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+Project Gutenberg's The Door in the Wall And Other Stories, by H. G. Wells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Door in the Wall And Other Stories
+
+Author: H. G. Wells
+
+Release Date: July 22, 2005 [EBook #456]
+[This file was first posted in March, 1996]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DOOR IN THE WALL AND OTHER STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+This etext was created by Judith Boss, Omaha, Nebraska.
+The equipment: an IBM-compatible 486/50, a Hewlett-Packard
+ScanJet IIc flatbed scanner, and Calera Recognition Systems'
+M/600 Series Professional OCR software and RISC accelerator board
+donated by Calera Recognition Systems.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE DOOR
+IN THE WALL
+And Other Stories
+
+BY
+H. G. WELLS
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+The Door in the Wall                               5
+The Star                                          27
+A Dream of Armageddon                             43
+The Cone                                          75
+A Moonlight Fable                                 91
+The Diamond Maker                                 99
+The Lord of the Dynamos                          111
+The Country of the Blind                         125
+
+
+
+
+
+THE DOOR IN THE WALL
+AND OTHER STORIES
+
+
+
+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 fights 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 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 he 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.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Door in the Wall And Other Stories
+by H. G. Wells
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DOOR IN THE WALL AND OTHER STORIES ***
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diff --git a/old/456.zip b/old/456.zip
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+*The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Door in the Wall, et. al.*
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+The Door in the Wall And Other Stories
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+
+
+THE DOOR
+IN THE WALL
+And Other Stories
+
+BY
+H. G. WELLS
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+The Door in the Wall                               5
+The Star                                          27
+A Dream of Armageddon                             43
+The Cone                                          75
+A Moonlight Fable                                 91
+The Diamond Maker                                 99
+The Lord of the Dynamos                          111
+The Country of the Blind                         125
+
+
+
+
+
+THE DOOR IN THE WALL
+AND OTHER STORIES
+
+
+
+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 woolgathering 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 fights 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 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
+hand, ling 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 he 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," be 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.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Door in the Wall, et. al.
+
+
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