me. He was ragged and he
+was dirty, unshaven and unkempt; he looked as though he had been left
+in a dust-bin for a week. And he was talking to _me_ of the irksome
+worries of a large business. I almost laughed outright. Either he was
+mad or playing a sorry jest on his own poverty.
+
+“If high aims and high positions,” said I, “have their drawbacks of
+hard work and anxiety, they have their compensations. Influence, the
+power of doing good, of assisting those weaker and poorer than
+ourselves; and there is even a certain gratification in display . . . .
+. ”
+
+My banter under the circumstances was in very vile taste. I spoke on
+the spur of the contrast of his appearance and speech. I was sorry even
+while I was speaking.
+
+He turned a haggard but very composed face upon me. Said he: “I forgot
+myself. Of course you would not understand.”
+
+He measured me for a moment. “No doubt it is very absurd. You will not
+believe me even when I tell you, so that it is fairly safe to tell you.
+And it will be a comfort to tell someone. I really have a big business
+in hand, a very big business. But there are troubles just now. The fact
+is . . . . I make diamonds.”
+
+“I suppose,” said I, “you are out of work just at present?”
+
+“I am sick of being disbelieved,” he said impatiently, and suddenly
+unbuttoning his wretched coat he pulled out a little canvas bag that
+was hanging by a cord round his neck. From this he produced a brown
+pebble. “I wonder if you know enough to know what that is?” He handed
+it to me.
+
+Now, a year or so ago, I had occupied my leisure in taking a London
+science degree, so that I have a smattering of physics and mineralogy.
+The thing was not unlike an uncut diamond of the darker sort, though
+far too large, being almost as big as the top of my thumb. I took it,
+and saw it had the form of a regular octahedron, with the curved faces
+peculiar to the most precious of minerals. I took out my penknife and
+tried to scratch it—vainly. Leaning forward towards the gas-lamp, I
+tried the thing on my watch-glass, and scored a white line across that
+with the greatest ease.
+
+I looked at my interlocutor with rising curiosity. “It certainly is
+rather like a diamond. But, if so, it is a Behemoth of diamonds. Where
+did you get it?”
+
+“I tell you I made it,” he said. “Give it back to me.”
+
+He replaced it hastily and buttoned his jacket. “I will sell it you for
+one hundred pounds,” he suddenly whispered eagerly. With that my
+suspicions returned. The thing might, after all, be merely a lump of
+that almost equally hard substance, corundum, with an accidental
+resemblance in shape to the diamond. Or if it was a diamond, how came
+he by it, and why should he offer it at a hundred pounds?
+
+We looked into one another’s eyes. He seemed eager, but honestly eager.
+At that moment I believed it was a diamond he was trying to sell. Yet I
+am a poor man, a hundred pounds would leave a visible gap in my
+fortunes and no sane man would buy a diamond by gaslight from a ragged
+tramp on his personal warranty only. Still, a diamond that size
+conjured up a vision of many thousands of pounds. Then, thought I, such
+a stone could scarcely exist without being mentioned in every book on
+gems, and again I called to mind the stories of contraband and
+light-fingered Kaffirs at the Cape. I put the question of purchase on
+one side.
+
+“How did you get it?” said I.
+
+“I made it.”
+
+I had heard something of Moissan, but I knew his artificial diamonds
+were very small. I shook my head.
+
+“You seem to know something of this kind of thing. I will tell you a
+little about myself. Perhaps then you may think better of the
+purchase.” He turned round with his back to the river, and put his
+hands in his pockets. He sighed. “I know you will not believe me.”
+
+“Diamonds,” he began—and as he spoke his voice lost its faint flavour
+of the tramp and assumed something of the easy tone of an educated
+man—“are to be made by throwing carbon out of combination in a suitable
+flux and under a suitable pressure; the carbon crystallises out, not as
+black-lead or charcoal-powder, but as small diamonds. So much has been
+known to chemists for years, but no one yet had hit upon exactly the
+right flux in which to melt up the carbon, or exactly the right
+pressure for the best results. Consequently the diamonds made by
+chemists are small and dark, and worthless as jewels. Now I, you know,
+have given up my life to this problem—given my life to it.
+
+“I began to work at the conditions of diamond making when I was
+seventeen, and now I am thirty-two. It seemed to me that it might take
+all the thought and energies of a man for ten years, or twenty years,
+but, even if it did, the game was still worth the candle. Suppose one
+to have at last just hit the right trick before the secret got out and
+diamonds became as common as coal, one might realize millions.
+Millions!”
+
+He paused and looked for my sympathy. His eyes shone hungrily. “To
+think,” said he, “that I am on the verge of it all, and here!
+
+“I had,” he proceeded, “about a thousand pounds when I was twenty-one,
+and this, I thought, eked out by a little teaching, would keep my
+researches going. A year or two was spent in study, at Berlin chiefly,
+and then I continued on my own account. The trouble was the secrecy.
+You see, if once I had let out what I was doing, other men might have
+been spurred on by my belief in the practicability of the idea; and I
+do not pretend to be such a genius as to have been sure of coming in
+first, in the case of a race for the discovery. And you see it was
+important that if I really meant to make a pile, people should not know
+it was an artificial process and capable of turning out diamonds by the
+ton. So I had to work all alone. At first I had a little laboratory,
+but as my resources began to run out I had to conduct my experiments in
+a wretched unfurnished room in Kentish Town, where I slept at last on a
+straw mattress on the floor among all my apparatus. The money simply
+flowed away. I grudged myself everything except scientific appliances.
+I tried to keep things going by a little teaching, but I am not a very
+good teacher, and I have no university degree, nor very much education
+except in chemistry, and I found I had to give a lot of time and labour
+for precious little money. But I got nearer and nearer the thing. Three
+years ago I settled the problem of the composition of the flux, and got
+near the pressure by putting this flux of mine and a certain carbon
+composition into a closed-up gun-barrel, filling up with water, sealing
+tightly, and heating.”
+
+He paused.
+
+“Rather risky,” said I.
+
+“Yes. It burst, and smashed all my windows and a lot of my apparatus;
+but I got a kind of diamond powder nevertheless. Following out the
+problem of getting a big pressure upon the molten mixture from which
+the things were to crystallise, I hit upon some researches of Daubree’s
+at the Paris _Laboratorie des Poudres et Salpetres_. He exploded
+dynamite in a tightly screwed steel cylinder, too strong to burst, and
+I found he could crush rocks into a muck not unlike the South African
+bed in which diamonds are found. It was a tremendous strain on my
+resources, but I got a steel cylinder made for my purpose after his
+pattern. I put in all my stuff and my explosives, built up a fire in my
+furnace, put the whole concern in, and—went out for a walk.”
+
+I could not help laughing at his matter-of-fact manner. “Did you not
+think it would blow up the house? Were there other people in the
+place?”
+
+“It was in the interest of science,” he said, ultimately. “There was a
+costermonger family on the floor below, a begging-letter writer in the
+room behind mine, and two flower-women were upstairs. Perhaps it was a
+bit thoughtless. But possibly some of them were out.
+
+“When I came back the thing was just where I left it, among the
+white-hot coals. The explosive hadn’t burst the case. And then I had a
+problem to face. You know time is an important element in
+crystallisation. If you hurry the process the crystals are small—it is
+only by prolonged standing that they grow to any size. I resolved to
+let this apparatus cool for two years, letting the temperature go down
+slowly during the time. And I was now quite out of money; and with a
+big fire and the rent of my room, as well as my hunger to satisfy, I
+had scarcely a penny in the world.
+
+“I can hardly tell you all the shifts I was put to while I was making
+the diamonds. I have sold newspapers, held horses, opened cab-doors.
+For many weeks I addressed envelopes. I had a place as assistant to a
+man who owned a barrow, and used to call down one side of the road
+while he called down the other.
+
+“Once for a week I had absolutely nothing to do, and I begged. What a
+week that was! One day the fire was going out and I had eaten nothing
+all day, and a little chap taking his girl out, gave me sixpence—to
+show off. Thank heaven for vanity! How the fish-shops smelt! But I went
+and spent it all on coals, and had the furnace bright red again, and
+then—Well, hunger makes a fool of a man.
+
+“At last, three weeks ago, I let the fire out. I took my cylinder and
+unscrewed it while it was still so hot that it punished my hands, and I
+scraped out the crumbling lava-like mass with a chisel, and hammered it
+into a powder upon an iron plate. And I found three big diamonds and
+five small ones. As I sat on the floor hammering, my door opened, and
+my neighbour, the begging-letter writer came in. He was drunk—as he
+usually is. ‘Nerchist,’ said he. ‘You’re drunk,’ said I. ‘’Structive
+scoundrel,’ said he. ‘Go to your father,’ said I, meaning the Father of
+Lies. ‘Never you mind,’ said he, and gave me a cunning wink, and
+hiccuped, and leaning up against the door, with his other eye against
+the door-post, began to babble of how he had been prying in my room,
+and how he had gone to the police that morning, and how they had taken
+down everything he had to say—‘’siffiwas a ge’m,’ said he. Then I
+suddenly realised I was in a hole. Either I should have to tell these
+police my little secret, and get the whole thing blown upon, or be
+lagged as an Anarchist. So I went up to my neighbour and took him by
+the collar, and rolled him about a bit, and then I gathered up my
+diamonds and cleared out. The evening newspapers called my den the
+Kentish Town Bomb Factory. And now I cannot part with the things for
+love or money.
+
+“If I go in to respectable jewellers they ask me to wait, and go and
+whisper to a clerk to fetch a policeman, and then I say I cannot wait.
+And I found out a receiver of stolen goods, and he simply stuck to the
+one I gave him and told me to prosecute if I wanted it back. I am going
+about now with several hundred thousand pounds-worth of diamonds round
+my neck, and without either food or shelter. You are the first person I
+have taken into my confidence. But I like your face and I am
+hard-driven.”
+
+He looked into my eyes.
+
+“It would be madness,” said I, “for me to buy a diamond under the
+circumstances. Besides, I do not carry hundreds of pounds about in my
+pocket. Yet I more than half believe your story. I will, if you like,
+do this: come to my office to-morrow . . . .”
+
+“You think I am a thief!” said he keenly. “You will tell the police. I
+am not coming into a trap.”
+
+“Somehow I am assured you are no thief. Here is my card. Take that,
+anyhow. You need not come to any appointment. Come when you will.”
+
+He took the card, and an earnest of my good-will.
+
+“Think better of it and come,” said I.
+
+He shook his head doubtfully. “I will pay back your half-crown with
+interest some day—such interest as will amaze you,” said he. “Anyhow,
+you will keep the secret? . . . . Don’t follow me.”
+
+He crossed the road and went into the darkness towards the little steps
+under the archway leading into Essex Street, and I let him go. And that
+was the last I ever saw of him.
+
+Afterwards I had two letters from him asking me to send bank-notes—not
+cheques—to certain addresses. I weighed the matter over and took what I
+conceived to be the wisest course. Once he called upon me when I was
+out. My urchin described him as a very thin, dirty, and ragged man,
+with a dreadful cough. He left no message. That was the finish of him
+so far as my story goes. I wonder sometimes what has become of him. Was
+he an ingenious monomaniac, or a fraudulent dealer in pebbles, or has
+he really made diamonds as he asserted? The latter is just sufficiently
+credible to make me think at times that I have missed the most
+brilliant opportunity of my life. He may of course be dead, and his
+diamonds carelessly thrown aside—one, I repeat, was almost as big as my
+thumb. Or he may be still wandering about trying to sell the things. It
+is just possible he may yet emerge upon society, and, passing athwart
+my heavens in the serene altitude sacred to the wealthy and the
+well-advertised, reproach me silently for my want of enterprise. I
+sometimes think I might at least have risked five pounds.
+
+
+
+
+THE LORD OF THE DYNAMOS
+
+
+The chief attendant of the three dynamos that buzzed and rattled at
+Camberwell, and kept the electric railway going, came out of Yorkshire,
+and his name was James Holroyd. He was a practical electrician, but
+fond of whisky, a heavy red-haired brute with irregular teeth. He
+doubted the existence of the deity, but accepted Carnot’s cycle, and he
+had read Shakespeare and found him weak in chemistry. His helper came
+out of the mysterious East, and his name was Azuma-zi. But Holroyd
+called him Pooh-bah. Holroyd liked a nigger because he would stand
+kicking—a habit with Holroyd—and did not pry into the machinery and try
+to learn the ways of it. Certain odd possibilities of the negro mind
+brought into abrupt contact with the crown of our civilisation Holroyd
+never fully realised, though just at the end he got some inkling of
+them.
+
+To define Azuma-zi was beyond ethnology. He was, perhaps, more negroid
+than anything else, though his hair was curly rather than frizzy, and
+his nose had a bridge. Moreover, his skin was brown rather than black,
+and the whites of his eyes were yellow. His broad cheekbones and narrow
+chin gave his face something of the viperine V. His head, too, was
+broad behind, and low and narrow at the forehead, as if his brain had
+been twisted round in the reverse way to a European’s. He was short of
+stature and still shorter of English. In conversation he made numerous
+odd noises of no known marketable value, and his infrequent words were
+carved and wrought into heraldic grotesqueness. Holroyd tried to
+elucidate his religious beliefs, and—especially after whisky—lectured
+to him against superstition and missionaries. Azuma-zi, however,
+shirked the discussion of his gods, even though he was kicked for it.
+
+Azuma-zi had come, clad in white but insufficient raiment, out of the
+stokehole of the _Lord Clive_, from the Straits Settlements, and
+beyond, into London. He had heard even in his youth of the greatness
+and riches of London, where all the women are white and fair, and even
+the beggars in the streets are white, and he arrived, with newly earned
+gold coins in his pocket, to worship at the shrine of civilisation. The
+day of his landing was a dismal one; the sky was dun, and a
+wind-worried drizzle filtered down to the greasy streets, but he
+plunged boldly into the delights of Shadwell, and was presently cast
+up, shattered in health, civilised in costume, penniless and, except in
+matters of the direst necessity, practically a dumb animal, to toil for
+James Holroyd and to be bullied by him in the dynamo shed at
+Camberwell. And to James Holroyd bullying was a labour of love.
+
+There were three dynamos with their engines at Camberwell. The two that
+had been there since the beginning were small machines; the larger one
+was new. The smaller machines made a reasonable noise; their straps
+hummed over the drums, every now and then the brushes buzzed and
+fizzled, and the air churned steadily, whoo! whoo! whoo! between their
+poles. One was loose in its foundations and kept the shed vibrating.
+But the big dynamo drowned these little noises altogether with the
+sustained drone of its iron core, which somehow set part of the
+ironwork humming. The place made the visitor’s head reel with the
+throb, throb, throb of the engines, the rotation of the big wheels, the
+spinning ball-valves, the occasional spittings of the steam, and over
+all the deep, unceasing, surging note of the big dynamo. This last
+noise was from an engineering point of view a defect, but Azuma-zi
+accounted it unto the monster for mightiness and pride.
+
+If it were possible we would have the noises of that shed always about
+the reader as he reads, we would tell all our story to such an
+accompaniment. It was a steady stream of din, from which the ear picked
+out first one thread and then another; there was the intermittent
+snorting, panting, and seething of the steam engines, the suck and thud
+of their pistons, the dull beat on the air as the spokes of the great
+driving-wheels came round, a note the leather straps made as they ran
+tighter and looser, and a fretful tumult from the dynamos; and over
+all, sometimes inaudible, as the ear tired of it, and then creeping
+back upon the senses again, was this trombone note of the big machine.
+The floor never felt steady and quiet beneath one’s feet, but quivered
+and jarred. It was a confusing, unsteady place, and enough to send
+anyone’s thoughts jerking into odd zigzags. And for three months, while
+the big strike of the engineers was in progress, Holroyd, who was a
+blackleg, and Azuma-zi, who was a mere black, were never out of the
+stir and eddy of it, but slept and fed in the little wooden shanty
+between the shed and the gates.
+
+Holroyd delivered a theological lecture on the text of his big machine
+soon after Azuma-zi came. He had to shout to be heard in the din. “Look
+at that,” said Holroyd; “where’s your ‘eathen idol to match ‘im?” And
+Azuma-zi looked. For a moment Holroyd was inaudible, and then Azuma-zi
+heard: “Kill a hundred men. Twelve per cent. on the ordinary shares,”
+said Holroyd, “and that’s something like a Gord!”
+
+Holroyd was proud of his big dynamo, and expatiated upon its size and
+power to Azuma-zi until heaven knows what odd currents of thought that
+and the incessant whirling and shindy set up within the curly black
+cranium. He would explain in the most graphic manner the dozen or so
+ways in which a man might be killed by it, and once he gave Azuma-zi a
+shock as a sample of its quality. After that, in the breathing-times of
+his labour—it was heavy labour, being not only his own, but most of
+Holroyd’s—Azuma-zi would sit and watch the big machine. Now and then
+the brushes would sparkle and spit blue flashes, at which Holroyd would
+swear, but all the rest was as smooth and rhythmic as breathing. The
+band ran shouting over the shaft, and ever behind one as one watched
+was the complacent thud of the piston. So it lived all day in this big
+airy shed, with him and Holroyd to wait upon it; not prisoned up and
+slaving to drive a ship as the other engines he knew—mere captive
+devils of the British Solomon—had been, but a machine enthroned. Those
+two smaller dynamos, Azuma-zi by force of contrast despised; the large
+one he privately christened the Lord of the Dynamos. They were fretful
+and irregular, but the big dynamo was steady. How great it was! How
+serene and easy in its working! Greater and calmer even than the
+Buddhas he had seen at Rangoon, and yet not motionless, but living! The
+great black coils spun, spun, spun, the rings ran round under the
+brushes, and the deep note of its coil steadied the whole. It affected
+Azuma-zi queerly.
+
+Azuma-zi was not fond of labour. He would sit about and watch the Lord
+of the Dynamos while Holroyd went away to persuade the yard porter to
+get whisky, although his proper place was not in the dynamo shed but
+behind the engines, and, moreover, if Holroyd caught him skulking he
+got hit for it with a rod of stout copper wire. He would go and stand
+close to the colossus and look up at the great leather band running
+overhead. There was a black patch on the band that came round, and it
+pleased him somehow among all the clatter to watch this return again
+and again. Odd thoughts spun with the whirl of it. Scientific people
+tell us that savages give souls to rocks and trees—and a machine is a
+thousand times more alive than a rock or a tree. And Azuma-zi was
+practically a savage still; the veneer of civilisation lay no deeper
+than his slop suit, his bruises, and the coal grime on his face and
+hands. His father before him had worshipped a meteoric stone, kindred
+blood it may be had splashed the broad wheels of Juggernaut.
+
+He took every opportunity Holroyd gave him of touching and handling the
+great dynamo that was fascinating him. He polished and cleaned it until
+the metal parts were blinding in the sun. He felt a mysterious sense of
+service in doing this. He would go up to it and touch its spinning
+coils gently. The gods he had worshipped were all far away. The people
+in London hid their gods.
+
+At last his dim feelings grew more distinct, and took shape in thoughts
+and at last in acts. When he came into the roaring shed one morning he
+salaamed to the Lord of the Dynamos, and then when Holroyd was away, he
+went and whispered to the thundering machine that he was its servant,
+and prayed it to have pity on him and save him from Holroyd. As he did
+so a rare gleam of light came in through the open archway of the
+throbbing machine-shed, and the Lord of the Dynamos, as he whirled and
+roared, was radiant with pale gold. Then Azuma-zi knew that his service
+was acceptable to his Lord. After that he did not feel so lonely as he
+had done, and he had indeed been very much alone in London. And even
+when his work time was over, which was rare, he loitered about the
+shed.
+
+Then, the next time Holroyd maltreated him, Azuma-zi went presently to
+the Lord of the Dynamos and whispered, “Thou seest, O my Lord!” and the
+angry whir of the machinery seemed to answer him. Thereafter it
+appeared to him that whenever Holroyd came into the shed a different
+note came into the sounds of the dynamo. “My Lord bides his time,” said
+Azuma-zi to himself. “The iniquity of the fool is not yet ripe.” And he
+waited and watched for the day of reckoning. One day there was evidence
+of short circuiting, and Holroyd, making an unwary examination—it was
+in the afternoon—got a rather severe shock. Azuma-zi from behind the
+engine saw him jump off and curse at the peccant coil.
+
+“He is warned,” said Azuma-zi to himself. “Surely my Lord is very
+patient.”
+
+Holroyd had at first initiated his “nigger” into such elementary
+conceptions of the dynamo’s working as would enable him to take
+temporary charge of the shed in his absence. But when he noticed the
+manner in which Azuma-zi hung about the monster he became suspicious.
+He dimly perceived his assistant was “up to something,” and connecting
+him with the anointing of the coils with oil that had rotted the
+varnish in one place, he issued an edict, shouted above the confusion
+of the machinery, “Don’t ‘ee go nigh that big dynamo any more,
+Pooh-bah, or a’ll take thy skin off!” Besides, if it pleased Azuma-zi
+to be near the big machine, it was plain sense and decency to keep him
+away from it.
+
+Azuma-zi obeyed at the time, but later he was caught bowing before the
+Lord of the Dynamos. At which Holroyd twisted his arm and kicked him as
+he turned to go away. As Azuma-zi presently stood behind the engine and
+glared at the back of the hated Holroyd, the noises of the machinery
+took a new rhythm, and sounded like four words in his native tongue.
+
+It is hard to say exactly what madness is. I fancy Azuma-zi was mad.
+The incessant din and whirl of the dynamo shed may have churned up his
+little store of knowledge and his big store of superstitious fancy, at
+last, into something akin to frenzy. At any rate, when the idea of
+making Holroyd a sacrifice to the Dynamo Fetich was thus suggested to
+him, it filled him with a strange tumult of exultant emotion.
+
+That night the two men and their black shadows were alone in the shed
+together. The shed was lit with one big arc light that winked and
+flickered purple. The shadows lay black behind the dynamos, the ball
+governors of the engines whirled from light to darkness, and their
+pistons beat loud and steady. The world outside seen through the open
+end of the shed seemed incredibly dim and remote. It seemed absolutely
+silent, too, since the riot of the machinery drowned every external
+sound. Far away was the black fence of the yard with grey shadowy
+houses behind, and above was the deep blue sky and the pale little
+stars. Azuma-zi suddenly walked across the centre of the shed above
+which the leather bands were running, and went into the shadow by the
+big dynamo. Holroyd heard a click, and the spin of the armature
+changed.
+
+“What are you dewin’ with that switch?” he bawled in surprise. “Han’t I
+told you—”
+
+Then he saw the set expression of Azuma-zi’s eyes as the Asiatic came
+out of the shadow towards him.
+
+In another moment the two men were grappling fiercely in front of the
+great dynamo.
+
+“You coffee-headed fool!” gasped Holroyd, with a brown hand at his
+throat. “Keep off those contact rings.” In another moment he was
+tripped and reeling back upon the Lord of the Dynamos. He instinctively
+loosened his grip upon his antagonist to save himself from the machine.
+
+The messenger, sent in furious haste from the station to find out what
+had happened in the dynamo shed, met Azuma-zi at the porter’s lodge by
+the gate. Azuma-zi tried to explain something, but the messenger could
+make nothing of the black’s incoherent English, and hurried on to the
+shed. The machines were all noisily at work, and nothing seemed to be
+disarranged. There was, however, a queer smell of singed hair. Then he
+saw an odd-looking crumpled mass clinging to the front of the big
+dynamo, and, approaching, recognised the distorted remains of Holroyd.
+
+The man stared and hesitated a moment. Then he saw the face, and shut
+his eyes convulsively. He turned on his heel before he opened them, so
+that he should not see Holroyd again, and went out of the shed to get
+advice and help.
+
+When Azuma-zi saw Holroyd die in the grip of the Great Dynamo he had
+been a little scared about the consequences of his act. Yet he felt
+strangely elated, and knew that the favour of the Lord Dynamo was upon
+him. His plan was already settled when he met the man coming from the
+station, and the scientific manager who speedily arrived on the scene
+jumped at the obvious conclusion of suicide. This expert scarcely
+noticed Azuma-zi, except to ask a few questions. Did he see Holroyd
+kill himself? Azuma-zi explained that he had been out of sight at the
+engine furnace until he heard a difference in the noise from the
+dynamo. It was not a difficult examination, being untinctured by
+suspicion.
+
+The distorted remains of Holroyd, which the electrician removed from
+the machine, were hastily covered by the porter with a coffee-stained
+tablecloth. Somebody, by a happy inspiration, fetched a medical man.
+The expert was chiefly anxious to get the machine at work again, for
+seven or eight trains had stopped midway in the stuffy tunnels of the
+electric railway. Azuma-zi, answering or misunderstanding the questions
+of the people who had by authority or impudence come into the shed, was
+presently sent back to the stoke-hole by the scientific manager. Of
+course a crowd collected outside the gates of the yard—a crowd, for no
+known reason, always hovers for a day or two near the scene of a sudden
+death in London; two or three reporters percolated somehow into the
+engine-shed, and one even got to Azuma-zi; but the scientific expert
+cleared them out again, being himself an amateur journalist.
+
+Presently the body was carried away, and public interest departed with
+it. Azuma-zi remained very quietly at his furnace, seeing over and over
+again in the coals a figure that wriggled violently and became still.
+An hour after the murder, to anyone coming into the shed it would have
+looked exactly as if nothing had ever happened there. Peeping presently
+from his engine-room the black saw the Lord Dynamo spin and whirl
+beside his little brothers, and the driving wheels were beating round,
+and the steam in the pistons went thud, thud, exactly as it had been
+earlier in the evening. After all, from the mechanical point of view,
+it had been a most insignificant incident—the mere temporary deflection
+of a current. But now the slender form and slender shadow of the
+scientific manager replaced the sturdy outline of Holroyd travelling up
+and down the lane of light upon the vibrating floor under the straps
+between the engines and the dynamos.
+
+“Have I not served my Lord?” said Azuma-zi inaudibly, from his shadow,
+and the note of the great dynamo rang out full and clear. As he looked
+at the big whirling mechanism the strange fascination of it that had
+been a little in abeyance since Holroyd’s death, resumed its sway.
+
+Never had Azuma-zi seen a man killed so swiftly and pitilessly. The big
+humming machine had slain its victim without wavering for a second from
+its steady beating. It was indeed a mighty god.
+
+The unconscious scientific manager stood with his back to him,
+scribbling on a piece of paper. His shadow lay at the foot of the
+monster.
+
+“Was the Lord Dynamo still hungry? His servant was ready.”
+
+Azuma-zi made a stealthy step forward; then stopped. The scientific
+manager suddenly stopped writing, and walked down the shed to the
+endmost of the dynamos, and began to examine the brushes.
+
+Azuma-zi hesitated, and then slipped across noiselessly into shadow by
+the switch. There he waited. Presently the manager’s footsteps could be
+heard returning. He stopped in his old position, unconscious of the
+stoker crouching ten feet away from him. Then the big dynamo suddenly
+fizzled, and in another moment Azuma-zi had sprung out of the darkness
+upon him.
+
+First, the scientific manager was gripped round the body and swung
+towards the big dynamo, then, kicking with his knee and forcing his
+antagonist’s head down with his hands, he loosened the grip on his
+waist and swung round away from the machine. Then the black grasped him
+again, putting a curly head against his chest, and they swayed and
+panted as it seemed for an age or so. Then the scientific manager was
+impelled to catch a black ear in his teeth and bite furiously. The
+black yelled hideously.
+
+They rolled over on the floor, and the black, who had apparently
+slipped from the vice of the teeth or parted with some ear—the
+scientific manager wondered which at the time—tried to throttle him.
+The scientific manager was making some ineffectual attempts to claw
+something with his hands and to kick, when the welcome sound of quick
+footsteps sounded on the floor. The next moment Azuma-zi had left him
+and darted towards the big dynamo. There was a splutter amid the roar.
+
+The officer of the company who had entered, stood staring as Azuma-zi
+caught the naked terminals in his hands, gave one horrible convulsion,
+and then hung motionless from the machine, his face violently
+distorted.
+
+“I’m jolly glad you came in when you did,” said the scientific manager,
+still sitting on the floor.
+
+He looked at the still quivering figure.
+
+“It’s not a nice death to die, apparently—but it is quick.”
+
+The official was still staring at the body. He was a man of slow
+apprehension.
+
+There was a pause.
+
+The scientific manager got up on his feet rather awkwardly. He ran his
+fingers along his collar thoughtfully, and moved his head to and fro
+several times.
+
+“Poor Holroyd! I see now.” Then almost mechanically he went towards the
+switch in the shadow and turned the current into the railway circuit
+again. As he did so the singed body loosened its grip upon the machine
+and fell forward on its face. The core of the dynamo roared out loud
+and clear, and the armature beat the air.
+
+So ended prematurely the Worship of the Dynamo Deity, perhaps the most
+short-lived of all religions. Yet withal it could at least boast a
+Martyrdom and a Human Sacrifice.
+
+
+
+
+THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
+
+
+Three hundred miles and more from Chimborazo, one hundred from the
+snows of Cotopaxi, in the wildest wastes of Ecuador’s Andes, there lies
+that mysterious mountain valley, cut off from all the world of men, the
+Country of the Blind. Long years ago that valley lay so far open to the
+world that men might come at last through frightful gorges and over an
+icy pass into its equable meadows, and thither indeed men came, a
+family or so of Peruvian half-breeds fleeing from the lust and tyranny
+of an evil Spanish ruler. Then came the stupendous outbreak of
+Mindobamba, when it was night in Quito for seventeen days, and the
+water was boiling at Yaguachi and all the fish floating dying even as
+far as Guayaquil; everywhere along the Pacific slopes there were
+land-slips and swift thawings and sudden floods, and one whole side of
+the old Arauca crest slipped and came down in thunder, and cut off the
+Country of the Blind for ever from the exploring feet of men. But one
+of these early settlers had chanced to be on the hither side of the
+gorges when the world had so terribly shaken itself, and he perforce
+had to forget his wife and his child and all the friends and
+possessions he had left up there, and start life over again in the
+lower world. He started it again but ill, blindness overtook him, and
+he died of punishment in the mines; but the story he told begot a
+legend that lingers along the length of the Cordilleras of the Andes to
+this day.
+
+He told of his reason for venturing back from that fastness, into which
+he had first been carried lashed to a llama, beside a vast bale of
+gear, when he was a child. The valley, he said, had in it all that the
+heart of man could desire—sweet water, pasture, an even climate, slopes
+of rich brown soil with tangles of a shrub that bore an excellent
+fruit, and on one side great hanging forests of pine that held the
+avalanches high. Far overhead, on three sides, vast cliffs of
+grey-green rock were capped by cliffs of ice; but the glacier stream
+came not to them, but flowed away by the farther slopes, and only now
+and then huge ice masses fell on the valley side. In this valley it
+neither rained nor snowed, but the abundant springs gave a rich green
+pasture, that irrigation would spread over all the valley space. The
+settlers did well indeed there. Their beasts did well and multiplied,
+and but one thing marred their happiness. Yet it was enough to mar it
+greatly. A strange disease had come upon them and had made all the
+children born to them there—and, indeed, several older children
+also—blind. It was to seek some charm or antidote against this plague
+of blindness that he had with fatigue and danger and difficulty
+returned down the gorge. In those days, in such cases, men did not
+think of germs and infections, but of sins, and it seemed to him that
+the reason of this affliction must lie in the negligence of these
+priestless immigrants to set up a shrine so soon as they entered the
+valley. He wanted a shrine—a handsome, cheap, effectual shrine—to be
+erected in the valley; he wanted relics and such-like potent things of
+faith, blessed objects and mysterious medals and prayers. In his wallet
+he had a bar of native silver for which he would not account; he
+insisted there was none in the valley with something of the insistence
+of an inexpert liar. They had all clubbed their money and ornaments
+together, having little need for such treasure up there, he said, to
+buy them holy help against their ill. I figure this dim-eyed young
+mountaineer, sunburnt, gaunt, and anxious, hat brim clutched
+feverishly, a man all unused to the ways of the lower world, telling
+this story to some keen-eyed, attentive priest before the great
+convulsion; I can picture him presently seeking to return with pious
+and infallible remedies against that trouble, and the infinite dismay
+with which he must have faced the tumbled vastness where the gorge had
+once come out. But the rest of his story of mischances is lost to me,
+save that I know of his evil death after several years. Poor stray from
+that remoteness! The stream that had once made the gorge now bursts
+from the mouth of a rocky cave, and the legend his poor, ill-told story
+set going developed into the legend of a race of blind men somewhere
+“over there” one may still hear to-day.
+
+And amidst the little population of that now isolated and forgotten
+valley the disease ran its course. The old became groping, the young
+saw but dimly, and the children that were born to them never saw at
+all. But life was very easy in that snow-rimmed basin, lost to all the
+world, with neither thorns nor briers, with no evil insects nor any
+beasts save the gentle breed of llamas they had lugged and thrust and
+followed up the beds of the shrunken rivers in the gorges up which they
+had come. The seeing had become purblind so gradually that they
+scarcely noticed their loss. They guided the sightless youngsters
+hither and thither until they knew the whole valley marvellously, and
+when at last sight died out among them the race lived on. They had even
+time to adapt themselves to the blind control of fire, which they made
+carefully in stoves of stone. They were a simple strain of people at
+the first, unlettered, only slightly touched with the Spanish
+civilisation, but with something of a tradition of the arts of old Peru
+and of its lost philosophy. Generation followed generation. They forgot
+many things; they devised many things. Their tradition of the greater
+world they came from became mythical in colour and uncertain. In all
+things save sight they were strong and able, and presently chance sent
+one who had an original mind and who could talk and persuade among
+them, and then afterwards another. These two passed, leaving their
+effects, and the little community grew in numbers and in understanding,
+and met and settled social and economic problems that arose. Generation
+followed generation. Generation followed generation. There came a time
+when a child was born who was fifteen generations from that ancestor
+who went out of the valley with a bar of silver to seek God’s aid, and
+who never returned. Thereabout it chanced that a man came into this
+community from the outer world. And this is the story of that man.
+
+He was a mountaineer from the country near Quito, a man who had been
+down to the sea and had seen the world, a reader of books in an
+original way, an acute and enterprising man, and he was taken on by a
+party of Englishmen who had come out to Ecuador to climb mountains, to
+replace one of their three Swiss guides who had fallen ill. He climbed
+here and he climbed there, and then came the attempt on Parascotopetl,
+the Matterhorn of the Andes, in which he was lost to the outer world.
+The story of that accident has been written a dozen times. Pointer’s
+narrative is the best. He tells how the little party worked their
+difficult and almost vertical way up to the very foot of the last and
+greatest precipice, and how they built a night shelter amidst the snow
+upon a little shelf of rock, and, with a touch of real dramatic power,
+how presently they found Nunez had gone from them. They shouted, and
+there was no reply; shouted and whistled, and for the rest of that
+night they slept no more.
+
+As the morning broke they saw the traces of his fall. It seems
+impossible he could have uttered a sound. He had slipped eastward
+towards the unknown side of the mountain; far below he had struck a
+steep slope of snow, and ploughed his way down it in the midst of a
+snow avalanche. His track went straight to the edge of a frightful
+precipice, and beyond that everything was hidden. Far, far below, and
+hazy with distance, they could see trees rising out of a narrow,
+shut-in valley—the lost Country of the Blind. But they did not know it
+was the lost Country of the Blind, nor distinguish it in any way from
+any other narrow streak of upland valley. Unnerved by this disaster,
+they abandoned their attempt in the afternoon, and Pointer was called
+away to the war before he could make another attack. To this day
+Parascotopetl lifts an unconquered crest, and Pointer’s shelter
+crumbles unvisited amidst the snows.
+
+And the man who fell survived.
+
+At the end of the slope he fell a thousand feet, and came down in the
+midst of a cloud of snow upon a snow-slope even steeper than the one
+above. Down this he was whirled, stunned and insensible, but without a
+bone broken in his body; and then at last came to gentler slopes, and
+at last rolled out and lay still, buried amidst a softening heap of the
+white masses that had accompanied and saved him. He came to himself
+with a dim fancy that he was ill in bed; then realized his position
+with a mountaineer’s intelligence and worked himself loose and, after a
+rest or so, out until he saw the stars. He rested flat upon his chest
+for a space, wondering where he was and what had happened to him. He
+explored his limbs, and discovered that several of his buttons were
+gone and his coat turned over his head. His knife had gone from his
+pocket and his hat was lost, though he had tied it under his chin. He
+recalled that he had been looking for loose stones to raise his piece
+of the shelter wall. His ice-axe had disappeared.
+
+He decided he must have fallen, and looked up to see, exaggerated by
+the ghastly light of the rising moon, the tremendous flight he had
+taken. For a while he lay, gazing blankly at the vast, pale cliff
+towering above, rising moment by moment out of a subsiding tide of
+darkness. Its phantasmal, mysterious beauty held him for a space, and
+then he was seized with a paroxysm of sobbing laughter . . . .
+
+After a great interval of time he became aware that he was near the
+lower edge of the snow. Below, down what was now a moon-lit and
+practicable slope, he saw the dark and broken appearance of rock-strewn
+turf. He struggled to his feet, aching in every joint and limb, got
+down painfully from the heaped loose snow about him, went downward
+until he was on the turf, and there dropped rather than lay beside a
+boulder, drank deep from the flask in his inner pocket, and instantly
+fell asleep . . . .
+
+He was awakened by the singing of birds in the trees far below.
+
+He sat up and perceived he was on a little alp at the foot of a vast
+precipice that sloped only a little in the gully down which he and his
+snow had come. Over against him another wall of rock reared itself
+against the sky. The gorge between these precipices ran east and west
+and was full of the morning sunlight, which lit to the westward the
+mass of fallen mountain that closed the descending gorge. Below him it
+seemed there was a precipice equally steep, but behind the snow in the
+gully he found a sort of chimney-cleft dripping with snow-water, down
+which a desperate man might venture. He found it easier than it seemed,
+and came at last to another desolate alp, and then after a rock climb
+of no particular difficulty, to a steep slope of trees. He took his
+bearings and turned his face up the gorge, for he saw it opened out
+above upon green meadows, among which he now glimpsed quite distinctly
+a cluster of stone huts of unfamiliar fashion. At times his progress
+was like clambering along the face of a wall, and after a time the
+rising sun ceased to strike along the gorge, the voices of the singing
+birds died away, and the air grew cold and dark about him. But the
+distant valley with its houses was all the brighter for that. He came
+presently to talus, and among the rocks he noted—for he was an
+observant man—an unfamiliar fern that seemed to clutch out of the
+crevices with intense green hands. He picked a frond or so and gnawed
+its stalk, and found it helpful.
+
+About midday he came at last out of the throat of the gorge into the
+plain and the sunlight. He was stiff and weary; he sat down in the
+shadow of a rock, filled up his flask with water from a spring and
+drank it down, and remained for a time, resting before he went on to
+the houses.
+
+They were very strange to his eyes, and indeed the whole aspect of that
+valley became, as he regarded it, queerer and more unfamiliar. The
+greater part of its surface was lush green meadow, starred with many
+beautiful flowers, irrigated with extraordinary care, and bearing
+evidence of systematic cropping piece by piece. High up and ringing the
+valley about was a wall, and what appeared to be a circumferential
+water channel, from which the little trickles of water that fed the
+meadow plants came, and on the higher slopes above this flocks of
+llamas cropped the scanty herbage. Sheds, apparently shelters or
+feeding-places for the llamas, stood against the boundary wall here and
+there. The irrigation streams ran together into a main channel down the
+centre of the valley, and this was enclosed on either side by a wall
+breast high. This gave a singularly urban quality to this secluded
+place, a quality that was greatly enhanced by the fact that a number of
+paths paved with black and white stones, and each with a curious little
+kerb at the side, ran hither and thither in an orderly manner. The
+houses of the central village were quite unlike the casual and
+higgledy-piggledy agglomeration of the mountain villages he knew; they
+stood in a continuous row on either side of a central street of
+astonishing cleanness, here and there their parti-coloured facade was
+pierced by a door, and not a solitary window broke their even frontage.
+They were parti-coloured with extraordinary irregularity, smeared with
+a sort of plaster that was sometimes grey, sometimes drab, sometimes
+slate-coloured or dark brown; and it was the sight of this wild
+plastering first brought the word “blind” into the thoughts of the
+explorer. “The good man who did that,” he thought, “must have been as
+blind as a bat.”
+
+He descended a steep place, and so came to the wall and channel that
+ran about the valley, near where the latter spouted out its surplus
+contents into the deeps of the gorge in a thin and wavering thread of
+cascade. He could now see a number of men and women resting on piled
+heaps of grass, as if taking a siesta, in the remoter part of the
+meadow, and nearer the village a number of recumbent children, and then
+nearer at hand three men carrying pails on yokes along a little path
+that ran from the encircling wall towards the houses. These latter were
+clad in garments of llama cloth and boots and belts of leather, and
+they wore caps of cloth with back and ear flaps. They followed one
+another in single file, walking slowly and yawning as they walked, like
+men who have been up all night. There was something so reassuringly
+prosperous and respectable in their bearing that after a moment’s
+hesitation Nunez stood forward as conspicuously as possible upon his
+rock, and gave vent to a mighty shout that echoed round the valley.
+
+The three men stopped, and moved their heads as though they were
+looking about them. They turned their faces this way and that, and
+Nunez gesticulated with freedom. But they did not appear to see him for
+all his gestures, and after a time, directing themselves towards the
+mountains far away to the right, they shouted as if in answer. Nunez
+bawled again, and then once more, and as he gestured ineffectually the
+word “blind” came up to the top of his thoughts. “The fools must be
+blind,” he said.
+
+When at last, after much shouting and wrath, Nunez crossed the stream
+by a little bridge, came through a gate in the wall, and approached
+them, he was sure that they were blind. He was sure that this was the
+Country of the Blind of which the legends told. Conviction had sprung
+upon him, and a sense of great and rather enviable adventure. The three
+stood side by side, not looking at him, but with their ears directed
+towards him, judging him by his unfamiliar steps. They stood close
+together like men a little afraid, and he could see their eyelids
+closed and sunken, as though the very balls beneath had shrunk away.
+There was an expression near awe on their faces.
+
+“A man,” one said, in hardly recognisable Spanish. “A man it is—a man
+or a spirit—coming down from the rocks.”
+
+But Nunez advanced with the confident steps of a youth who enters upon
+life. All the old stories of the lost valley and the Country of the
+Blind had come back to his mind, and through his thoughts ran this old
+proverb, as if it were a refrain:—
+
+“In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King.”
+
+“In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King.”
+
+And very civilly he gave them greeting. He talked to them and used his
+eyes.
+
+“Where does he come from, brother Pedro?” asked one.
+
+“Down out of the rocks.”
+
+“Over the mountains I come,” said Nunez, “out of the country beyond
+there—where men can see. From near Bogota—where there are a hundred
+thousands of people, and where the city passes out of sight.”
+
+“Sight?” muttered Pedro. “Sight?”
+
+“He comes,” said the second blind man, “out of the rocks.”
+
+The cloth of their coats, Nunez saw was curious fashioned, each with a
+different sort of stitching.
+
+They startled him by a simultaneous movement towards him, each with a
+hand outstretched. He stepped back from the advance of these spread
+fingers.
+
+“Come hither,” said the third blind man, following his motion and
+clutching him neatly.
+
+And they held Nunez and felt him over, saying no word further until
+they had done so.
+
+“Carefully,” he cried, with a finger in his eye, and found they thought
+that organ, with its fluttering lids, a queer thing in him. They went
+over it again.
+
+“A strange creature, Correa,” said the one called Pedro. “Feel the
+coarseness of his hair. Like a llama’s hair.”
+
+“Rough he is as the rocks that begot him,” said Correa, investigating
+Nunez’s unshaven chin with a soft and slightly moist hand. “Perhaps he
+will grow finer.”
+
+Nunez struggled a little under their examination, but they gripped him
+firm.
+
+“Carefully,” he said again.
+
+“He speaks,” said the third man. “Certainly he is a man.”
+
+“Ugh!” said Pedro, at the roughness of his coat.
+
+“And you have come into the world?” asked Pedro.
+
+“_Out_ of the world. Over mountains and glaciers; right over above
+there, half-way to the sun. Out of the great, big world that goes down,
+twelve days’ journey to the sea.”
+
+They scarcely seemed to heed him. “Our fathers have told us men may be
+made by the forces of Nature,” said Correa. “It is the warmth of
+things, and moisture, and rottenness—rottenness.”
+
+“Let us lead him to the elders,” said Pedro.
+
+“Shout first,” said Correa, “lest the children be afraid. This is a
+marvellous occasion.”
+
+So they shouted, and Pedro went first and took Nunez by the hand to
+lead him to the houses.
+
+He drew his hand away. “I can see,” he said.
+
+“See?” said Correa.
+
+“Yes; see,” said Nunez, turning towards him, and stumbled against
+Pedro’s pail.
+
+“His senses are still imperfect,” said the third blind man. “He
+stumbles, and talks unmeaning words. Lead him by the hand.”
+
+“As you will,” said Nunez, and was led along laughing.
+
+It seemed they knew nothing of sight.
+
+Well, all in good time he would teach them.
+
+He heard people shouting, and saw a number of figures gathering
+together in the middle roadway of the village.
+
+He found it tax his nerve and patience more than he had anticipated,
+that first encounter with the population of the Country of the Blind.
+The place seemed larger as he drew near to it, and the smeared
+plasterings queerer, and a crowd of children and men and women (the
+women and girls he was pleased to note had, some of them, quite sweet
+faces, for all that their eyes were shut and sunken) came about him,
+holding on to him, touching him with soft, sensitive hands, smelling at
+him, and listening at every word he spoke. Some of the maidens and
+children, however, kept aloof as if afraid, and indeed his voice seemed
+coarse and rude beside their softer notes. They mobbed him. His three
+guides kept close to him with an effect of proprietorship, and said
+again and again, “A wild man out of the rocks.”
+
+“Bogota,” he said. “Bogota. Over the mountain crests.”
+
+“A wild man—using wild words,” said Pedro. “Did you hear that—
+
+“_Bogota?_ His mind has hardly formed yet. He has only the beginnings
+of speech.”
+
+A little boy nipped his hand. “Bogota!” he said mockingly.
+
+“Aye! A city to your village. I come from the great world—where men
+have eyes and see.”
+
+“His name’s Bogota,” they said.
+
+“He stumbled,” said Correa—“stumbled twice as we came hither.”
+
+“Bring him in to the elders.”
+
+And they thrust him suddenly through a doorway into a room as black as
+pitch, save at the end there faintly glowed a fire. The crowd closed in
+behind him and shut out all but the faintest glimmer of day, and before
+he could arrest himself he had fallen headlong over the feet of a
+seated man. His arm, outflung, struck the face of someone else as he
+went down; he felt the soft impact of features and heard a cry of
+anger, and for a moment he struggled against a number of hands that
+clutched him. It was a one-sided fight. An inkling of the situation
+came to him and he lay quiet.
+
+“I fell down,” he said; “I couldn’t see in this pitchy darkness.”
+
+There was a pause as if the unseen persons about him tried to
+understand his words. Then the voice of Correa said: “He is but newly
+formed. He stumbles as he walks and mingles words that mean nothing
+with his speech.”
+
+Others also said things about him that he heard or understood
+imperfectly.
+
+“May I sit up?” he asked, in a pause. “I will not struggle against you
+again.”
+
+They consulted and let him rise.
+
+The voice of an older man began to question him, and Nunez found
+himself trying to explain the great world out of which he had fallen,
+and the sky and mountains and such-like marvels, to these elders who
+sat in darkness in the Country of the Blind. And they would believe and
+understand nothing whatever that he told them, a thing quite outside
+his expectation. They would not even understand many of his words. For
+fourteen generations these people had been blind and cut off from all
+the seeing world; the names for all the things of sight had faded and
+changed; the story of the outer world was faded and changed to a
+child’s story; and they had ceased to concern themselves with anything
+beyond the rocky slopes above their circling wall. Blind men of genius
+had arisen among them and questioned the shreds of belief and tradition
+they had brought with them from their seeing days, and had dismissed
+all these things as idle fancies and replaced them with new and saner
+explanations. Much of their imagination had shrivelled with their eyes,
+and they had made for themselves new imaginations with their ever more
+sensitive ears and finger-tips. Slowly Nunez realised this: that his
+expectation of wonder and reverence at his origin and his gifts was not
+to be borne out; and after his poor attempt to explain sight to them
+had been set aside as the confused version of a new-made being
+describing the marvels of his incoherent sensations, he subsided, a
+little dashed, into listening to their instruction. And the eldest of
+the blind men explained to him life and philosophy and religion, how
+that the world (meaning their valley) had been first an empty hollow in
+the rocks, and then had come first inanimate things without the gift of
+touch, and llamas and a few other creatures that had little sense, and
+then men, and at last angels, whom one could hear singing and making
+fluttering sounds, but whom no one could touch at all, which puzzled
+Nunez greatly until he thought of the birds.
+
+He went on to tell Nunez how this time had been divided into the warm
+and the cold, which are the blind equivalents of day and night, and how
+it was good to sleep in the warm and work during the cold, so that now,
+but for his advent, the whole town of the blind would have been asleep.
+He said Nunez must have been specially created to learn and serve the
+wisdom they had acquired, and that for all his mental incoherency and
+stumbling behaviour he must have courage and do his best to learn, and
+at that all the people in the door-way murmured encouragingly. He said
+the night—for the blind call their day night—was now far gone, and it
+behooved everyone to go back to sleep. He asked Nunez if he knew how to
+sleep, and Nunez said he did, but that before sleep he wanted food.
+They brought him food, llama’s milk in a bowl and rough salted bread,
+and led him into a lonely place to eat out of their hearing, and
+afterwards to slumber until the chill of the mountain evening roused
+them to begin their day again. But Nunez slumbered not at all.
+
+Instead, he sat up in the place where they had left him, resting his
+limbs and turning the unanticipated circumstances of his arrival over
+and over in his mind.
+
+Every now and then he laughed, sometimes with amusement and sometimes
+with indignation.
+
+“Unformed mind!” he said. “Got no senses yet! They little know they’ve
+been insulting their Heaven-sent King and master . . . . .
+
+“I see I must bring them to reason.
+
+“Let me think.
+
+“Let me think.”
+
+He was still thinking when the sun set.
+
+Nunez had an eye for all beautiful things, and it seemed to him that
+the glow upon the snow-fields and glaciers that rose about the valley
+on every side was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. His eyes
+went from that inaccessible glory to the village and irrigated fields,
+fast sinking into the twilight, and suddenly a wave of emotion took
+him, and he thanked God from the bottom of his heart that the power of
+sight had been given him.
+
+He heard a voice calling to him from out of the village.
+
+“Yaho there, Bogota! Come hither!”
+
+At that he stood up, smiling. He would show these people once and for
+all what sight would do for a man. They would seek him, but not find
+him.
+
+“You move not, Bogota,” said the voice.
+
+He laughed noiselessly and made two stealthy steps aside from the path.
+
+“Trample not on the grass, Bogota; that is not allowed.”
+
+Nunez had scarcely heard the sound he made himself. He stopped, amazed.
+
+The owner of the voice came running up the piebald path towards him.
+
+He stepped back into the pathway. “Here I am,” he said.
+
+“Why did you not come when I called you?” said the blind man. “Must you
+be led like a child? Cannot you hear the path as you walk?”
+
+Nunez laughed. “I can see it,” he said.
+
+“There is no such word as _see_,” said the blind man, after a pause.
+“Cease this folly and follow the sound of my feet.”
+
+Nunez followed, a little annoyed.
+
+“My time will come,” he said.
+
+“You’ll learn,” the blind man answered. “There is much to learn in the
+world.”
+
+“Has no one told you, ‘In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is
+King?’”
+
+“What is blind?” asked the blind man, carelessly, over his shoulder.
+
+Four days passed and the fifth found the King of the Blind still
+incognito, as a clumsy and useless stranger among his subjects.
+
+It was, he found, much more difficult to proclaim himself than he had
+supposed, and in the meantime, while he meditated his _coup d’etat_, he
+did what he was told and learnt the manners and customs of the Country
+of the Blind. He found working and going about at night a particularly
+irksome thing, and he decided that that should be the first thing he
+would change.
+
+They led a simple, laborious life, these people, with all the elements
+of virtue and happiness as these things can be understood by men. They
+toiled, but not oppressively; they had food and clothing sufficient for
+their needs; they had days and seasons of rest; they made much of music
+and singing, and there was love among them and little children. It was
+marvellous with what confidence and precision they went about their
+ordered world. Everything, you see, had been made to fit their needs;
+each of the radiating paths of the valley area had a constant angle to
+the others, and was distinguished by a special notch upon its kerbing;
+all obstacles and irregularities of path or meadow had long since been
+cleared away; all their methods and procedure arose naturally from
+their special needs. Their senses had become marvellously acute; they
+could hear and judge the slightest gesture of a man a dozen paces
+away—could hear the very beating of his heart. Intonation had long
+replaced expression with them, and touches gesture, and their work with
+hoe and spade and fork was as free and confident as garden work can be.
+Their sense of smell was extraordinarily fine; they could distinguish
+individual differences as readily as a dog can, and they went about the
+tending of llamas, who lived among the rocks above and came to the wall
+for food and shelter, with ease and confidence. It was only when at
+last Nunez sought to assert himself that he found how easy and
+confident their movements could be.
+
+He rebelled only after he had tried persuasion.
+
+He tried at first on several occasions to tell them of sight. “Look you
+here, you people,” he said. “There are things you do not understand in
+me.”
+
+Once or twice one or two of them attended to him; they sat with faces
+downcast and ears turned intelligently towards him, and he did his best
+to tell them what it was to see. Among his hearers was a girl, with
+eyelids less red and sunken than the others, so that one could almost
+fancy she was hiding eyes, whom especially he hoped to persuade. He
+spoke of the beauties of sight, of watching the mountains, of the sky
+and the sunrise, and they heard him with amused incredulity that
+presently became condemnatory. They told him there were indeed no
+mountains at all, but that the end of the rocks where the llamas grazed
+was indeed the end of the world; thence sprang a cavernous roof of the
+universe, from which the dew and the avalanches fell; and when he
+maintained stoutly the world had neither end nor roof such as they
+supposed, they said his thoughts were wicked. So far as he could
+describe sky and clouds and stars to them it seemed to them a hideous
+void, a terrible blankness in the place of the smooth roof to things in
+which they believed—it was an article of faith with them that the
+cavern roof was exquisitely smooth to the touch. He saw that in some
+manner he shocked them, and gave up that aspect of the matter
+altogether, and tried to show them the practical value of sight. One
+morning he saw Pedro in the path called Seventeen and coming towards
+the central houses, but still too far off for hearing or scent, and he
+told them as much. “In a little while,” he prophesied, “Pedro will be
+here.” An old man remarked that Pedro had no business on path
+Seventeen, and then, as if in confirmation, that individual as he drew
+near turned and went transversely into path Ten, and so back with
+nimble paces towards the outer wall. They mocked Nunez when Pedro did
+not arrive, and afterwards, when he asked Pedro questions to clear his
+character, Pedro denied and outfaced him, and was afterwards hostile to
+him.
+
+Then he induced them to let him go a long way up the sloping meadows
+towards the wall with one complaisant individual, and to him he
+promised to describe all that happened among the houses. He noted
+certain goings and comings, but the things that really seemed to
+signify to these people happened inside of or behind the windowless
+houses—the only things they took note of to test him by—and of those he
+could see or tell nothing; and it was after the failure of this
+attempt, and the ridicule they could not repress, that he resorted to
+force. He thought of seizing a spade and suddenly smiting one or two of
+them to earth, and so in fair combat showing the advantage of eyes. He
+went so far with that resolution as to seize his spade, and then he
+discovered a new thing about himself, and that was that it was
+impossible for him to hit a blind man in cold blood.
+
+He hesitated, and found them all aware that he had snatched up the
+spade. They stood all alert, with their heads on one side, and bent
+ears towards him for what he would do next.
+
+“Put that spade down,” said one, and he felt a sort of helpless horror.
+He came near obedience.
+
+Then he had thrust one backwards against a house wall, and fled past
+him and out of the village.
+
+He went athwart one of their meadows, leaving a track of trampled grass
+behind his feet, and presently sat down by the side of one of their
+ways. He felt something of the buoyancy that comes to all men in the
+beginning of a fight, but more perplexity. He began to realise that you
+cannot even fight happily with creatures who stand upon a different
+mental basis to yourself. Far away he saw a number of men carrying
+spades and sticks come out of the street of houses and advance in a
+spreading line along the several paths towards him. They advanced
+slowly, speaking frequently to one another, and ever and again the
+whole cordon would halt and sniff the air and listen.
+
+The first time they did this Nunez laughed. But afterwards he did not
+laugh.
+
+One struck his trail in the meadow grass and came stooping and feeling
+his way along it.
+
+For five minutes he watched the slow extension of the cordon, and then
+his vague disposition to do something forthwith became frantic. He
+stood up, went a pace or so towards the circumferential wall, turned,
+and went back a little way. There they all stood in a crescent, still
+and listening.
+
+He also stood still, gripping his spade very tightly in both hands.
+Should he charge them?
+
+The pulse in his ears ran into the rhythm of “In the Country of the
+Blind the One-Eyed Man is King.”
+
+Should he charge them?
+
+He looked back at the high and unclimbable wall behind—unclimbable
+because of its smooth plastering, but withal pierced with many little
+doors and at the approaching line of seekers. Behind these others were
+now coming out of the street of houses.
+
+Should he charge them?
+
+“Bogota!” called one. “Bogota! where are you?”
+
+He gripped his spade still tighter and advanced down the meadows
+towards the place of habitations, and directly he moved they converged
+upon him. “I’ll hit them if they touch me,” he swore; “by Heaven, I
+will. I’ll hit.” He called aloud, “Look here, I’m going to do what I
+like in this valley! Do you hear? I’m going to do what I like and go
+where I like.”
+
+They were moving in upon him quickly, groping, yet moving rapidly. It
+was like playing blind man’s buff with everyone blindfolded except one.
+“Get hold of him!” cried one. He found himself in the arc of a loose
+curve of pursuers. He felt suddenly he must be active and resolute.
+
+“You don’t understand,” he cried, in a voice that was meant to be great
+and resolute, and which broke. “You are blind and I can see. Leave me
+alone!”
+
+“Bogota! Put down that spade and come off the grass!”
+
+The last order, grotesque in its urban familiarity, produced a gust of
+anger. “I’ll hurt you,” he said, sobbing with emotion. “By Heaven, I’ll
+hurt you! Leave me alone!”
+
+He began to run—not knowing clearly where to run. He ran from the
+nearest blind man, because it was a horror to hit him. He stopped, and
+then made a dash to escape from their closing ranks. He made for where
+a gap was wide, and the men on either side, with a quick perception of
+the approach of his paces, rushed in on one another. He sprang forward,
+and then saw he must be caught, and _swish!_ the spade had struck. He
+felt the soft thud of hand and arm, and the man was down with a yell of
+pain, and he was through.
+
+Through! And then he was close to the street of houses again, and blind
+men, whirling spades and stakes, were running with a reasoned swiftness
+hither and thither.
+
+He heard steps behind him just in time, and found a tall man rushing
+forward and swiping at the sound of him. He lost his nerve, hurled his
+spade a yard wide of this antagonist, and whirled about and fled,
+fairly yelling as he dodged another.
+
+He was panic-stricken. He ran furiously to and fro, dodging when there
+was no need to dodge, and, in his anxiety to see on every side of him
+at once, stumbling. For a moment he was down and they heard his fall.
+Far away in the circumferential wall a little doorway looked like
+Heaven, and he set off in a wild rush for it. He did not even look
+round at his pursuers until it was gained, and he had stumbled across
+the bridge, clambered a little way among the rocks, to the surprise and
+dismay of a young llama, who went leaping out of sight, and lay down
+sobbing for breath.
+
+And so his _coup d’etat_ came to an end.
+
+He stayed outside the wall of the valley of the blind for two nights
+and days without food or shelter, and meditated upon the Unexpected.
+During these meditations he repeated very frequently and always with a
+profounder note of derision the exploded proverb: “In the Country of
+the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King.” He thought chiefly of ways of
+fighting and conquering these people, and it grew clear that for him no
+practicable way was possible. He had no weapons, and now it would be
+hard to get one.
+
+The canker of civilisation had got to him even in Bogota, and he could
+not find it in himself to go down and assassinate a blind man. Of
+course, if he did that, he might then dictate terms on the threat of
+assassinating them all. But—Sooner or later he must sleep! . . . .
+
+He tried also to find food among the pine trees, to be comfortable
+under pine boughs while the frost fell at night, and—with less
+confidence—to catch a llama by artifice in order to try to kill
+it—perhaps by hammering it with a stone—and so finally, perhaps, to eat
+some of it. But the llamas had a doubt of him and regarded him with
+distrustful brown eyes and spat when he drew near. Fear came on him the
+second day and fits of shivering. Finally he crawled down to the wall
+of the Country of the Blind and tried to make his terms. He crawled
+along by the stream, shouting, until two blind men came out to the gate
+and talked to him.
+
+“I was mad,” he said. “But I was only newly made.”
+
+They said that was better.
+
+He told them he was wiser now, and repented of all he had done.
+
+Then he wept without intention, for he was very weak and ill now, and
+they took that as a favourable sign.
+
+They asked him if he still thought he could “_see_.”
+
+“No,” he said. “That was folly. The word means nothing. Less than
+nothing!”
+
+They asked him what was overhead.
+
+“About ten times ten the height of a man there is a roof above the
+world—of rock—and very, very smooth. So smooth—so beautifully smooth .
+.” He burst again into hysterical tears. “Before you ask me any more,
+give me some food or I shall die!”
+
+He expected dire punishments, but these blind people were capable of
+toleration. They regarded his rebellion as but one more proof of his
+general idiocy and inferiority, and after they had whipped him they
+appointed him to do the simplest and heaviest work they had for anyone
+to do, and he, seeing no other way of living, did submissively what he
+was told.
+
+He was ill for some days and they nursed him kindly. That refined his
+submission. But they insisted on his lying in the dark, and that was a
+great misery. And blind philosophers came and talked to him of the
+wicked levity of his mind, and reproved him so impressively for his
+doubts about the lid of rock that covered their cosmic _casserole_ that
+he almost doubted whether indeed he was not the victim of hallucination
+in not seeing it overhead.
+
+So Nunez became a citizen of the Country of the Blind, and these people
+ceased to be a generalised people and became individualities to him,
+and familiar to him, while the world beyond the mountains became more
+and more remote and unreal. There was Yacob, his master, a kindly man
+when not annoyed; there was Pedro, Yacob’s nephew; and there was
+Medina-sarote, who was the youngest daughter of Yacob. She was little
+esteemed in the world of the blind, because she had a clear-cut face
+and lacked that satisfying, glossy smoothness that is the blind man’s
+ideal of feminine beauty, but Nunez thought her beautiful at first, and
+presently the most beautiful thing in the whole creation. Her closed
+eyelids were not sunken and red after the common way of the valley, but
+lay as though they might open again at any moment; and she had long
+eyelashes, which were considered a grave disfigurement. And her voice
+was weak and did not satisfy the acute hearing of the valley swains. So
+that she had no lover.
+
+There came a time when Nunez thought that, could he win her, he would
+be resigned to live in the valley for all the rest of his days.
+
+He watched her; he sought opportunities of doing her little services
+and presently he found that she observed him. Once at a rest-day
+gathering they sat side by side in the dim starlight, and the music was
+sweet. His hand came upon hers and he dared to clasp it. Then very
+tenderly she returned his pressure. And one day, as they were at their
+meal in the darkness, he felt her hand very softly seeking him, and as
+it chanced the fire leapt then, and he saw the tenderness of her face.
+
+He sought to speak to her.
+
+He went to her one day when she was sitting in the summer moonlight
+spinning. The light made her a thing of silver and mystery. He sat down
+at her feet and told her he loved her, and told her how beautiful she
+seemed to him. He had a lover’s voice, he spoke with a tender reverence
+that came near to awe, and she had never before been touched by
+adoration. She made him no definite answer, but it was clear his words
+pleased her.
+
+After that he talked to her whenever he could take an opportunity. The
+valley became the world for him, and the world beyond the mountains
+where men lived by day seemed no more than a fairy tale he would some
+day pour into her ears. Very tentatively and timidly he spoke to her of
+sight.
+
+Sight seemed to her the most poetical of fancies, and she listened to
+his description of the stars and the mountains and her own sweet
+white-lit beauty as though it was a guilty indulgence. She did not
+believe, she could only half understand, but she was mysteriously
+delighted, and it seemed to him that she completely understood.
+
+His love lost its awe and took courage. Presently he was for demanding
+her of Yacob and the elders in marriage, but she became fearful and
+delayed. And it was one of her elder sisters who first told Yacob that
+Medina-sarote and Nunez were in love.
+
+There was from the first very great opposition to the marriage of Nunez
+and Medina-sarote; not so much because they valued her as because they
+held him as a being apart, an idiot, incompetent thing below the
+permissible level of a man. Her sisters opposed it bitterly as bringing
+discredit on them all; and old Yacob, though he had formed a sort of
+liking for his clumsy, obedient serf, shook his head and said the thing
+could not be. The young men were all angry at the idea of corrupting
+the race, and one went so far as to revile and strike Nunez. He struck
+back. Then for the first time he found an advantage in seeing, even by
+twilight, and after that fight was over no one was disposed to raise a
+hand against him. But they still found his marriage impossible.
+
+Old Yacob had a tenderness for his last little daughter, and was
+grieved to have her weep upon his shoulder.
+
+“You see, my dear, he’s an idiot. He has delusions; he can’t do
+anything right.”
+
+“I know,” wept Medina-sarote. “But he’s better than he was. He’s
+getting better. And he’s strong, dear father, and kind—stronger and
+kinder than any other man in the world. And he loves me—and, father, I
+love him.”
+
+Old Yacob was greatly distressed to find her inconsolable, and,
+besides—what made it more distressing—he liked Nunez for many things.
+So he went and sat in the windowless council-chamber with the other
+elders and watched the trend of the talk, and said, at the proper time,
+“He’s better than he was. Very likely, some day, we shall find him as
+sane as ourselves.”
+
+Then afterwards one of the elders, who thought deeply, had an idea. He
+was a great doctor among these people, their medicine-man, and he had a
+very philosophical and inventive mind, and the idea of curing Nunez of
+his peculiarities appealed to him. One day when Yacob was present he
+returned to the topic of Nunez. “I have examined Nunez,” he said, “and
+the case is clearer to me. I think very probably he might be cured.”
+
+“This is what I have always hoped,” said old Yacob.
+
+“His brain is affected,” said the blind doctor.
+
+The elders murmured assent.
+
+“Now, _what_ affects it?”
+
+“Ah!” said old Yacob.
+
+“_This_,” said the doctor, answering his own question. “Those queer
+things that are called the eyes, and which exist to make an agreeable
+depression in the face, are diseased, in the case of Nunez, in such a
+way as to affect his brain. They are greatly distended, he has
+eyelashes, and his eyelids move, and consequently his brain is in a
+state of constant irritation and distraction.”
+
+“Yes?” said old Yacob. “Yes?”
+
+“And I think I may say with reasonable certainty that, in order to cure
+him complete, all that we need to do is a simple and easy surgical
+operation—namely, to remove these irritant bodies.”
+
+“And then he will be sane?”
+
+“Then he will be perfectly sane, and a quite admirable citizen.”
+
+“Thank Heaven for science!” said old Yacob, and went forth at once to
+tell Nunez of his happy hopes.
+
+But Nunez’s manner of receiving the good news struck him as being cold
+and disappointing.
+
+“One might think,” he said, “from the tone you take that you did not
+care for my daughter.”
+
+It was Medina-sarote who persuaded Nunez to face the blind surgeons.
+
+“_You_ do not want me,” he said, “to lose my gift of sight?”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“My world is sight.”
+
+Her head drooped lower.
+
+“There are the beautiful things, the beautiful little things—the
+flowers, the lichens amidst the rocks, the light and softness on a
+piece of fur, the far sky with its drifting dawn of clouds, the sunsets
+and the stars. And there is _you_. For you alone it is good to have
+sight, to see your sweet, serene face, your kindly lips, your dear,
+beautiful hands folded together. . . . . It is these eyes of mine you
+won, these eyes that hold me to you, that these idiots seek. Instead, I
+must touch you, hear you, and never see you again. I must come under
+that roof of rock and stone and darkness, that horrible roof under
+which your imaginations stoop . . . _No_; _you_ would not have me do
+that?”
+
+A disagreeable doubt had arisen in him. He stopped and left the thing a
+question.
+
+“I wish,” she said, “sometimes—” She paused.
+
+“Yes?” he said, a little apprehensively.
+
+“I wish sometimes—you would not talk like that.”
+
+“Like what?”
+
+“I know it’s pretty—it’s your imagination. I love it, but _now_—”
+
+He felt cold. “_Now?_” he said, faintly.
+
+She sat quite still.
+
+“You mean—you think—I should be better, better perhaps—”
+
+He was realising things very swiftly. He felt anger perhaps, anger at
+the dull course of fate, but also sympathy for her lack of
+understanding—a sympathy near akin to pity.
+
+“_Dear_,” he said, and he could see by her whiteness how tensely her
+spirit pressed against the things she could not say. He put his arms
+about her, he kissed her ear, and they sat for a time in silence.
+
+“If I were to consent to this?” he said at last, in a voice that was
+very gentle.
+
+She flung her arms about him, weeping wildly. “Oh, if you would,” she
+sobbed, “if only you would!”
+
+For a week before the operation that was to raise him from his
+servitude and inferiority to the level of a blind citizen Nunez knew
+nothing of sleep, and all through the warm, sunlit hours, while the
+others slumbered happily, he sat brooding or wandered aimlessly, trying
+to bring his mind to bear on his dilemma. He had given his answer, he
+had given his consent, and still he was not sure. And at last work-time
+was over, the sun rose in splendour over the golden crests, and his
+last day of vision began for him. He had a few minutes with
+Medina-sarote before she went apart to sleep.
+
+“To-morrow,” he said, “I shall see no more.”
+
+“Dear heart!” she answered, and pressed his hands with all her
+strength.
+
+“They will hurt you but little,” she said; “and you are going through
+this pain, you are going through it, dear lover, for _me_ . . . . Dear,
+if a woman’s heart and life can do it, I will repay you. My dearest
+one, my dearest with the tender voice, I will repay.”
+
+He was drenched in pity for himself and her.
+
+He held her in his arms, and pressed his lips to hers and looked on her
+sweet face for the last time. “Good-bye!” he whispered to that dear
+sight, “good-bye!”
+
+And then in silence he turned away from her.
+
+She could hear his slow retreating footsteps, and something in the
+rhythm of them threw her into a passion of weeping.
+
+He walked away.
+
+He had fully meant to go to a lonely place where the meadows were
+beautiful with white narcissus, and there remain until the hour of his
+sacrifice should come, but as he walked he lifted up his eyes and saw
+the morning, the morning like an angel in golden armour, marching down
+the steeps . . . .
+
+It seemed to him that before this splendour he and this blind world in
+the valley, and his love and all, were no more than a pit of sin.
+
+He did not turn aside as he had meant to do, but went on and passed
+through the wall of the circumference and out upon the rocks, and his
+eyes were always upon the sunlit ice and snow.
+
+He saw their infinite beauty, and his imagination soared over them to
+the things beyond he was now to resign for ever!
+
+He thought of that great free world that he was parted from, the world
+that was his own, and he had a vision of those further slopes, distance
+beyond distance, with Bogota, a place of multitudinous stirring beauty,
+a glory by day, a luminous mystery by night, a place of palaces and
+fountains and statues and white houses, lying beautifully in the middle
+distance. He thought how for a day or so one might come down through
+passes drawing ever nearer and nearer to its busy streets and ways. He
+thought of the river journey, day by day, from great Bogota to the
+still vaster world beyond, through towns and villages, forest and
+desert places, the rushing river day by day, until its banks receded,
+and the big steamers came splashing by and one had reached the sea—the
+limitless sea, with its thousand islands, its thousands of islands, and
+its ships seen dimly far away in their incessant journeyings round and
+about that greater world. And there, unpent by mountains, one saw the
+sky—the sky, not such a disc as one saw it here, but an arch of
+immeasurable blue, a deep of deeps in which the circling stars were
+floating . . . .
+
+His eyes began to scrutinise the great curtain of the mountains with a
+keener inquiry.
+
+For example; if one went so, up that gully and to that chimney there,
+then one might come out high among those stunted pines that ran round
+in a sort of shelf and rose still higher and higher as it passed above
+the gorge. And then? That talus might be managed. Thence perhaps a
+climb might be found to take him up to the precipice that came below
+the snow; and if that chimney failed, then another farther to the east
+might serve his purpose better. And then? Then one would be out upon
+the amber-lit snow there, and half-way up to the crest of those
+beautiful desolations. And suppose one had good fortune!
+
+He glanced back at the village, then turned right round and regarded it
+with folded arms.
+
+He thought of Medina-sarote, and she had become small and remote.
+
+He turned again towards the mountain wall down which the day had come
+to him.
+
+Then very circumspectly he began his climb.
+
+When sunset came he was not longer climbing, but he was far and high.
+His clothes were torn, his limbs were bloodstained, he was bruised in
+many places, but he lay as if he were at his ease, and there was a
+smile on his face.
+
+From where he rested the valley seemed as if it were in a pit and
+nearly a mile below. Already it was dim with haze and shadow, though
+the mountain summits around him were things of light and fire. The
+mountain summits around him were things of light and fire, and the
+little things in the rocks near at hand were drenched with light and
+beauty, a vein of green mineral piercing the grey, a flash of small
+crystal here and there, a minute, minutely-beautiful orange lichen
+close beside his face. There were deep, mysterious shadows in the
+gorge, blue deepening into purple, and purple into a luminous darkness,
+and overhead was the illimitable vastness of the sky. But he heeded
+these things no longer, but lay quite still there, smiling as if he
+were content now merely to have escaped from the valley of the Blind,
+in which he had thought to be King. And the glow of the sunset passed,
+and the night came, and still he lay there, under the cold, clear
+stars.
+
+
+
+
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