from Day and night stories (1917)
"THERE'S a hextraordinary gentleman to see you, sir," said the new man.
"Why 'extraordinary'?" asked Dr. Silence, drawing the tips of his thin fingers through his brown beard. His eyes twinkled pleasantly. "Why 'extraordinary,' Barker?" he repeated encouragingly, noticing the perplexed expression in the man's eyes.
"He's so--so thin, sir. I could hardly see 'im at all--at first. He was inside the house before I could ask the name," he added, remembering strict orders.
"And who brought him here?"
"He come alone, sir, in a closed cab. He
pushed by me before I could say a word The man stopped short with obvious embarrassment,
as though he had already said enough to jeopardise his new
situation, but trying hard to show that he remembered the
instructions and warnings he had received with regard to the
admission of strangers not properly accredited.
"And where is the gentleman now?" asked
Dr. Silence, turning away to conceal his amusement.
"I really couldn't exactly say, sir. I left
him standing in the 'all----"
The doctor looked up sharply. "But why in the
hall, Barker? Why not in the waiting-room?" He fixed his
piercing though kindly eyes on the man's face. "Did he
frighten you?" he asked quickly.
"I think he did, sir, if I may say so. I
seemed to lose sight of him, as it were----" The man stammered,
evidently convinced by now that he had earned his dismissal.
"He come in so funny, just like a cold wind," he added
boldly, setting his heels at attention and looking his master
full in the face.
The doctor made an internal note of the man's
halting description; he was pleased that the slight evidence of
intuition which had induced him to engage Barker had not entirely
failed at the first trial. Dr. Silence sought for this
qualification in all his assistants, from secretary to
serving-man, and if it surrounded him with a somewhat singular
crew, the drawbacks were more than compensated for on the whole
by their occasional flashes of insight.
"So the gentleman made you feel queer, did
he?"
"That was it, I think, sir," repeated
the man stolidly.
"And he brings no kind of introduction to
me--no letter or anything?" asked the doctor, with feigned
surprise, as though he knew what was coming.
The man fumbled, both in mind and pockets, and
finally produced an envelope.
"I beg pardon, sir," he said, greatly
flustered; "the gentleman handed me this for you."
It was a note from a discerning friend, who had
never yet sent him a case that was not vitally interesting from
one point or another.
"Please see the bearer of this note,"
the brief message ran, "though I doubt if even you can do
much to help him."
John Silence paused a moment, so as to
gather from the mind of the writer all that lay behind the brief
words of the letter. Then he looked up at his servant with a
graver expression than he had yet worn.
"Go back and find this gentleman," he
said, "and show him into the green study. Do not reply to
his question, or speak more than actually necessary; but think
kind, helpful, sympathetic thoughts as strongly as you can,
Barker. You remember what I told you about the importance of
thinking, when I engaged you. Put curiosity out of your mind, and
think gently, sympathetically, affectionately, if you can."
He smiled, and Barker, who had recovered his
composure in the doctor's presence, bowed silently and went out.
There were two different reception rooms in Dr.
Silence's house. One, intended for persons who imagined they
needed spiritual assistance when really they were only candidates
for the asylum, had padded walls, and was well supplied with
various concealed contrivances by means of which sudden violence
could be instantly met and overcome. It was, however, rarely
used. The other, intended for the reception of genuine cases of
spiritual distress and out-of-the-way afflictions of a psychic
nature, was entirely draped and furnished in a soothing deep
green, calculated to induce calmness and repose of mind. And this
room was the one in which Dr. Silence interviewed the majority of
his "queer" cases, and the one into which he had
directed Barker to show his present caller.
To begin with, the arm-chair in which the patient
was always directed to sit, was nailed to the floor, since its
immovability tended to impart this same excellent characteristic
to the occupant. Patients invariably grew excited when talking
about themselves, and their excitement tended to confuse their
thoughts and to exaggerate their language. The immobility of the
chair helped to counteract this. After repeated endeavours to
drag it forward, or push it back, they ended by resigning
themselves to sitting quietly. And with the futility of fidgeting
there followed a calmer state of mind.
Upon the floor, and at intervals in the wall
immediately behind, were certain tiny green buttons, practically
unnoticeable, which on being pressed permitted a soothing and
persuasive narcotic to rise invisibly about the occupant of the
chair. The effect upon the excitable patient was rapid,
admirable, and harmless. The green study was further provided
with a secret spy-hole; for John Silence liked when possible to
observe his patient's face before it had assumed that mask the
features of the human countenance invariably wear in the presence
of another person. A man sitting alone wears a psychic
expression; and this expression is the man himself. It disappears
the moment another person joins him. And Dr. Silence often
learned more from a few moments' secret observation of a face
than from hours of conversation with its owner afterwards.
A very light, almost a dancing step followed
Barker's heavy tread towards the green room, and a moment
afterwards the man came in and announced that the gentleman was
waiting. He was still pale and his manner nervous.
"Never mind, Barker," the doctor said
kindly; "if you were not intuitive the man would have had no
effect upon you at all. You only need training and development.
And when you have learned to interpret these feelings and
sensations better, you will feel no fear, but only a great
sympathy."
"Yes, sir; thank you sir!" And Barker
bowed and made his escape, while Dr. Silence, an amused smile
lurking about the corners of his mouth, made his way noiselessly
down the passage and put his eye to the spy-hole in the door of
the green study.
This spy-hole was so placed that it commanded a
view of almost the entire room, and, looking through it, the
doctor saw a hat, gloves, and umbrella lying on a chair by the
table, but searched at first in vain for their owner.
The windows were both closed and a brisk fire
burned in the grate. There were various signs--signs intelligible
at least to a keenly intuitive soul--that the room was occupied,
yet so far as human beings were concerned, it seemed undeniably
empty. No one sat in the chairs; no one stood on the mat before
the fire; there was no sign even that a patient was anywhere
close against the wall, examining the Böcklin
reproduction--as patients so often did when they thought they
were alone--and therefore rather difficult to see from the
spy-hole. Ordinarily speaking, there was no one in the room. It
was unoccupied.
Yet Dr. Silence was quite well aware that a human
being was in the room. His sensitive system never failed to let
him know the proximity of an incarnate or discarnate being. Even
in the dark he could tall that. And he now knew positively that
his patient, the patient who had alarmed Barker, and had then
tripped down the corridor with that dancing footstep An inkling of the true state of the case began to
dawn upon him, and he was on the verge of entering from view. It passed out of sight together with the portion of
the marble mantelpiece on which it rested. Next, that part of the
fire and grate and brass fender immediately below, it vanished
entirely, as though a slice had been taken clean out of them.
Dr. Silence then understood that something between
him and these objects was slowly coming into being, something
that concealed them and obstructed his vision by inserting itself
in the line of sight between them and himself.
He quietly awaited further results before going
in.
First he saw a thin, perpendicular line tracing
itself from just above the height of the clock and continuing
downwards till it reached the woolly fire-mat. This line grew
wider, broadened, grew solid. It was no shadow; it was something
substantial. It defined itself more and more. Then suddenly, at
the top of the line, and about on a level with the face of the
clock, he saw a small luminous disc gazing steadily at him. It
was a human eye, looking straight into his own, pressed there
against the spy-hole. And it was bright with intelligence. Dr.
Silence held his breath for a moment Then, like someone moving out of deep shadow into
light, he saw the figure of a man come sliding sideways into
view, a whitish face following the eye, and the perpendicular
line he had first observed broadening out and developing into the
complete figure of a human being. It was the patient. He had
apparently been standing there in front of the fire all the time.
A second eye had followed the first, and both of them stared
steadily at the spy-hole, sharply concentrated, yet with a sly
twinkle of humour and amusement that made it impossible for the
doctor to maintain his position any longer.
He opened the door and went in quickly. As he did
so he noticed for the first time the sound of a German band
coming in noisily through the open ventilators. In some
intuitive, unaccountable fashion the music connected itself with
the patient he was about to interview. This sort of prevision was
not unfamiliar to him. It always explained itself later.
The man, he saw, was of middle age and of very
ordinary appearance; so ordinary, in fact, that he was difficult
to describe--his only peculiarity being his extreme thinness.
Pleasant--that is, good--vibrations issued from his atmosphere
and met Dr. Silence as he advanced to greet him, yet vibrations
alive with currents and discharges betraying the perturbed and
disordered condition of his mind and brain. There was evidently
something wholly out of the usual in the state of his thoughts.
Yet, though strange, it was not altogether distressing; it was
not the impression that the broken and violent atmosphere of the
insane produces upon the mind. Dr. Silence realised in a flash
that here was a case of absorbing interest that might require all
his powers to handle properly.
"I was watching you through my little
peep-hole--as you saw," he began, with a pleasant smile,
advancing to shake hands. "I find it of the greatest
assistance sometimes----"
But the patient interrupted him at once. His voice
was hurried and had odd, shrill changes in it, breaking from high
to low in unexpected fashion. One moment it thundered, the next
it almost squeaked.
"I understand without explanation," he
broke in rapidly. "You get the true note of a man in that
way--when he thinks himself unobserved. I quite agree. Only, in
my case, I fear, you saw very little. My case, as you of course
grasp, Dr. Silence, is extremely peculiar, uncomfortably
peculiar. Indeed, unless Sir William had positively assured
me----"
"My friend has sent you to me," the
doctor interrupted gravely, with a gentle note of authority,
"and that is quite sufficient. Pray, be seated,
Mr.----"
"Mudge--Racine Mudge," returned the
other.
"Take this comfortable one, Mr. Mudge,"
leading him to the fixed chair, "and tell me your condition
in your own way and at your own pace. My whole day is at your
service if you require it."
Mr. Mudge moved towards the chair in question and
then hesitated.
"You will promise me not to use the narcotic
buttons," he said, before sitting down. "I do not need
them. Also I ought to mention that anything you think of vividly
will reach my mind. That is apparently part of my peculiar
case." He sat down with a sigh and arranged his thin legs
and body into a position of comfort. Evidently he was very
sensitive to the thoughts of others, for the picture of the green
buttons had only entered the doctor's mind for a second, yet the
other had instantly snapped it up. Dr. Silence noticed, too that
Mr. Mudge held on tightly with both hands to the arms of the
chair.
"I'm rather glad the chair is nailed to the
floor," he remarked, as he settled himself more comfortably.
"It suits me admirably. The fact is---and this is my case in
a nutshell--which is all that a doctor of your marvellous
development requires--the fact is, Dr. Silence, I am a victim of
Higher Space. That's what"s the matter with me--Higher
Space!"
The two looked at each other for a space in
silence, the little patient holding tightly to the arms of the
chair which "suited him admirably", and looking up with
staring eyes, his atmosphere positively trembling with the waves
of some unknown activity; while the doctor smiled kindly and
sympathetically, and put his whole person as far as possible into
the mental condition of the other.
"Higher Space," repeated Mr. Mudge,
"that's what it is. Now, do you think you can help me with
that?"
There was a pause during which the men's eyes
steadily searched down below the surface of their respective
personalities. Then Dr. Silence spoke.
"I am quite sure I can help," he
answered quietly; "sympathy must always help, and suffering
always claims my sympathy. I see you have suffered cruelly. You
must tell me all about your case, and when I hear the gradual
steps by which you reached this strange condition, I have no
doubt I can be of assistance to you."
He drew a chair up beside his interlocutor and
laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment. His whole being
radiated kindness, intelligence, desire to help.
"For instance," he went on, "I feel
sure it was the result of no mere chance that you became familiar
with the terrors of what you term Higher Space; for higher space
is no mere external measurement. It is, of course, a spiritual
state, a spiritual condition, an inner development, and one that
we must recognise as abnormal, since it is beyond the reach of
the senses at the present stage of evolution. Higher Space is a
mystical state."
"Oh!" cried the other, rubbing his
birdlike hands with pleasure, "the relief it is to me to
talk to someone who can understand! Of course what you say is the
utter truth. And you are right that no mere chance led me to my
present condition, but, on the other hand, prolonged and
deliberate study. Yet chance in a sense now governs it. I mean,
my entering the condition of higher space seems to depend upon
the chance of this and that circumstance." He sighed and
paused a moment. "For instance," he continued,
starting, "the mere sound of that German band sent me off.
Not that all music will do so, but certain sounds, certain
vibrations, at once key me up to the requisite pitch, and off I
go. Wagner's music always does it, and that band must have been
playing a stray bit of Wagner. But I'll come to all that later.
Only, first"--he smiled deprecating]y--"I must ask you
to send away your man from the spy-hole."
John Silence looked up with a start, for Mr.
Mudge's back was to the door, and there was no mirror. He saw the
brown eye of Barker glued to the little circle of glass, and he
crossed the room without a word and snapped down the black
shutter provided for the purpose, and then heard Barker shuffle
away along the passage.
"Now," continued the little man in the
chair, "I can go on. You have managed to put me completely
at my ease, and I feel I may tell you my whole case without shame
or reserve. You will understand. But you must be patient with me
if I go into details that are already familiar to you--details of
higher space, I mean--and if I seem stupid when I have to
describe things that transcend the power of language and are
really therefore indescribable."
"My dear friend," put in the other
calmly, "that goes without saying. To know higher space is
an experience that defies description, and one is obliged to make
use of more or less intelligible symbols. But, pray, proceed.
Your vivid thoughts will tell me more than your halting
words."
An immense sigh of relief proceeded from the
little figure half lost in the depths of the chair. Such
intelligent sympathy meeting him half-way was a new experience,
and it touched his heart at once. He leaned back, relaxing his
tight hold of the arms, and began in his thin, scale-like voice.
"My mother was a Frenchwoman, and my father
an Essex bargeman," he said abruptly. "Hence my
name--Racine and Mudge. My father died before I ever saw him. My
mother inherited money from her Bordeaux relations, and when she
died soon after, I was left alone with wealth and a strange
freedom. I had no guardian, trustees, sisters, brothers, or any
connection in the world to look after me. I grew up, therefore,
utterly without education. This much was to my advantage; I
learned none of that deceitful rubbish taught in schools, and so
had nothing to unlearn when I awakened to my true
love-- In his growing excitement, Mr. Mudge attempted to
drag the chair forward a little nearer to his listener, and then
smiled faintly as he resigned himself instantly again to its
immobility, and plunged anew into the recital of his singular
"disease".
"The audacious speculations of Bolyai, the
amazing theories of Gauss--that through a point more than
one line could be drawn parallel to a given line; the
possibility that the angles of a triangle are together
greater than two right angles, if drawn upon immense
curvatures "How I got there," he resumed after a
brief pause, during which he appeared to be listening nervously
for an approaching sound, "is more than I can put
intelligibly into words. I can only hope to leave your mind with
an intuitive comprehension of the possibility of what I say.
"Here, however, came a change. At this point
I was no longer absorbing the fruits of studies I had made
before; it was the beginning of new efforts to learn for the
first time, and I had to go slowly and laboriously through
terrible work. Here I sought for the theories and speculations of
others. But books were few and far between, and with the
exception of one man--a 'dreamer,' the world called him--whose
audacity and piercing intuition amazed and delighted me beyond
description, I found no one to guide or help.
"You, of course, Dr. Silence, understand
something of what I am driving at with these stammering words,
though you cannot perhaps yet guess what depths of pain my new
knowledge brought me to, nor why an acquaintance with a new
dimension of space should prove a source of misery and
terror."
Mr. Racine Mudge, remembering that the chair would
not move, did the next best thing he could in his desire to draw
nearer to the attentive man facing him, and sat forward upon the
very edge of the cushions, crossing his legs and gesticulating
with both hands as though he saw into this region of new space he
was attempting to describe, and might any moment tumble into it
bodily from the edge of the chair and disappear from view. John
Silence, separated from him by three aces, sat with his eyes
fixed upon the thin white face opposite, noting every word and
every gesture with deep attention.
"This room we now sit in, Dr. Silence, has
one side open to space--to higher space. A closed box only
seems closed. There is a way in and out of a soap bubble
without breaking the skin."
"You tell me no new thing," the doctor
interposed gently.
"Hence, if higher space exists and our world
borders upon it and lies partially in it, if follows necessarily
that we see only portions of all objects. We never see their true
and complete shape. We see three measurements, but not their
fourth. The new direction is concealed from us, and when I hold
this book and move my hand all round it I have not really made a
complete circuit. We only perceive those portions of any object
which exist in our three dimensions, the rest escapes us. But,
once learn to see in higher space, and objects will appear as
they actually are. Only they will thus be hardly recognisable!
"Now you may begin to grasp something of what I am coming
to."
"I am beginning to understand something of
what you must have suffered," observed the doctor
soothingly, "for I have made similar experiments myself, and
only stopped just in time----"
"You are the one man in all the world who can
understand, and sympathise," exclaimed Mr. Mudge,
grasping his hand and holding it tightly while he spoke. The
nailed chair prevented further excitability.
"Well," he resumed, after a moments'
pause, "I procured the implements and the coloured blocks
for practical experiment, and I followed the instructions
carefully till I had arrived at an imaginative conception of four
dimensional space. The tessaract, the figure whose boundaries are
cubes, I knew by heart. That is to say, I knew it and saw it
mentally, for my eye, of course, could never take in a new
measurement, nor my hands and feet handle it.
"So, at least, I thought," he added,
making a wry face. "I had reached the stage, you see, when I
could imagine in a new dimension. I was able to conceive
the shape of that new figure which is intrinsically different to
all we know--the shape of the tessaract. I could perceive in four
dimensions. When, therefore, I looked at a cube I could see all
its sides at once. Its top was not foreshortened, nor its farther
side and base invisible. I saw the whole thing out flat, so to
speak. Moreover, I also saw its content--its in-sides."
"You were not yourself able to enter this new
world?" interrupted Dr. Silence.
"Not then. I was only able to conceive
intuitively what it was like and how exactly it must look. Later,
when I slipped in there and saw objects in their entirety,
unlimited by the paucity of our poor three measurements, I very
nearly lost my life. For, you see, space does not stop at a
single new dimension, a fourth. It extends in all possible new
ones, and we must conceive it as containing any number of new
dimensions. In other words, there is no space at all, but only a
condition. But, meanwhile, I had come to grasp the strange fact
that the objects in our normal world appear to us only
partially."
Mr. Mudge moved farther forward till he was
balanced dangerously on the very edge of the chair. "From
this starting point," he resumed, "I began my studies
and experiments, and continued them for years. I had money, and
I was without friends. I lived in solitude and experimented. My
intellect, of course, had little part in the work, for
intellectually it was all unthinkable. Never was the limitation
of mere reason more plainly demonstrated. It was mystically,
intuitively, spiritually that I began to advance. And what I
learnt, and knew, and did is all impossible to put into language,
since it describes experiences transcending the experiences of
men. It is only some of the results--what you would call the
symptoms of my disease--that I can give you, and even these must
often appear absurd contradictions and impossible paradoxes.
"I can only tell you, Dr. Silence"--his
manner became grave suddenly--"that I reached sometimes a
point of view whence all the great puzzles of the world became
plain to me, and I understood what they call in the Yoga books
'The Great Heresy of Separateness'; why all great teachers have
urged the necessity of man loving his neighbour as himself; how
men are all really one; and why the utter loss
of self is necessary to salvation and the discovery of the true
life of the soul."
He paused a moment and drew breath.
"Your speculations have been my own long
ago," the doctor said quietly. "I fully realise the
force of your words. Men are doubtless not separate at all--in
the sense they imagine."
"All this about the very much higher space I
only dimly, very dimly conceived, of course," the other went
on, raising his voice again by jerks; "but what did happen
to me was the humbler accident of--the simpler disaster--oh dear,
how shall I put it----?"
He stammered and showed visible signs of distress.
"It was simply this," he resumed with a
sudden rush of words, "that, accidentally, as the result of
my years of experiment, I one day slipped bodily into the next
world, the world of four dimensions, yet without knowing
precisely how I got there, or how I could get back again. I
discovered, that is, that my ordinary three-dimensional body was
but an expression--a partial projection--of my higher
four-dimensional body!
"Now you understand what I meant much earlier
in our talk when I spoke of chance. I cannot control my entrance
or exit. Certain people, certain human atmospheres, certain
wandering forces, thoughts, desires even--the radiations of
certain combinations of colour, and above all, the vibrations of
certain kinds of music, will suddenly throw me into a state of
what I can only describe as an intense and terrific inner
vibration--and behold I am off! Off in the direction at right
angles to all our known directions! Off in the direction the cube
takes when it begins to trace the outlines of the new figure, the
tessaract! Off into my breathless and semi-divine higher space!
Off, inside myself, into the world of four
dimensions!"
He gasped and dropped back into the
depths of the immovable chair.
"And there," he whispered, his voice
issuing from among the cushions, "there I have to stay until
these vibrations subside, or until they do something which I cannot
find words to describe properly or intelligibly to you--and then, behold,
I am back again. First, that is, I disappear. Then I reappear.
Only,"--he sighed--"I cannot control my entrance nor my
exit."
"Just so," exclaimed Dr. Silence,
"and that is why a few---"
"Why a few moments ago," interrupted Mr.
Mudge, taking the words out of his mouth, "you found me
gone, and then saw me return. The music of that wretched German
band sent me off. Your intense thinking about me brought me
back--when the band had stopped its Wagner. I saw you
approach the peep-hole and I saw Barker's intention of doing
so later. For me no interiors are hidden. I see inside. When
in that state the content of your mind, as of your body, is
open to me as the day. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!"
Mr. Mudge stopped and mopped his brow. A light
trembling ran over the surface of his small body like wind over
grass. He still held tightly to the arms of the chair.
"At first," he presently resumed,
"my new experiences were so vividly interesting that I felt
no alarm. There was no room for it. The alarm came a little
later."
"Then you actually penetrated far enough into
that state to experience yourself as a normal portion of
it?" asked the doctor, leaning forward, deeply interested.
Mr. Mudge nodded a perspiring face in reply.
"I did," he whispered, "undoubtedly
I did. I am coming to all that. It began first at night, when I
realised that sleep brought no loss of consciousness----"
"The spirit, of course, can never sleep. Only
the body becomes unconscious," interposed John Silence.
"Yes, we know that--theoretically. At night,
of course, the spirit is active elsewhere, and we have no memory
of where and how, simply because the brain stays behind and
receives no record. But I found the, while remaining conscious,
I also retained memory. I had attained to the state of continuous
consciousness, for at night regularly, with the first approaches
of drowsiness, I entered nolens volens the four
dimensional world.
"For a time this happened frequently, and I
could not control it; though later I found a way to regulate it
better. Apparently sleep is unnecessary in the higher--the four
dimensional--body. Yes, perhaps. But I should infinitely have
preferred dull sleep to the knowledge. For, unable to control my
movements, I wandered to and fro, attracted owing to my partial
development and premature arrival, to parts of this new world
that alarmed me more and more. It was the awful waste and
drift of a monstrous world, so utterly different to all we know
and see that I cannot even hint at the nature of the sights
and objects and beings in it. More than that, I cannot even
remember them. I cannot now picture them to myself even,
but can recall only the memory of the impression they
made upon me, the horror and devastating terror of it all. To be
in several places at once, for instance----"
"Perfectly," interrupted John Silence,
noticing the increase of the other's excitement, "I
understand exactly. But now, please, tell me a little more of
this alarm you experienced, and how it affected you."
"It's not the disappearing and reappearing
per se that I mind," continued Mr. Mudge, "so
much as certain other things. It's seeing people and objects in
their weird entirety, in their true and complete shapes, that is
so distressing. It introduced me to a world of monsters. Horses,
dogs, cats, all of which I loved; people, trees, children; all
that I have considered beautiful in life--everything, from a
human face to a cathedral--appear to me in a different shape and
aspect to all I have known before. Instead of seeing their
partial expression in three dimensions, I saw them complete--in
four. I cannot perhaps convince you why this should be terrible,
but I assure you that it is so. To hear the human voice
proceeding from this novel appearance which I scarcely recognise
as a human body is ghastly, simply ghastly. To see inside
everything and everybody is a form of insight peculiarly
distressing. To be so confused in geography as to find myself one
moment at the North Pole, and the next at Clapham Junction--or
possibly at both places simultaneously--is absurdly terrifying.
Your imagination will readily furnish other details without my
multiplying my experiences now. But you have no idea what it all
means, and how I suffer."
Mr. Mudge paused in his panting account and lay
back in his chair. He still held tightly to the arms as though
they could keep him in the world of sanity and three
measurements, and only now and again released his left hand in
order to mop his face. He looked very thin and white and oddly
unsubstantial, and he stared about him as though he saw into this
other space he had been talking about.
John Silence, too, felt warm. He had listened to
every word and had made many notes. The presence of this man had
an exhilarating effect upon him. It seemed as if Mr. Racine
Mudge still carried about with him something of that breathless
higher-space condition he had been describing. At any rate,
Dr. Silence had himself advanced sufficiently far to realise
that the visions of this extraordinary little person had a basis
of truth for their origin.
After a pause that prolonged itself into minutes,
he crossed the room and unlocked a drawer in a bookcase, taking
out a small book with a red cover. It had a lock to it, and he
produced a key out of his pocket and proceeded to open the
covers. The bright eyes of Mr. Mudge never left him for a single
second.
"It almost seems a pity," he said at
length, "to cure you, Mr. Mudge. You are on the way to
discovery of great things. Though you may lose your life in the
process--that is, your life here in the world of three
dimensions--you would lose thereby nothing of great value--you
will pardon my apparent rudeness, I know--and you might gain what
is infinitely greater. Your suffering, of course, lies in the
fact that you alternate between the two worlds and are never
wholly in one or the other. Also, I rather imagine, though I
cannot be certain of this from any personal experiments, that you
have here and there penetrated even into space of more than
four dimensions, and have hence experienced the terror you
speak of."
The perspiring son of the Essex bargeman and the
woman of Normandy bent his head several times in assent, but
uttered no word in reply.
"Some strange psychic predisposition, dating
no doubt from one of your former lives, has favoured the
development of your 'disease'; and the fact that you had no
normal training at school or college, no leading by the poor
intellect into the culs-de-sac falsely called knowledge, has
further caused your exceedingly rapid movement along the lines of
direct inner experience. None of the knowledge you have
foreshadowed has come to you through the senses, of course."
Mr. Mudge, sitting in his immovable chair, began
to tremble slightly. A wind again seemed to pass over his surface
and again to set it curiously in motion like a field of grass.
"You are merely talking to gain time,"
he said hurriedly, in a shaking voice. "This thinking aloud
delays us. I see ahead what you are coming to, only please be
quick, for something is going to happen. A band is again corning
down the street, and if it plays--if it plays Wagner--I shall be
off in a twinkling."
"Precisely. I will be quick. I was leading up
to the point of how to effect your cure. The way is this: You
must simply learn to block the entrances--prevent the
centres acting."
"True, true utterly true!" exclaimed the
little man, dodging about nervously in the depths of the chair.
"But how, in the name of space, can that be done?"
"By concentration. They are all within you,
these centres, although outer causes such as colour, music and
other things lead you towards them. These external things you
cannot hope to destroy, but once the entrances are blocked, they
will lead you only to bricked walls and closed channels. You will
no longer be able to find the way."
"Quick, quick!" cried the bobbing figure
in the chair. "How is this concentration to be
effected?"
"This little book," continued Dr.
Silence calmly, "will explain to you the way." He
tapped the cover. "Let me now read out to you certain simple
instructions, composed, as I see you divine, entirely from my own
personal experiences in the same direction. Follow these
instructions and you will no longer enter the state of higher
space. The entrances will be blocked effectively."
Mr. Mudge sat bolt upright in his chair to listen,
and John Silence cleared his throat and began to read slowly in a
very distinct voice.
But before he had uttered a dozen words, something
happened. A sound of street music entered the room through
the open ventilators, for a band had begun to play in the stable
mews at the back of the house--the March from
Tannhäuser. Odd as it may seem that a German band
should twice within the space of an hour enter the same mews and
play Wagner, it was nevertheless the fact.
Mr. Racine Mudge heard it. He uttered a sharp,
squeaking cry and twisted his arms with nervous energy round the
chair. A piteous look that was not far from tears spread over his
white face. Grey shadows followed it--the grey of fear. He
began to struggle convulsively.
"Hold me fast! Catch me! For God's sake, keep
me here! I'm on the rush already. Oh, it's frightful!" he
cried in tones of anguish, his voice as thin as a reed.
Dr. Silence made a plunge forward to seize him,
but in a flash, before he could cover the space between them, Mr.
Racine Mudge, screaming and struggling, seemed to shoot
past him into invisibility. He disappeared like an arrow from
a bow propelled at infinite speed, and his voice no longer
sounded in the external air, but seemed in some curious way
to make itself heard somewhere within the depths of the doctor's
own being. It was almost like a faint singing cry in his head,
like a voice of dream, a voice of vision and unreality.
"Alcohol, alcohol!" it cried faintly,
with distance in it, "give me alcohol! It's the quickest
way. Alcohol, before I'm out of reach!"
The doctor, accustomed to rapid
decisions and even more rapid action, remembered that a brandy
flask stood upon the mantelpiece, and in less than a second he
had seized it and was holding it out towards the space above the
chair recently occupied by the visible Mudge. But, before his
very eyes, and long ere he could unscrew the metal stopper, he
saw the contents of the closed glass phial sink and lessen as
though someone were drinking violently and greedily of the liquor
within.
"Thanks! Enough! It deadens the
vibrations!" cried the faint voice in his interior, as he
withdrew the flask and set it back upon the mantelpiece. He
understood that in Mudge's present condition one side of the
flask was open to space and he could drink without removing the
stopper. He could hardly have had a more interesting proof of
what he had been hearing described at such length.
But the next moment--the very same moment it
almost seemed--the German band stopped midway in its tune--and
there was Mr. Mudge back in his chair again, gasping and
panting!
"Quick!" he shrieked, "stop that
band! Send it away! Catch hold of me! Block the entrances! Block
the entrances! Give me the red book! Oh, oh, oh-h-h-h!!!"
The music had begun again. It was merely a
temporary interruption. The Tannhäuser March started
again, this time at a tremendous pace that made it sound like a
rapid two-step, as though the instruments played against time
But the brief interruption gave Dr. Silence a
moment in which to collect his scattering thoughts, and before
the band had got through half a bar, he had flung forward upon
the chair and held Mr. Racine Mudge, the struggling little victim
of Higher Space, in a grip of iron. His arms went all round
his diminutive person, taking in a good part of the chair at
the same time. He was not a big man, yet he seemed to smother
Mudge completely.
Yet, even as he did so, and felt the wriggling
form underneath him, it began to melt and slip away like air or
water. The wood of the armchair somehow disentangled itself from
between his own arms and those of Mudge. The phenomenon known
as the passage of matter through matter took place. The little
man seemed actually to be interfused with the other's being.
Dr. Silence could just see his face beneath him. It puckered
and grew dark as though from some great internal effort. He
heard the thin, reedy voice crying his ear to "Block the
entrances, block the entrances!" and then--but how in the
world describe what is indescribable?
John Silence half rose up to watch. Racine Mudge,
his face distorted beyond all recognition, was making a
marvellous inward movement, as though doubling back upon himself.
He turned funnel-wise like water in a whirling vortex, and
then appeared to break up somewhat as a reflection breaks
up and divides in a distorting convex mirror. He went neither
forward nor backward, neither to the right nor the left, neither
up nor down. But he went. He went utterly. He simply
flashed away out of sight like a vanishing projectile.
All but one leg! Dr. Silence just had the time and
the presence of mind to seize upon the left ankle and boot as it
disappeared, and to this he held on for several seconds like grim
death. Yet all the time he knew it was a foolish and useless
thing to do.
The foot was in his grasp one moment, and the next
it seemed--this was the only way he could describe it--inside
his own skin and bones, and at the same time outside his hand
and all round it. It seemed mingled in some amazing way with
his own flesh and blood. Then it was gone, and he was tightly
grasping a mere draught of heated air.
"Gone! gone! gone!" cried a faint,
whispering voice somewhere deep within his own consciousness.
"Lost! lost! lost!" it repeated, growing fainter and
fainter till at length it vanished into nothing and the last
signs of Mr. Racine Mudge vanished with it.
John Silence locked his red book and replaced it
in the cabinet, which he fastened with a click, and when Barker
answered the bell he inquired if Mr. Mudge had left a card upon
the table. It appeared that he had, and when the servant returned
with it, Dr. Silence read the address and made a note of it. It
was in North London.
"Mr. Mudge has gone," he said quietly to
Barker, noticing his expression of alarm.
"He's not taken his 'at with him, sir."
"Mr. Mudge requires no hat where he is
now," continued the doctor, stooping to poke the fire.
"But he may return for it----"
"And the humbrella, sir."
"And the umbrella."
"He didn't go out my way, sir, if
you please," stuttered the amazed servant, his curiosity
overcoming his nervousness.
"Mr. Mudge has his own way of coming and
going, and prefers it. If he returns by the door at any time
remember to bring him instantly to me, and be kind and gentle
with him and ask no questions. Also, remember, Barker, to think
pleasantly, sympathetically, affectionately of him while he is
away. Mr. Mudge is a very suffering gentleman."
Barker bowed and went out of the room backwards,
gasping and feeling round the inside of his collar with three
very hot fingers of one hand.
It was two days later when he brought in a
telegram to the study. Dr. Silence opened it, and read as
follows:
Dr. Silence looked up and saw Barker staring at
him bewilderingly. It occurred to him that somehow he knew the
contents of the telegram.
"Make a parcel of Mr. Mudge's things,"
he said briefly, "and address them Thomas Cook & Sons,
Ludgate Circus. And send them there exactly a month from to-day,
marked 'To be called for.'"
"Yes, sir," said Barker, leaving the
room with a deep sigh and a hurried glance at the waste-paper
basket where his master had dropped the pink paper.
(End.)
"Bombay. Just slipped out again.
All safe. Have blocked entrances. Thousand thanks. Address Cooks,
London.--MUDGE.