THE FIRST ONE By HERBERT D. KASTLE - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24192/pg24192-images.html

 

The first man to return from beyond the Great Frontier may be welcomed ... but will it be as a curiosity, rather than as a hero...?

There was the usual welcoming crowd for a celebrity, and the usual speeches by the usual politicians who met him at the airport which had once been twenty miles outside of Croton, but which the growing city had since engulfed and placed well within its boundaries. But everything wasn't usual. The crowd was quiet, and the mayor didn't seem quite as at-ease as he'd been on his last big welcoming—for Corporal Berringer, one of the crew of the spaceship Washington, first to set Americans upon Mars. His Honor's handclasp was somewhat moist and cold. His Honor's eyes held a trace of remoteness.

Dr. Owen Francis felt a sudden wave of pleasure and admiration sweep over him as he saw her enter the room. He was in the act of going out; in fact, he had already said good-bye to his hostess, glad to make his escape from the chattering throng, when the tall and graceful young woman glided past him. Her carriage was superb; she had black eyes with a twinkling happiness in them; her mouth was exquisite. Round her neck, in spite of the warm afternoon, she wore a soft thing of fur or feathers; and as she brushed by to shake the hand he had just shaken himself, the tail of this touched his very cheek. Their eyes met fair and square. He felt as though her eyes also touched him. Changing his mind, he lingered another ten minutes, chatting with various ladies he did not in the least remember, but who remembered him. He did not, of course, desire to exchange banalities with these other ladies, yet did so gallantly enough. If they found him absent-minded they excused him since he was the famous mental specialist whom everybody was proud to know. And all the time his eyes never left the tall graceful figure that allured him almost to the point of casting a spell upon him.

His first impression deepened as he watched. He was aware of excitement, curiosity, longing; there was a touch even of exaltation in him; yet he took no steps to seek the introduction which was easily enough procurable. He checked himself, if with an effort. Several times their eyes[28] met across the crowded room; he dared to believe—he felt instinctively—that his interest was returned. Indeed, it was more than instinct, for she was certainly aware of his presence, and he even caught her indicating him to a woman she spoke with, and evidently asking who he was. Once he half bowed, and once, in spite of himself, he went so far as to smile, and there came, he was sure, a faint, delicious brightening of the eyes in answer. There was, he fancied, a look of yearning in the face. The young woman charmed him inexpressibly; the very way she moved delighted him. Yet at last he slipped out of the room without a word, without an introduction, without even knowing her name. He chose his moment when her back was turned. It was characteristic of him.

For Owen Francis had ever regarded marriage, for himself at least, as a disaster that could be avoided. He was in love with his work, and his work was necessary to humanity. Others might perpetuate the race, but he must heal it. He had come to regard love as the bait wherewith Nature lays her trap to fulfill her own ends. A man in love was a man enjoying a delusion, a deluded man. In his case, and he was nearing forty-five, the theory had worked admirably, and the dangerous exception that proved it had as yet not troubled him.

“It’s come at last—I do believe,” he thought to himself, as he walked home, a new tumultuous emotion in his blood; “the exception, quite possibly, has come at last. I wonder....”

And it seemed he said it to the tall graceful figure by his side, who turned up dark eyes smilingly to meet his own, and whose lips repeated softly his last two words “I wonder....”

The experience, being new to him, was baffling. A part of his nature, long dormant, received the authentic thrill that pertains actually to youth. He was a man of chaste, abstemious custom. The reaction was vehement. That dormant part of him became obstreperous. He[29] thought of his age, his appearance, his prospects; he looked thirty-eight, he was not unhandsome, his position was secure, even remarkable. That gorgeous young woman—he called her gorgeous—haunted him. Never could he forget that face, those eyes. It was extraordinary—he had left her there unspoken to, unknown, when an introduction would have been the simplest thing in the world.

“But it still is,” he replied. And the reflection filled his being with a flood of joy.

He checked himself again. Not so easily is established habit routed. He felt instinctively that, at last, he had met his mate; if he followed it up he was a man in love, a lost man enjoying a delusion, a deluded man. But the way she had looked at him! That air of intuitive invitation which not even the sweetest modesty could conceal! He felt an immense confidence in himself; also he felt oddly sure of her.

The presence of that following figure, already precious, came with him into his house, even into his study at the back where he sat over a number of letters by the open window. The pathetic little London garden showed its pitiful patch. The lilac had faded, but a smell of roses entered. The sun was just behind the buildings opposite, and the garden lay soft and warm in summer shadows.

He read and tossed aside the letters; one only interested him, from Edward Farque, whose journey to China had interrupted a friendship of long standing. Edward Farque’s work on eastern art and philosophy, on Chinese painting and Chinese thought in particular, had made its mark. He was an authority. He was to be back about this time, and his friend smiled with pleasure. “Dear old unpractical dreamer, as I used to call him,” he mused. “He’s a success, anyhow!” And as he mused, the presence that sat beside him came a little closer, yet at the same time faded. Not that he forgot her—that was impossible—but that just before opening the letter from his friend, he[30] had come to a decision. He had definitely made up his mind to seek acquaintance. The reality replaced the remembered substitute.

“As the newspapers may have warned you,” ran the familiar and kinky writing, “I am back in England after what the scribes term my ten years of exile in Cathay. I have taken a little house in Hampstead for six months, and am just settling in. Come to us to-morrow night and let me prove it to you. Come to dinner. We shall have much to say; we both are ten years wiser. You know how glad I shall be to see my old-time critic and disparager, but let me add frankly that I want to ask you a few professional, or, rather, technical, questions. So prepare yourself to come as doctor and as friend. I am writing, as the papers said truthfully, a treatise on Chinese thought. But—don’t shy!—it is about Chinese Magic that I want your technical advice [the last two words were substituted for “professional wisdom,” which had been crossed out] and the benefit of your vast experience. So come, old friend, come quickly, and come hungry! I’ll feed your body as you shall feed my mind.—Yours,
“Edward Farque.”

“P.S.—‘The coming of a friend from a far-off land—is not this true joy?’”

Dr. Francis laid down the letter with a pleased anticipatory chuckle, and it was the touch in the final sentence that amused him. In spite of being an authority, Farque was clearly the same fanciful, poetic dreamer as of old. He quoted Confucius as in other days. The firm but kinky writing had not altered either. The only sign of novelty he noticed was the use of scented paper, for a faint and pungent aroma clung to the big quarto sheet.

“A Chinese habit, doubtless,” he decided, sniffing it with a puzzled air of disapproval. Yet it had nothing in common with the scented sachets some ladies use too[31] lavishly, so that even the air of the street is polluted by their passing for a dozen yards. He was familiar with every kind of perfumed note-paper used in London, Paris, and Constantinople. This one was difficult. It was delicate and penetrating for all its faintness, pleasurable too. He rather liked it, and while annoyed that he could not name it, he sniffed at the letter several times, as though it were a flower.

“I’ll go,” he decided at once, and wrote an acceptance then and there. He went out and posted it. He meant to prolong his walk into the Park, taking his chief preoccupation, the face, the eyes, the figure, with him. Already he was composing the note of inquiry to Mrs. Malleson, his hostess of the tea-party, the note whose willing answer should give him the name, the address, the means of introduction he had now determined to secure. He visualized that note of inquiry, seeing it in his mind’s eye; only, for some odd reason, he saw the kinky writing of Farque instead of his own more elegant script. Association of ideas and emotions readily explained this. Two new and unexpected interests had entered his life on the same day, and within half an hour of each other. What he could not so readily explain, however, was that two words in his friend’s ridiculous letter, and in that kinky writing, stood out sharply from the rest. As he slipped his envelope into the mouth of the red pillar-box they shone vividly in his mind. These two words were “Chinese Magic.”

2

It was the warmth of his friend’s invitation as much as his own state of inward excitement that decided him suddenly to anticipate his visit by twenty-four hours. It would clear his judgment and help his mind, if he spent the evening at Hampstead rather than alone with his own thoughts. “A dose of China,” he thought, with a smile, “will do me good. Edward won’t mind. I’ll telephone.”[32]

He left the Park soon after six o’clock and acted upon his impulse. The connexion was bad, the wire buzzed and popped and crackled; talk was difficult; he did not hear properly. The Professor had not yet come in, apparently. Francis said he would come up anyhow on the chance.

“Velly pleased,” said the voice in his ear, as he rang off.

Going into his study, he drafted the note that should result in the introduction that was now, it appeared, the chief object of his life. The way this woman with the black, twinkling eyes obsessed him was—he admitted it with joy—extraordinary. The draft he put in his pocket, intending to re-write it next morning, and all the way up to Hampstead Heath the gracious figure glided silently beside him, the eyes were ever present, his cheek still glowed where the feather boa had touched his skin. Edward Farque remained in the background. In fact, it was on the very door-step, having rung the bell, that Francis realized he must pull himself together. “I’ve come to see old Farque,” he reminded himself, with a smile. “I’ve got to be interested in him and his, and, probably, for an hour or two, to talk Chinese——” when the door opened noiselessly, and he saw facing him, with a grin of celestial welcome on his yellow face, a China-man.

“Oh!” he said, with a start. He had not expected a Chinese servant.

“Velly pleased,” the man bowed him in.

Dr. Francis stared round him with astonishment he could not conceal. A great golden idol faced him in the hall, its gleaming visage blazing out of a sort of miniature golden palanquin, with a grin, half dignified, half cruel. Fully double human size, it blocked the way, looking so life-like that it might have moved to meet him without too great a shock to what seemed possible. It rested on a throne with four massive legs, carved, the doctor saw, with serpents, dragons, and mythical monsters generally.[33] Round it on every side were other things in keeping. Name them he could not, describe them he did not try. He summed them up in one word—China: pictures, weapons, cloths and tapestries, bells, gongs, and figures of every sort and kind imaginable.

Being ignorant of Chinese matters, Dr. Francis stood and looked about him in a mental state of some confusion. He had the feeling that he had entered a Chinese temple, for there was a faint smell of incense hanging about the house that was, to say the least, un-English. Nothing English, in fact, was visible at all. The matting on the floor, the swinging curtains of bamboo beads that replaced the customary doors, the silk draperies and pictured cushions, the bronze and ivory, the screens hung with fantastic embroideries, everything was Chinese. Hampstead vanished from his thoughts. The very lamps were in keeping, the ancient lacquered furniture as well. The value of what he saw, an expert could have told him, was considerable.

“You likee?” queried the voice at his side.

He had forgotten the servant. He turned sharply.

“Very much; it’s wonderfully done,” he said. “Makes you feel at home, John, eh?” he added tactfully, with a smile, and was going to ask how long all this preparation had taken, when a voice sounded on the stairs beyond. It was a voice he knew, a note of hearty welcome in its deep notes.

“The coming of a friend from a far-off land, even from Harley Street—is not this true joy?” he heard, and the next minute was shaking the hand of his old and valued friend. The intimacy between them had always been of the truest.

“I almost expected a pigtail,” observed Francis, looking him affectionately up and down, “but, really—why, you’ve hardly changed at all!”

“Outwardly, not as much, perhaps, as Time expects,” was the happy reply, “but inwardly——!” He scanned[34] appreciatively the burly figure of the doctor in his turn. “And I can say the same of you,” he declared, still holding his hand tight. “This is a real pleasure, Owen,” he went on in his deep voice, “to see you again is a joy to me. Old friends meeting again—there’s nothing like it in life, I believe, nothing.” He gave the hand another squeeze before he let it go. “And we,” he added, leading the way into a room across the hall, “neither of us is a fugitive from life. We take what we can, I mean.”

The doctor smiled as he noted the un-English turn of language, and together they entered a sitting-room that was, again, more like some inner chamber of a Chinese temple than a back room in a rented Hampstead house.

“I only knew ten minutes ago that you were coming, my dear fellow,” the scholar was saying, as his friend gazed round him with increased astonishment, “or I would have prepared more suitably for your reception. I was out till late. All this”—he waved his hand—“surprises you, of course, but the fact is I have been home some days already, and most of what you see was arranged for me in advance of my arrival. Hence its apparent completion. I say ‘apparent,’ because, actually, it is far from faithfully carried out. Yet to exceed,” he added, “is as bad as to fall short.”

The doctor watched him while he listened to a somewhat lengthy explanation of the various articles surrounding them. The speaker—he confirmed his first impression—had changed little during the long interval; the same enthusiasm was in him as before, the same fire and dreaminess alternately in the fine grey eyes, the same humour and passion about the mouth, the same free gestures, and the same big voice. Only the lines had deepened on the forehead, and on the fine face the air of thoughtfulness was also deeper. It was Edward Farque as of old, scholar, poet, dreamer and enthusiast, despiser of western civilization, contemptuous of money, generous and upright, a type of value, an individual.[35]

“You’ve done well, done splendidly, Edward, old man,” said his friend presently, after hearing of Chinese wonders that took him somewhat beyond his depth perhaps. “No one is more pleased than I. I’ve watched your books. You haven’t regretted England, I’ll be bound?” he asked.

“The philosopher has no country, in any case,” was the reply, steadily given. “But out there, I confess, I’ve found my home.” He leaned forward, a deeper earnestness in his tone and expression. And into his face, as he spoke, came a glow of happiness. “My heart,” he said, “is in China.”

“I see it is, I see it is,” put in the other, conscious that he could not honestly share his friend’s enthusiasm. “And you’re fortunate to be free to live where your treasure is,” he added after a moment’s pause. “You must be a happy man. Your passion amounts to nostalgia, I suspect. Already yearning to get back there, probably?”

Farque gazed at him for some seconds with shining eyes. “You remember the Persian saying, I’m sure,” he said. “‘You see a man drink, but you do not see his thirst.’ Well,” he added, laughing happily, “you may see me off in six months’ time, but you will not see my happiness.”

While he went on talking, the doctor glanced round the room, marvelling still at the exquisite taste of everything, the neat arrangement, the perfect matching of form and colour. A woman might have done this thing, occurred to him, as the haunting figure shifted deliciously into the foreground of his mind again. The thought of her had been momentarily replaced by all he heard and saw. She now returned, filling him with joy, anticipation and enthusiasm. Presently, when it was his turn to talk, he would tell his friend about this new, unimagined happiness that had burst upon him like a sunrise. Presently, but not just yet. He remembered, too, with a passing twinge of possible boredom to come, that there must be[36] some delay before his own heart could unburden itself in its turn. Farque wanted to ask some professional questions, of course. He had for the moment forgotten that part of the letter in his general interest and astonishment.

“Happiness, yes....” he murmured, aware that his thoughts had wandered, and catching at the last word he remembered hearing. “As you said just now in your own queer way—you haven’t changed a bit, let me tell you, in your picturesqueness of quotation, Edward—one must not be fugitive from life; one must seize happiness when and where it offers.”

He said it lightly enough, hugging internally his own sweet secret; but he was a little surprised at the earnestness of his friend’s rejoinder: “Both of us, I see,” came the deep voice, backed by the flash of the far-seeing grey eyes, “have made some progress in the doctrine of life and death.” He paused, gazing at the other with sight that was obviously turned inwards upon his own thoughts. “Beauty,” he went on presently, his tone even more serious, “has been my lure; yours, Reality....”

“You don’t flatter either of us, Edward. That’s too exclusive a statement,” put in the doctor. He was becoming every minute more and more interested in the workings of his friend’s mind. Something about the signs offered eluded his understanding. “Explain yourself, old scholar-poet. I’m a dull, practical mind, remember, and can’t keep pace with Chinese subtleties.”

“You’ve left out Beauty,” was the quiet rejoinder, “while I left out Reality. That’s neither Chinese nor subtle. It is simply true.”

“A bit wholesale, isn’t it?” laughed Francis. “A big generalization, rather.”

A bright light seemed to illuminate the scholar’s face. It was as though an inner lamp was suddenly lit. At the same moment the sound of a soft gong floated in from the hall outside, so soft that the actual strokes were not[37] distinguishable in the wave of musical vibration that reached the ear.

Farque rose to lead the way in to dinner.

“What if I——” he whispered, “have combined the two?” And upon his face was a look of joy that reached down into the other’s own full heart with its unexpectedness and wonder. It was the last remark in the world he had looked for. He wondered for a moment whether he interpreted it correctly.

“By Jove...!” he exclaimed. “Edward, what d’you mean?”

“You shall hear—after dinner,” said Farque, his voice mysterious, his eyes still shining with his inner joy. “I told you I have some questions to ask you—professionally.” And they took their seats round an ancient, marvellous table, lit by two swinging lamps of soft green jade, while the Chinese servant waited on them with the silent movements and deft neatness of his imperturbable celestial race.

3

To say that he was bored during the meal were an over-statement of Dr. Francis’s mental condition, but to say that he was half-bored seemed the literal truth; for one-half of him, while he ate his steak and savoury and watched Farque manipulating chou chop suey and chou om dong most cleverly with chop-sticks, was too pre-occupied with his own romance to allow the other half to give its full attention to the conversation.

He had entered the room, however, with a distinct quickening of what may be termed his instinctive and infallible sense of diagnosis. That last remark of his friend’s had stimulated him. He was aware of surprise, curiosity, and impatience. Willy-nilly, he began automatically to study him with a profounder interest. Something, he gathered, was not quite as it should be in Edward Farque’s mental composition. There was what might be called an[38] elusive emotional disturbance. He began to wonder and to watch.

They talked, naturally, of China and of things Chinese, for the scholar responded to little else, and Francis listened with what sympathy and patience he could muster. Of art and beauty he had hitherto known little, his mind was practical and utilitarian. He now learned that all art was derived from China, where a high, fine, subtle culture had reigned since time immemorial. Older than Egypt was their wisdom. When the western races were eating one another, before Greece was even heard of, the Chinese had reached a level of knowledge and achievement that few realized. Never had they, even in earliest times, been deluded by anthropomorphic conceptions of the Deity, but perceived in everything the expressions of a single whole whose giant activities they reverently worshipped. Their contempt for the western scurry after knowledge, wealth, machinery, was justified, if Farque was worthy of belief. He seemed saturated with Chinese thought, art, philosophy, and his natural bias towards the celestial race had hardened into an attitude to life that had now become ineradicable.

“They deal, as it were, in essences,” he declared; “they discern the essence of everything, leaving out the superfluous, the unessential, the trivial. Their pictures alone prove it. Come with me,” he concluded, “and see the ‘Earthly Paradise,’ now in the British Museum. It is like Botticelli, but better than anything Botticelli ever did. It was painted”—he paused for emphasis—“600 years B.C.”

The wonder of this quiet, ancient civilization, a sense of its depth, its wisdom, grew upon his listener as the enthusiastic poet described its charm and influence upon himself. He willingly allowed the enchantment of the other’s Paradise to steal upon his own awakened heart. There was a good deal Francis might have offered by way of criticism and objection, but he preferred on the whole[39] to keep his own views to himself, and to let his friend wander unhindered through the mazes of his passionate evocation. All men, he well knew, needed a dream to carry them through life’s disappointments, a dream that they could enter at will and find peace, contentment, happiness. Farque’s dream was China. Why not? It was as good as another, and a man like Farque was entitled to what dream he pleased.

“And their women?” he inquired at last, letting both halves of his mind speak together for the first time.

But he was not prepared for the expression that leaped upon his friend’s face at the simple question. Nor for his method of reply. It was no reply, in point of fact. It was simply an attack upon all other types of woman, and upon the white, the English, in particular—their emptiness, their triviality, their want of intuitive imagination, of spiritual grace, of everything, in a word, that should constitute woman a meet companion for man, and a little higher than the angels into the bargain. The doctor listened spellbound. Too humorous to be shocked, he was, at any rate, disturbed by what he heard, displeased a little, too. It threatened too directly his own new tender dream.

Only with the utmost self-restraint did he keep his temper under, and prevent hot words he would have regretted later from tearing his friend’s absurd claim into ragged shreds. He was wounded personally as well. Never now could he bring himself to tell his own secret to him. The outburst chilled and disappointed him. But it had another effect—it cooled his judgment. His sense of diagnosis quickened. He divined an idée fixe, a mania possibly. His interest deepened abruptly. He watched. He began to look about him with more wary eyes, and a sense of uneasiness, once the anger passed, stirred in his friendly and affectionate heart.

They had been sitting alone over their port for some considerable time, the servant having long since left the room. The doctor had sought to change the subject many[40] times without much success, when suddenly Farque changed it for him.

“Now,” he announced, “I’ll tell you something,” and Francis guessed that the professional questions were on the way at last. “We must pity the living, remember, and part with the dead. Have you forgotten old Shan-Yu?”

The forgotten name came back to him, the picturesque East End dealer of many years ago. “The old merchant who taught you your first Chinese? I do recall him dimly; now you mention it. You made quite a friend of him, didn’t you? He thought very highly of you—ah, it comes back to me now—he offered something or other very wonderful in his gratitude, unless my memory fails me?”

“His most valuable possession,” Farque went on, a strange look deepening on his face, an expression of mysterious rapture, as it were, and one that Francis recognized and swiftly pigeon-holed in his now attentive mind.

“Which was?” he asked sympathetically. “You told me once, but so long ago that really it’s slipped my mind. Something magical, wasn’t it?” He watched closely for his friend’s reply.

Farque lowered his voice to a whisper almost devotional:

“The Perfume of the Garden of Happiness,” he murmured, with an expression in his eyes as though the mere recollection gave him joy. “‘Burn it,’ he told me, ‘in a brazier; then inhale. You will enter the Valley of a Thousand Temples wherein lies the Garden of Happiness, and there you will meet your Love. You will have seven years of happiness with your Love before the Waters of Separation flow between you. I give this to you who alone of men here have appreciated the wisdom of my land. Follow my body towards the Sunrise. You, an eastern soul in a barbarian body, will meet your Destiny.’”

The doctor’s attention, such is the power of self-interest, quickened amazingly as he heard. His own romance[41] flamed up with power. His friend—it dawned upon him suddenly—loved a woman.

“Come,” said Farque, rising quietly, “we will go into the other room, and I will show you what I have shown to but one other in the world before. You are a doctor,” he continued, as he led the way to the silk-covered divan where golden dragons swallowed crimson suns, and wonderful jade horses hovered near. “You understand the mind and nerves. States of consciousness you also can explain, and the effect of drugs is, doubtless, known to you.” He swung to the heavy curtains that took the place of door, handed a lacquered box of cigarettes to his friend, and lit one himself. “Perfumes, too,” he added, “you probably have studied, with their extraordinary evocative power.” He stood in the middle of the room, the green light falling on his interesting and thoughtful face, and for a passing second Francis, watching keenly, observed a change flit over it and vanish. The eyes grew narrow and slid tilted upwards, the skin wore a shade of yellow underneath the green from the lamp of jade, the nose slipped back a little, the cheek-bones forward.

“Perfumes,” said the doctor, “no. Of perfumes I know nothing, beyond their interesting effect upon the memory. I cannot help you there. But, you, I suspect,” and he looked up with an inviting sympathy that concealed the close observation underneath, “you yourself, I feel sure, can tell me something of value about them?”

“Perhaps,” was the calm reply, “perhaps, for I have smelt the perfume of the Garden of Happiness, and I have been in the Valley of a Thousand Temples.” He spoke with a glow of joy and reverence almost devotional.

The doctor waited in some suspense, while his friend moved towards an inlaid cabinet across the room. More than broad-minded, he was that much rarer thing, an open-minded man, ready at a moment’s notice to discard all preconceived ideas, provided new knowledge that[42] necessitated the holocaust were shown to him. At present, none the less, he held very definite views of his own. “Please ask me any questions you like,” he added. “All I know is entirely yours, as always.” He was aware of suppressed excitement in his friend that betrayed itself in every word and look and gesture, an excitement intense, and not as yet explained by anything he had seen or heard.

The scholar, meanwhile, had opened a drawer in the cabinet and taken from it a neat little packet tied up with purple silk. He held it with tender, almost loving care, as he came and sat down on the divan beside his friend.

“This,” he said, in a tone, again, of something between reverence and worship, “contains what I have to show you first.” He slowly unrolled it, disclosing a yet smaller silken bag within, coloured a deep rich orange. There were two vertical columns of writing on it, painted in Chinese characters. The doctor leaned forward to examine them. His friend translated:

“The Perfume of the Garden of Happiness,” he read aloud, tracing the letters of the first column with his finger. “The Destroyer of Honourable Homes,” he finished, passing to the second, and then proceeded to unwrap the little silken bag. Before it was actually open, however, and the pale shredded material resembling coloured chaff visible to the eyes, the doctor’s nostrils had recognized the strange aroma he had first noticed about his friend’s letter received earlier in the day. The same soft, penetrating odour, sharply piercing, sweet and delicate, rose to his brain. It stirred at once a deep emotional pleasure in him. Having come to him first when he was aglow with his own unexpected romance, his mind and heart full of the woman he had just left, that delicious, torturing state revived in him quite naturally. The evocative power of perfume with regard to memory is compelling. A livelier sympathy towards his friend, and towards what he was about to hear, awoke in him spontaneously.[43]

He did not mention the letter, however. He merely leaned over to smell the fragrant perfume more easily.

Farque drew back the open packet instantly, at the same time holding out a warning hand. “Careful,” he said gravely, “be careful, my old friend—unless you desire to share the rapture and the risk that have been mine. To enjoy its full effect, true, this dust must be burned in a brazier and its smoke inhaled; but even sniffed, as you now would sniff it, and you are in danger——”

“Of what?” asked Francis, impressed by the other’s extraordinary intensity of voice and manner.

“Of Heaven; but, possibly, of Heaven before your time.”

4

The tale that Farque unfolded then had certainly a strange celestial flavour, a glory not of this dull world; and as his friend listened, his interest deepened with every minute, while his bewilderment increased. He watched closely, expert that he was, for clues that might guide his deductions aright, but for all his keen observation and experience he could detect no inconsistency, no weakness, nothing that betrayed the smallest mental aberration. The origin and nature of what he already decided was an idée fixe, a mania, evaded him entirely. This evasion piqued and vexed him; he had heard a thousand tales of similar type before; that this one in particular should baffle his unusual skill touched his pride. Yet he faced the position honestly, he confessed himself baffled until the end of the evening. When he went away, however, he went away satisfied, even forgetful—because a new problem of yet more poignant interest had replaced the first.

“It was after three years out there,” said Farque, “that a sense of my loneliness first came upon me. It came upon me bitterly. My work had not then been recognized; obstacles and difficulties had increased; I felt a failure; I had accomplished nothing. And it seemed to me I had misjudged[44] my capacities, taken a wrong direction, and wasted my life accordingly. For my move to China, remember, was a radical move, and my boats were burnt behind me. This sense of loneliness was really devastating.”

Francis, already fidgeting, put up his hand.

“One question, if I may,” he said, “and I’ll not interrupt again.”

“By all means,” said the other patiently, “what is it?”

“Were you—we are such old friends”—he apologized—“were you still celibate as ever?”

Farque looked surprised, then smiled. “My habits had not changed,” he replied, “I was, as always, celibate.”

“Ah!” murmured the doctor, and settled down to listen.

“And I think now,” his friend went on, “that it was the lack of companionship that first turned my thoughts towards conscious disappointment. However that may be, it was one evening, as I walked homewards to my little house, that I caught my imagination lingering upon English memories, though chiefly, I admit, upon my old Chinese tutor, the dead Shan-Yu.

“It was dusk, the stars were coming out in the pale evening air, and the orchards, as I passed them, stood like wavering ghosts of unbelievable beauty. The effect of thousands upon thousands of these trees, flooding the twilight of a spring evening with their sea of blossom, is almost unearthly. They seem transparencies, their colour hangs sheets upon the very sky. I crossed a small wooden bridge that joined two of these orchards above a stream, and in the dark water I watched a moment the mingled reflection of stars and flowering branches on the quiet surface. It seemed too exquisite to belong to earth, this fairy garden of stars and blossoms, shining faintly in the crystal depths, and my thought, as I gazed, dived suddenly down the little avenue that memory opened into former days. I remembered Shan-Yu’s present, given to me when he died. His very words came back to me: The Garden of Happiness in the Valley of the Thousand Temples,[45] with its promise of love, of seven years of happiness, and the prophecy that I should follow his body towards the Sunrise and meet my destiny.

“This memory I took home with me into my lonely little one-storey house upon the hill. My servants did not sleep there. There was no one near. I sat by the open window with my thoughts, and you may easily guess that before very long I had unearthed the long-forgotten packet from among my things, spread a portion of its contents on a metal tray above a lighted brazier, and was comfortably seated before it, inhaling the light blue smoke with its exquisite and fragrant perfume.

“A light air entered through the window, the distant orchards below me trembled, rose and floated through the dusk, and I found myself, almost at once, in a pavilion of flowers; a blue river lay shining in the sun before me, as it wandered through a lovely valley where I saw groves of flowering trees among a thousand scattered temples. Drenched in light and colour, the Valley lay dreaming amid a peaceful loveliness that woke what seemed impossible, unrealizable, longings in my heart. I yearned towards its groves and temples, I would bathe my soul in that flood of tender light, and my body in the blue coolness of that winding river. In a thousand temples must I worship. Yet these impossible yearnings instantly were satisfied. I found myself there at once ... and the time that passed over my head you may reckon in centuries, if not in ages. I was in the Garden of Happiness and its marvellous perfume banished time and sorrow, there was no end to chill the soul, nor any beginning, which is its foolish counterpart.

“Nor was there loneliness.” The speaker clasped his thin hands, and closed his eyes a moment in what was evidently an ecstasy of the sweetest memory man may ever know. A slight trembling ran through his frame, communicating itself to his friend upon the divan beside him—this understanding, listening, sympathetic friend, whose[46] eyes had never once yet withdrawn their attentive gaze from the narrator’s face.

“I was not alone,” the scholar resumed, opening his eyes again, and smiling out of some deep inner joy. “Shan-Yu came down the steps of the first temple and took my hand, while the great golden figures in the dim interior turned their splendid shining heads to watch. Then, breathing the soul of his ancient wisdom in my ear, he led me through all the perfumed ways of that enchanted garden, worshipping with me at a hundred deathless shrines, led me, I tell you, to the sound of soft gongs and gentle bells, by fragrant groves and sparkling streams, mid a million gorgeous flowers, until, beneath that unsetting sun, we reached the heart of the Valley, where the source of the river gushed forth beneath the lighted mountains. He stopped and pointed across the narrow waters. I saw the woman——”

“The woman,” his listener murmured beneath his breath, though Farque seemed unaware of interruption.

“She smiled at me and held her hands out, and while she did so, even before I could express my joy and wonder in response, Shan-Yu, I saw, had crossed the narrow stream and stood beside her. I made to follow then, my heart burning with inexpressible delight. But Shan-Yu held up his hand, as they began to move down the flowered bank together, making a sign that I should keep pace with them, though on my own side.

“Thus, side by side, yet with the blue sparkling stream between us, we followed back along its winding course, through the heart of that enchanted valley, my hands stretched out towards the radiant figure of my Love, and hers stretched out towards me. They did not touch, but our eyes, our smiles, our thoughts, these met and mingled in a sweet union of unimagined bliss, so that the absence of physical contact was unnoticed and laid no injury on our marvellous joy. It was a spirit union, and our kiss a spirit kiss. Therein lay the subtlety and glory of the[47] Chinese wonder, for it was our essences that met, and for such union there is no satiety and, equally, no possible end. The Perfume of the Garden of Happiness is an essence. We were in Eternity.

“The stream, meanwhile, widened between us, and as it widened, my Love grew farther from me in space, smaller, less visibly defined, yet ever essentially more perfect, and never once with a sense of distance that made our union less divinely close. Across the widening reaches of blue, sunlit water I still knew her smile, her eyes, the gestures of her radiant being; I saw her exquisite reflection in the stream; and, mid the music of those soft gongs and gentle bells, the voice of Shan-Yu came like a melody to my ears:

“‘You have followed me into the sunrise, and have found your destiny. Behold now your Love. In this Valley of a Thousand Temples you have known the Garden of Happiness, and its Perfume your soul now inhales.’

“‘I am bathed,’ I answered, ‘in a happiness divine. It is forever.’

“‘The Waters of Separation,’ his answer floated like a bell, ‘lie widening between you.’

“I moved nearer to the bank, impelled by the pain in his words to take my Love and hold her to my breast.

“‘But I would cross to her,’ I cried, and saw that, as I moved, Shan-Yu and my Love came likewise closer to the water’s edge across the widening river. They both obeyed, I was aware, my slightest wish.

“‘Seven years of Happiness you may know,’ sang his gentle tones across the brimming flood, ‘if you would cross to her. Yet the Destroyer of Honourable Homes lies in the shadows that you must cast outside.’

“I heard his words, I noticed for the first time that in the blaze of this radiant sunshine we cast no shadows on the sea of flowers at our feet, and—I stretched out my arms towards my Love across the river.

“‘I accept my destiny,’ I cried, ‘I will have my seven[48] years of bliss,’ and stepped forward into the running flood. As the cool water took my feet, my Love’s hands stretched out both to hold me and to bid me stay. There was acceptance in her gesture, but there was warning too.

“I did not falter. I advanced until the water bathed my knees, and my Love, too, came to meet me, the stream already to her waist, while our arms stretched forth above the running flood towards each other.

“The change came suddenly. Shan-Yu first faded behind her advancing figure into air; there stole a chill upon the sunlight; a cool mist rose from the water, hiding the Garden and the hills beyond; our fingers touched, I gazed into her eyes, our lips lay level with the water—and the room was dark and cold about me. The brazier stood extinguished at my side. The dust had burnt out, and no smoke rose. I slowly left my chair and closed the window, for the air was chill.”

5

It was difficult at first to return to Hampstead and the details of ordinary life about him. Francis looked round him slowly, freeing himself gradually from the spell his friend’s words had laid even upon his analytical temperament. The transition was helped, however, by the details that everywhere met his eye. The Chinese atmosphere remained. More, its effect had gained, if anything. The embroideries of yellow gold, the pictures, the lacquered stools and inlaid cabinets, above all, the exquisite figures in green jade upon the shelf beside him, all this, in the shimmering pale olive light the lamps shed everywhere, helped his puzzled mind to bridge the gulf from the Garden of Happiness into the decorated villa upon Hampstead Heath.

There was silence between the two men for several minutes. Far was it from the doctor’s desire to injure his old friend’s delightful fantasy. For he called it fantasy,[49] although something in him trembled. He remained, therefore, silent. Truth to tell, perhaps, he knew not exactly what to say.

Farque broke the silence himself. He had not moved since the story ended; he sat motionless, his hands tightly clasped, his eyes alight with the memory of his strange imagined joy, his face rapt and almost luminous, as though he still wandered through the groves of the Enchanted Garden and inhaled the perfume of its perfect happiness in the Valley of the Thousand Temples.

“It was two days later,” he went on suddenly in his quiet voice, “only two days afterwards, that I met her.”

“You met her? You met the woman of your dream?” Francis’s eyes opened very wide.

“In that little harbour town,” repeated Farque calmly, “I met her in the flesh. She had just landed in a steamer from up the coast. The details are of no particular interest. She knew me, of course, at once. And, naturally, I knew her.”

The doctor’s tongue refused to act as he heard. It dawned upon him suddenly that his friend was married. He remembered the woman’s touch about the house; he recalled, too, for the first time that the letter of invitation to dinner had said “come to us.” He was full of a bewildered astonishment.

The reaction upon himself was odd, perhaps, yet wholly natural. His heart warmed towards his imaginative friend. He could now tell him his own new strange romance. The woman who haunted him crept back into the room and sat between them. He found his tongue.

“You married her, Edward?” he exclaimed.

“She is my wife,” was the reply, in a gentle, happy voice.

“A Ch——” he could not bring himself to say the word. “A foreigner?”

“My wife is a Chinese woman,” Farque helped him easily, with a delighted smile.[50]

So great was the other’s absorption in the actual moment, that he had not heard the step in the passage that his host had heard. The latter stood up suddenly.

“I hear her now,” he said. “I’m glad she’s come back before you left.” He stepped towards the door.

But before he reached it, the door was opened and in came the woman herself. Francis tried to rise, but something had happened to him. His heart missed a beat. Something, it seemed, broke in him. He faced a tall, graceful young English woman with black eyes of sparkling happiness, the woman of his own romance. She still wore the feather boa round her neck. She was no more Chinese than he was.

“My wife,” he heard Farque introducing them, as he struggled to his feet, searching feverishly for words of congratulation, normal, everyday words he ought to use, “I’m so pleased, oh, so pleased,” Farque was saying—he heard the sound from a distance, his sight was blurred as well—“my two best friends in the world, my English comrade and my Chinese wife.” His voice was absolutely sincere with conviction and belief.

“But we have already met,” came the woman’s delightful voice, her eyes full upon his face with smiling pleasure, “I saw you at Mrs. Malleson’s tea only this afternoon.”

And Francis remembered suddenly that the Mallesons were old acquaintances of Farque’s as well as of himself. “And I even dared to ask who you were,” the voice went on, floating from some other space, it seemed, to his ears, “I had you pointed out to me. I had heard of you from Edward, of course. But you vanished before I could be introduced.”

The doctor mumbled something or other polite and, he hoped, adequate. But the truth had flashed upon him with remorseless suddenness. She had “heard of” him—the famous mental specialist. Her interest in him was cruelly explained, cruelly both for himself and for his friend. Farque’s delusion lay clear before his eyes. An awakening[51] to reality might involve dislocation of the mind. She, too, moreover, knew the truth. She was involved as well. And her interest in himself was—consultation.

“Seven years we’ve been married, just seven years to-day,” Farque was saying thoughtfully, as he looked at them. “Curious, rather, isn’t it?”

“Very,” said Francis, turning his regard from the black eyes to the grey.

Thus it was that Owen Francis left the house a little later with a mind in a measure satisfied, yet in a measure forgetful too—forgetful of his own deep problem, because another of even greater interest had replaced it.

“Why undeceive him?” ran his thought. “He need never know. It’s harmless anyhow—I can tell her that.”

But, side by side with this reflection, ran another that was oddly haunting, considering his type of mind: “Destroyer of Honourable Homes,” was the form of words it took. And with a sigh he added “Chinese Magic.”

---

COMPUTER MALFUNCTION

JOHN WYNDHAM - THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS

 

As the little steamer entered the bay of Kettletoft in the Orkneys the beach at Sanday appeared so low that the houses almost seemed to be standing in the water; and to the big, dark man leaning over the rail of the upper deck the sight of them came with a pang of mingled pain and pleasure. The scene, to his eyes, had not changed. The houses, the low shore, the flat treeless country beyond, the vast open sky, all looked exactly the same as when he left the island thirty years ago to work for the Hudson Bay Company in distant N. W. Canada. A lad of eighteen then, he was now a man of forty-eight, old for his years, and this was the home-coming he had so often dreamed about in the lonely wilderness of trees where he had spent his life. Yet his grim face wore an anxious rather than a tender expression. The return was perhaps not quite as he had pictured it.

Jim Peace had not done too badly, however, in the Company’s service. For an islander, he would be a rich man now; he had not married, he had saved the greater part of his salary, and even in the far-away Post where he had spent so many years there had been occasional opportunities of the kind common to new, wild countries[2] where life and law are in the making. He had not hesitated to take them. None of the big Company Posts, it was true, had come his way, nor had he risen very high in the service; in another two years his turn would have come, yet he had left of his own accord before those two years were up. His decision, judging by the strength in the features, was not due to impulse; the move had been deliberately weighed and calculated; he had renounced his opportunity after full reflection. A man with those steady eyes, with that square jaw and determined mouth, certainly did not act without good reason.

A curious expression now flickered over his weather-hardened face as he saw again his childhood’s home, and the return, so often dreamed about, actually took place at last. An uneasy light flashed for a moment in the deep-set grey eyes, but was quickly gone again, and the tanned visage recovered its accustomed look of stern composure. His keen sight took in a dark knot of figures on the landing-pier—his brother, he knew, among them. A wave of home-sickness swept over him. He longed to see his brother again, the old farm, the sweep of open country, the sand-dunes, and the breaking seas. The smell of long-forgotten days came to his nostrils with its sweet, painful pang of youthful memories.

How fine, he thought, to be back there in the old familiar fields of childhood, with sea and sand about him instead of the smother of endless woods that ran a thousand miles without a break. He was glad in particular that no trees were visible, and that rabbits scampering among the dunes were the only wild animals he need ever meet....

Those thirty years in the woods, it seemed, oppressed his mind; the forests, the countless multitudes of trees, had wearied him. His nerves, perhaps, had suffered finally. Snow, frost and sun, stars, and the wind had been his companions during the long days and endless nights in his lonely Post, but chiefly—trees. Trees, trees,[3] trees! On the whole, he had preferred them in stormy weather, though, in another way, their rigid hosts, ’mid the deep silence of still days, had been equally oppressive. In the clear sunlight of a windless day they assumed a waiting, listening, watching aspect that had something spectral in it, but when in motion—well, he preferred a moving animal to one that stood stock-still and stared. Wind, moreover, in a million trees, even the lightest breeze, drowned all other sounds—the howling of the wolves, for instance, in winter, or the ceaseless harsh barking of the husky dogs he so disliked.

Even on this warm September afternoon a slight shiver ran over him as the background of dead years loomed up behind the present scene. He thrust the picture back, deep down inside himself. The self-control, the strong, even violent will that the face betrayed, came into operation instantly. The background was background; it belonged to what was past, and the past was over and done with. It was dead. Jim meant it to stay dead.

The figure waving to him from the pier was his brother. He knew Tom instantly; the years had dealt easily with him in this quiet island; there was no startling, no unkindly change, and a deep emotion, though unexpressed, rose in his heart. It was good to be home again, he realized, as he sat presently in the cart, Tom holding the reins, driving slowly back to the farm at the north end of the island. Everything he found familiar, yet at the same time strange. They passed the school where he used to go as a little bare-legged boy; other boys were now learning their lessons exactly as he used to do. Through the open window he could hear the droning voice of the schoolmaster, who, though invisible, wore the face of Mr. Lovibond, his own teacher.

“Lovibond?” said Tom, in reply to his question. “Oh, he’s been dead these twenty years. He went south, you know—Glasgow, I think it was, or Edinburgh. He got typhoid.”[4]

Stands of golden plover were to be seen as of old in the fields, or flashing overhead in swift flight with a whir of wings, wheeling and turning together like one huge bird. Down on the empty shore a curlew cried. Its piercing note rose clear above the noisy clamour of the gulls. The sun played softly on the quiet sea, the air was keen but pleasant, the tang of salt mixed sweetly with the clean smells of open country that he knew so well. Nothing of essentials had changed, even the low clouds beyond the heaving uplands were the clouds of childhood.

They came presently to the sand-dunes, where rabbits sat at their burrow-mouths, or ran helter-skelter across the road in front of the slow cart.

“They’re safe till the colder weather comes and trapping begins,” he mentioned. It all came back to him in detail.

“And they know it, too—the canny little beggars,” replied Tom. “Any rabbits out where you’ve been?” he asked casually.

“Not to hurt you,” returned his brother shortly.

Nothing seemed changed, although everything seemed different. He looked upon the old, familiar things, but with other eyes. There were, of course, changes, alterations, yet so slight, in a way so odd and curious, that they evaded him; not being of the physical order, they reported to his soul, not to his mind. But his soul, being troubled, sought to deny the changes; to admit them meant to admit a change in himself he had determined to conceal even if he could not entirely deny it.

“Same old place, Tom,” came one of his rare remarks. “The years ain’t done much to it.” He looked into his brother’s face a moment squarely. “Nor to you, either, Tom,” he added, affection and tenderness just touching his voice and breaking through a natural reserve that was almost taciturnity.

His brother returned the look; and something in that instant passed between the two men, something of understanding[5] that no words had hinted at, much less expressed. The tie was real, they loved each other, they were loyal, true, steadfast fellows. In youth they had known no secrets. The shadow that now passed and vanished left a vague trouble in both hearts.

“The forests,” said Tom slowly, “have made a silent man of you, Jim. You’ll miss them here, I’m thinking.”

“Maybe,” was the curt reply, “but I guess not.”

His lips snapped to as though they were of steel and could never open again, while the tone he used made Tom realize that the subject was not one his brother cared to talk about particularly. He was surprised, therefore, when, after a pause, Jim returned to it of his own accord. He was sitting a little sideways as he spoke, taking in the scene with hungry eyes. “It’s a queer thing,” he observed, “to look round and see nothing but clean empty land, and not a single tree in sight. You see, it don’t look natural quite.”

Again his brother was struck by the tone of voice, but this time by something else as well he could not name. Jim was excusing himself, explaining. The manner, too, arrested him. And thirty years disappeared as though they had not been, for it was thus Jim acted as a boy when there was something unpleasant he had to say and wished to get it over. The tone, the gesture, the manner, all were there. He was edging up to something he wished to say, yet dared not utter.

“You’ve had enough of trees then?” Tom said sympathetically, trying to help, “and things?”

The instant the last two words were out he realized that they had been drawn from him instinctively, and that it was the anxiety of deep affection which had prompted them. He had guessed without knowing he had guessed, or rather, without intention or attempt to guess. Jim had a secret. Love’s clairvoyance had discovered it, though not yet its hidden terms.

“I have——” began the other, then paused, evidently[6] to choose his words with care. “I’ve had enough of trees.” He was about to speak of something that his brother had unwittingly touched upon in his chance phrase, but instead of finding the words he sought, he gave a sudden start, his breath caught sharply. “What’s that?” he exclaimed, jerking his body round so abruptly that Tom automatically pulled the reins. “What is it?”

“A dog barking,” Tom answered, much surprised. “A farm dog barking. Why? What did you think it was?” he asked, as he flicked the horse to go on again. “You made me jump,” he added, with a laugh. “You’re used to huskies, ain’t you?”

“It sounded so—not like a dog, I mean,” came the slow explanation. “It’s long since I heard a sheep-dog bark, I suppose it startled me.”

“Oh, it’s a dog all right,” Tom assured him comfortingly, for his heart told him infallibly the kind of tone to use. And presently, too, he changed the subject in his blunt, honest fashion, knowing that, also, was the right and kindly thing to do. He pointed out the old farms as they drove along, his brother silent again, sitting stiff and rigid at his side. “And it’s good to have you back, Jim, from those outlandish places. There are not too many of the family left now—just you and I, as a matter of fact.”

“Just you and I,” the other repeated gruffly, but in a sweetened tone that proved he appreciated the ready sympathy and tact. “We’ll stick together, Tom, eh? Blood’s thicker than water, ain’t it? I’ve learnt that much, anyhow.”

The voice had something gentle and appealing in it, something his brother heard now for the first time. An elbow nudged into his side, and Tom knew the gesture was not solely a sign of affection, but grew partly also from the comfort born of physical contact when the heart is anxious. The touch, like the last words, conveyed an[7] appeal for help. Tom was so surprised he couldn’t believe it quite.

Scared! Jim scared! The thought puzzled and afflicted him who knew his brother’s character inside out, his courage, his presence of mind in danger, his resolution. Jim frightened seemed an impossibility, a contradiction in terms; he was the kind of man who did not know the meaning of fear, who shrank from nothing, whose spirits rose highest when things appeared most hopeless. It must, indeed, be an uncommon, even a terrible danger that could shake such nerves; yet Tom saw the signs and read them clearly. Explain them he could not, nor did he try. All he knew with certainty was that his brother, sitting now beside him in the cart, hid a secret terror in his heart. Sooner or later, in his own good time, he would share it with him.

He ascribed it, this simple Orkney farmer, to those thirty years of loneliness and exile in wild desolate places, without companionship, without the society of women, with only Indians, husky dogs, a few trappers or fur-dealers like himself, but none of the wholesome, natural influences that sweeten life within reach. Thirty years was a long, long time. He began planning schemes to help. Jim must see people as much as possible, and his mind ran quickly over the men and women available. In women the neighbourhood was not rich, but there were several men of the right sort who might be useful, good fellows all. There was John Rossiter, another old Hudson Bay man, who had been factor at Cartwright, Labrador, for many years, and had returned long ago to spend his last days in civilization. There was Sandy McKay, also back from a long spell of rubber-planting in Malay.... Tom was still busy making plans when they reached the old farm and presently sat down to their first meal together since that early breakfast thirty years ago before Jim caught the steamer that bore him off to exile—an exile[8] that now returned him with nerves unstrung and a secret terror hidden in his heart.

“I’ll ask no questions,” he decided. “Jim will tell me in his own good time. And meanwhile, I’ll get him to see as many folks as possible.” He meant it too; yet not only for his brother’s sake. Jim’s terror was so vivid it had touched his own heart too.

“Ah, a man can open his lungs here and breathe!” exclaimed Jim, as the two came out after supper and stood before the house, gazing across the open country. He drew a deep breath as though to prove his assertion, exhaling with slow satisfaction again. “It’s good to see a clear horizon and to know there’s all that water between—between me and where I’ve been.” He turned his face to watch the plover in the sky, then looked towards the distant shore-line where the sea was just visible in the long evening light. “There can’t be too much water for me,” he added, half to himself. “I guess they can’t cross water—not that much water at any rate.”

Tom stared, wondering uneasily what to make of it.

“At the trees again, Jim?” he said laughingly. He had overheard the last words, though spoken low, and thought it best not to ignore them altogether. To be natural was the right way, he believed, natural and cheery. To make a joke of anything unpleasant, he felt, was to make it less serious. “I’ve never seen a tree come across the Atlantic yet, except as a mast—dead,” he added.

“I wasn’t thinking of the trees just then,” was the blunt reply, “but of—something else. The damned trees are nothing, though I hate the sight of ’em. Not of much account, anyway”—as though he compared them mentally with another thing. He puffed at his pipe, a moment.

“They certainly can’t move,” put in his brother, “nor swim either.”

“Nor another thing,” said Jim, his voice thick suddenly, but not with smoke, and his speech confused, though[9] the idea in his mind was certainly clear as daylight. “Things can’t hide behind ’em—can they?”

“Not much cover hereabouts, I admit,” laughed Tom, though the look in his brother’s eyes made his laughter as short as it sounded unnatural.

“That’s so,” agreed the other. “But what I meant was”—he threw out his chest, looked about him with an air of intense relief, drew in another deep breath, and again exhaled with satisfaction—“if there are no trees, there’s no hiding.”

It was the expression on the rugged, weathered face that sent the blood in a sudden gulping rush from his brother’s heart. He had seen men frightened, seen men afraid before they were actually frightened; he had also seen men stiff with terror in the face both of natural and so-called supernatural things; but never in his life before had he seen the look of unearthly dread that now turned his brother’s face as white as chalk and yet put the glow of fire in two haunted burning eyes.

Across the darkening landscape the sound of distant barking had floated to them on the evening wind.

“It’s only a farm-dog barking.” Yet it was Jim’s deep, quiet voice that said it, one hand upon his brother’s arm.

“That’s all,” replied Tom, ashamed that he had betrayed himself, and realizing with a shock of surprise that it was Jim who now played the rôle of comforter—a startling change in their relations. “Why, what did you think it was?”

He tried hard to speak naturally and easily, but his voice shook. So deep was the brothers’ love and intimacy that they could not help but share.

Jim lowered his great head. “I thought,” he whispered, his grey beard touching the other’s cheek, “maybe it was the wolves”—an agony of terror made both voice and body tremble—“the Wolves of God!”[10]

2

The interval of thirty years had been bridged easily enough; it was the secret that left the open gap neither of them cared or dared to cross. Jim’s reason for hesitation lay within reach of guesswork, but Tom’s silence was more complicated.

With strong, simple men, strangers to affectation or pretence, reserve is a real, almost a sacred thing. Jim offered nothing more; Tom asked no single question. In the latter’s mind lay, for one thing, a singular intuitive certainty: that if he knew the truth he would lose his brother. How, why, wherefore, he had no notion; whether by death, or because, having told an awful thing, Jim would hide—physically or mentally—he knew not, nor even asked himself. No subtlety lay in Tom, the Orkney farmer. He merely felt that a knowledge of the truth involved separation which was death.

Day and night, however, that extraordinary phrase which, at its first hearing, had frozen his blood, ran on beating in his mind. With it came always the original, nameless horror that had held him motionless where he stood, his brother’s bearded lips against his ear: The Wolves of God. In some dim way, he sometimes felt—tried to persuade himself, rather—the horror did not belong to the phrase alone, but was a sympathetic echo of what Jim felt himself. It had entered his own mind and heart. They had always shared in this same strange, intimate way. The deep brotherly tie accounted for it. Of the possible transference of thought and emotion he knew nothing, but this was what he meant perhaps.

At the same time he fought and strove to keep it out, not because it brought uneasy and distressing feelings to him, but because he did not wish to pry, to ascertain, to discover his brother’s secret as by some kind of subterfuge that seemed too near to eavesdropping almost. Also, he wished most earnestly to protect him. Meanwhile, in[11] spite of himself, or perhaps because of himself, he watched his brother as a wild animal watches its young. Jim was the only tie he had on earth. He loved him with a brother’s love, and Jim, similarly, he knew, loved him. His job was difficult. Love alone could guide him.

He gave openings, but he never questioned:

“Your letter did surprise me, Jim. I was never so delighted in my life. You had still two years to run.”

“I’d had enough,” was the short reply. “God, man, it was good to get home again!”

This, and the blunt talk that followed their first meeting, was all Tom had to go upon, while those eyes that refused to shut watched ceaselessly always. There was improvement, unless, which never occurred to Tom, it was self-control; there was no more talk of trees and water, the barking of the dogs passed unnoticed, no reference to the loneliness of the backwoods life passed his lips; he spent his days fishing, shooting, helping with the work of the farm, his evenings smoking over a glass—he was more than temperate—and talking over the days of long ago.

The signs of uneasiness still were there, but they were negative, far more suggestive, therefore, than if open and direct. He desired no company, for instance—an unnatural thing, thought Tom, after so many years of loneliness.

It was this and the awkward fact that he had given up two years before his time was finished, renouncing, therefore, a comfortable pension—it was these two big details that stuck with such unkind persistence in his brother’s thoughts. Behind both, moreover, ran ever the strange whispered phrase. What the words meant, or whence they were derived, Tom had no possible inkling. Like the wicked refrain of some forbidden song, they haunted him day and night, even his sleep not free from them entirely. All of which, to the simple Orkney farmer, was so new an experience that he knew not how to deal[12] with it at all. Too strong to be flustered, he was at any rate bewildered. And it was for Jim, his brother, he suffered most.

What perplexed him chiefly, however, was the attitude his brother showed towards old John Rossiter. He could almost have imagined that the two men had met and known each other out in Canada, though Rossiter showed him how impossible that was, both in point of time and of geography as well. He had brought them together within the first few days, and Jim, silent, gloomy, morose, even surly, had eyed him like an enemy. Old Rossiter, the milk of human kindness as thick in his veins as cream, had taken no offence. Grizzled veteran of the wilds, he had served his full term with the Company and now enjoyed his well-earned pension. He was full of stories, reminiscences, adventures of every sort and kind; he knew men and values, had seen strange things that only the true wilderness delivers, and he loved nothing better than to tell them over a glass. He talked with Jim so genially and affably that little response was called for luckily, for Jim was glum and unresponsive almost to rudeness. Old Rossiter noticed nothing. What Tom noticed was, chiefly perhaps, his brother’s acute uneasiness. Between his desire to help, his attachment to Rossiter, and his keen personal distress, he knew not what to do or say. The situation was becoming too much for him.

The two families, besides—Peace and Rossiter—had been neighbours for generations, had intermarried freely, and were related in various degrees. He was too fond of his brother to feel ashamed, but he was glad when the visit was over and they were out of their host’s house. Jim had even declined to drink with him.

“They’re good fellows on the island,” said Tom on their way home, “but not specially entertaining, perhaps. We all stick together though. You can trust ’em mostly.”

“I never was a talker, Tom,” came the gruff reply. “You know that.” And Tom, understanding more than[13] he understood, accepted the apology and made generous allowances.

“John likes to talk,” he helped him. “He appreciates a good listener.”

“It’s the kind of talk I’m finished with,” was the rejoinder. “The Company and their goings-on don’t interest me any more. I’ve had enough.”

Tom noticed other things as well with those affectionate eyes of his that did not want to see yet would not close. As the days drew in, for instance, Jim seemed reluctant to leave the house towards evening. Once the full light of day had passed, he kept indoors. He was eager and ready enough to shoot in the early morning, no matter at what hour he had to get up, but he refused point blank to go with his brother to the lake for an evening flight. No excuse was offered; he simply declined to go.

The gap between them thus widened and deepened, while yet in another sense it grew less formidable. Both knew, that is, that a secret lay between them for the first time in their lives, yet both knew also that at the right and proper moment it would be revealed. Jim only waited till the proper moment came. And Tom understood. His deep, simple love was equal to all emergencies. He respected his brother’s reserve. The obvious desire of John Rossiter to talk and ask questions, for instance, he resisted staunchly as far as he was able. Only when he could help and protect his brother did he yield a little. The talk was brief, even monosyllabic; neither the old Hudson Bay fellow nor the Orkney farmer ran to many words:

“He ain’t right with himself,” offered John, taking his pipe out of his mouth and leaning forward. “That’s what I don’t like to see.” He put a skinny hand on Tom’s knee, and looked earnestly into his face as he said it.

“Jim!” replied the other. “Jim ill, you mean!” It sounded ridiculous.[14]

“His mind is sick.”

“I don’t understand,” Tom said, though the truth bit like rough-edged steel into the brother’s heart.

“His soul, then, if you like that better.”

Tom fought with himself a moment, then asked him to be more explicit.

“More’n I can say,” rejoined the laconic old backwoodsman. “I don’t know myself. The woods heal some men and make others sick.”

“Maybe, John, maybe.” Tom fought back his resentment. “You’ve lived, like him, in lonely places. You ought to know.” His mouth shut with a snap, as though he had said too much. Loyalty to his suffering brother caught him strongly. Already his heart ached for Jim. He felt angry with Rossiter for his divination, but perceived, too, that the old fellow meant well and was trying to help him. If he lost Jim, he lost the world—his all.

A considerable pause followed, during which both men puffed their pipes with reckless energy. Both, that is, were a bit excited. Yet both had their code, a code they would not exceed for worlds.

“Jim,” added Tom presently, making an effort to meet the sympathy half way, “ain’t quite up to the mark, I’ll admit that.”

There was another long pause, while Rossiter kept his eyes on his companion steadily, though without a trace of expression in them—a habit that the woods had taught him.

“Jim,” he said at length, with an obvious effort, “is skeered. And it’s the soul in him that’s skeered.”

Tom wavered dreadfully then. He saw that old Rossiter, experienced backwoodsman and taught by the Company as he was, knew where the secret lay, if he did not yet know its exact terms. It was easy enough to put the question, yet he hesitated, because loyalty forbade.

“It’s a dirty outfit somewheres,” the old man mumbled to himself.[15]

Tom sprang to his feet, “If you talk that way,” he exclaimed angrily, “you’re no friend of mine—or his.” His anger gained upon him as he said it. “Say that again,” he cried, “and I’ll knock your teeth——”

He sat back, stunned a moment.

“Forgive me, John,” he faltered, shamed yet still angry. “It’s pain to me, it’s pain. Jim,” he went on, after a long breath and a pull at his glass, “Jim is scared, I know it.” He waited a moment, hunting for the words that he could use without disloyalty. “But it’s nothing he’s done himself,” he said, “nothing to his discredit. I know that.”

Old Rossiter looked up, a strange light in his eyes.

“No offence,” he said quietly.

“Tell me what you know,” cried Tom suddenly, standing up again.

The old factor met his eye squarely, steadfastly. He laid his pipe aside.

“D’ye really want to hear?” he asked in a lowered voice. “Because, if you don’t—why, say so right now. I’m all for justice,” he added, “and always was.”

“Tell me,” said Tom, his heart in his mouth. “Maybe, if I knew—I might help him.” The old man’s words woke fear in him. He well knew his passionate, remorseless sense of justice.

“Help him,” repeated the other. “For a man skeered in his soul there ain’t no help. But—if you want to hear—I’ll tell you.”

“Tell me,” cried Tom. “I will help him,” while rising anger fought back rising fear.

John took another pull at his glass.

“Jest between you and me like.”

“Between you and me,” said Tom. “Get on with it.”

There was a deep silence in the little room. Only the sound of the sea came in, the wind behind it.

“The Wolves,” whispered old Rossiter. “The Wolves of God.”

Tom sat still in his chair, as though struck in the[16] face. He shivered. He kept silent and the silence seemed to him long and curious. His heart was throbbing, the blood in his veins played strange tricks. All he remembered was that old Rossiter had gone on talking. The voice, however, sounded far away and distant. It was all unreal, he felt, as he went homewards across the bleak, wind-swept upland, the sound of the sea for ever in his ears....

Yes, old John Rossiter, damned be his soul, had gone on talking. He had said wild, incredible things. Damned be his soul! His teeth should be smashed for that. It was outrageous, it was cowardly, it was not true.

“Jim,” he thought, “my brother, Jim!” as he ploughed his way wearily against the wind. “I’ll teach him. I’ll teach him to spread such wicked tales!” He referred to Rossiter. “God blast these fellows! They come home from their outlandish places and think they can say anything! I’ll knock his yellow dog’s teeth...!”

While, inside, his heart went quailing, crying for help, afraid.

He tried hard to remember exactly what old John had said. Round Garden Lake—that’s where Jim was located in his lonely Post—there was a tribe of Redskins. They were of unusual type. Malefactors among them—thieves, criminals, murderers—were not punished. They were merely turned out by the Tribe to die.

But how?

The Wolves of God took care of them. What were the Wolves of God?

A pack of wolves the Redskins held in awe, a sacred pack, a spirit pack—God curse the man! Absurd, outlandish nonsense! Superstitious humbug! A pack of wolves that punished malefactors, killing but never eating them. “Torn but not eaten,” the words came back to him, “white men as well as red. They could even cross the sea....”[17]

“He ought to be strung up for telling such wild yarns. By God—I’ll teach him!”

“Jim! My brother, Jim! It’s monstrous.”

But the old man, in his passionate cold justice, had said a yet more terrible thing, a thing that Tom would never forget, as he never could forgive it: “You mustn’t keep him here; you must send him away. We cannot have him on the island.” And for that, though he could scarcely believe his ears, wondering afterwards whether he heard aright, for that, the proper answer to which was a blow in the mouth, Tom knew that his old friendship and affection had turned to bitter hatred.

“If I don’t kill him, for that cursed lie, may God—and Jim—forgive me!”

3

It was a few days later that the storm caught the islands, making them tremble in their sea-born bed. The wind tearing over the treeless expanse was terrible, the lightning lit the skies. No such rain had ever been known. The building shook and trembled. It almost seemed the sea had burst her limits, and the waves poured in. Its fury and the noises that the wind made affected both the brothers, but Jim disliked the uproar most. It made him gloomy, silent, morose. It made him—Tom perceived it at once—uneasy. “Scared in his soul”—the ugly phrase came back to him.

“God save anyone who’s out to-night,” said Jim anxiously, as the old farm rattled about his head. Whereupon the door opened as of itself. There was no knock. It flew wide, as if the wind had burst it. Two drenched and beaten figures showed in the gap against the lurid sky—old John Rossiter and Sandy. They laid their fowling pieces down and took off their capes; they had been up at the lake for the evening flight and six birds were in the game bag. So suddenly had the storm come up that they had been caught before they could get home.[18]

And, while Tom welcomed them, looked after their creature wants, and made them feel at home as in duty bound, no visit, he felt at the same time, could have been less opportune. Sandy did not matter—Sandy never did matter anywhere, his personality being negligible—but John Rossiter was the last man Tom wished to see just then. He hated the man; hated that sense of implacable justice that he knew was in him; with the slightest excuse he would have turned him out and sent him on to his own home, storm or no storm. But Rossiter provided no excuse; he was all gratitude and easy politeness, more pleasant and friendly to Jim even than to his brother. Tom set out the whisky and sugar, sliced the lemon, put the kettle on, and furnished dry coats while the soaked garments hung up before the roaring fire that Orkney makes customary even when days are warm.

“It might be the equinoctials,” observed Sandy, “if it wasn’t late October.” He shivered, for the tropics had thinned his blood.

“This ain’t no ordinary storm,” put in Rossiter, drying his drenched boots. “It reminds me a bit”—he jerked his head to the window that gave seawards, the rush of rain against the panes half drowning his voice—“reminds me a bit of yonder.” He looked up, as though to find someone to agree with him, only one such person being in the room.

“Sure, it ain’t,” agreed Jim at once, but speaking slowly, “no ordinary storm.” His voice was quiet as a child’s. Tom, stooping over the kettle, felt something cold go trickling down his back. “It’s from acrost the Atlantic too.”

“All our big storms come from the sea,” offered Sandy, saying just what Sandy was expected to say. His lank red hair lay matted on his forehead, making him look like an unhappy collie dog.

“There’s no hospitality,” Rossiter changed the talk, “like an islander’s,” as Tom mixed and filled the glasses.[19] “He don’t even ask ‘Say when?’” He chuckled in his beard and turned to Sandy, well pleased with the compliment to his host. “Now, in Malay,” he added dryly, “it’s probably different, I guess.” And the two men, one from Labrador, the other from the tropics, fell to bantering one another with heavy humour, while Tom made things comfortable and Jim stood silent with his back to the fire. At each blow of the wind that shook the building, a suitable remark was made, generally by Sandy: “Did you hear that now?” “Ninety miles an hour at least.” “Good thing you build solid in this country!” while Rossiter occasionally repeated that it was an “uncommon storm” and that “it reminded” him of the northern tempests he had known “out yonder.”

Tom said little, one thought and one thought only in his heart—the wish that the storm would abate and his guests depart. He felt uneasy about Jim. He hated Rossiter. In the kitchen he had steadied himself already with a good stiff drink, and was now half-way through a second; the feeling was in him that he would need their help before the evening was out. Jim, he noticed, had left his glass untouched. His attention, clearly, went to the wind and the outer night; he added little to the conversation.

“Hark!” cried Sandy’s shrill voice. “Did you hear that? That wasn’t wind, I’ll swear.” He sat up, looking for all the world like a dog pricking its ears to something no one else could hear.

“The sea coming over the dunes,” said Rossiter. “There’ll be an awful tide to-night and a terrible sea off the Swarf. Moon at the full, too.” He cocked his head sideways to listen. The roaring was tremendous, waves and wind combining with a result that almost shook the ground. Rain hit the glass with incessant volleys like duck shot.

It was then that Jim spoke, having said no word for a long time.[20]

“It’s good there’s no trees,” he mentioned quietly. “I’m glad of that.”

“There’d be fearful damage, wouldn’t there?” remarked Sandy. “They might fall on the house too.”

But it was the tone Jim used that made Rossiter turn stiffly in his chair, looking first at the speaker, then at his brother. Tom caught both glances and saw the hard keen glitter in the eyes. This kind of talk, he decided, had got to stop, yet how to stop it he hardly knew, for his were not subtle methods, and rudeness to his guests ran too strong against the island customs. He refilled the glasses, thinking in his blunt fashion how best to achieve his object, when Sandy helped the situation without knowing it.

“That’s my first,” he observed, and all burst out laughing. For Sandy’s tenth glass was equally his “first,” and he absorbed his liquor like a sponge, yet showed no effects of it until the moment when he would suddenly collapse and sink helpless to the ground. The glass in question, however, was only his third, the final moment still far away.

“Three in one and one in three,” said Rossiter, amid the general laughter, while Sandy, grave as a judge, half emptied it at a single gulp. Good-natured, obtuse as a cart-horse, the tropics, it seemed, had first worn out his nerves, then removed them entirely from his body. “That’s Malay theology, I guess,” finished Rossiter. And the laugh broke out again. Whereupon, setting his glass down, Sandy offered his usual explanation that the hot lands had thinned his blood, that he felt the cold in these “arctic islands,” and that alcohol was a necessity of life with him. Tom, grateful for the unexpected help, encouraged him to talk, and Sandy, accustomed to neglect as a rule, responded readily. Having saved the situation, however, he now unwittingly led it back into the danger zone.

“A night for tales, eh?” he remarked, as the wind came howling with a burst of strangest noises against the[21] house. “Down there in the States,” he went on, “they’d say the evil spirits were out. They’re a superstitious crowd, the natives. I remember once——” And he told a tale, half foolish, half interesting, of a mysterious track he had seen when following buffalo in the jungle. It ran close to the spoor of a wounded buffalo for miles, a track unlike that of any known animal, and the natives, though unable to name it, regarded it with awe. It was a good sign, a kill was certain. They said it was a spirit track.

“You got your buffalo?” asked Tom.

“Found him two miles away, lying dead. The mysterious spoor came to an end close beside the carcass. It didn’t continue.”

“And that reminds me——” began old Rossiter, ignoring Tom’s attempt to introduce another subject. He told them of the haunted island at Eagle River, and a tale of the man who would not stay buried on another island off the coast. From that he went on to describe the strange man-beast that hides in the deep forests of Labrador, manifesting but rarely, and dangerous to men who stray too far from camp, men with a passion for wild life over-strong in their blood—the great mythical Wendigo. And while he talked, Tom noticed that Sandy used each pause as a good moment for a drink, but that Jim’s glass still remained untouched.

The atmosphere of incredible things, thus, grew in the little room, much as it gathers among the shadows round a forest camp-fire when men who have seen strange places of the world give tongue about them, knowing they will not be laughed at—an atmosphere, once established, it is vain to fight against. The ingrained superstition that hides in every mother’s son comes up at such times to breathe. It came up now. Sandy, closer by several glasses to the moment, Tom saw, when he would be suddenly drunk, gave birth again, a tale this time of a Scottish planter who had brutally dismissed a native servant for no other reason than that he disliked him. The man disappeared[22] completely, but the villagers hinted that he would—soon indeed that he had—come back, though “not quite as he went.” The planter armed, knowing that vengeance might be violent. A black panther, meanwhile, was seen prowling about the bungalow. One night a noise outside his door on the veranda roused him. Just in time to see the black brute leaping over the railings into the compound, he fired, and the beast fell with a savage growl of pain. Help arrived and more shots were fired into the animal, as it lay, mortally wounded already, lashing its tail upon the grass. The lanterns, however, showed that instead of a panther, it was the servant they had shot to shreds.

Sandy told the story well, a certain odd conviction in his tone and manner, neither of them at all to the liking of his host. Uneasiness and annoyance had been growing in Tom for some time already, his inability to control the situation adding to his anger. Emotion was accumulating in him dangerously; it was directed chiefly against Rossiter, who, though saying nothing definite, somehow deliberately encouraged both talk and atmosphere. Given the conditions, it was natural enough the talk should take the turn it did take, but what made Tom more and more angry was that, if Rossiter had not been present, he could have stopped it easily enough. It was the presence of the old Hudson Bay man that prevented his taking decided action. He was afraid of Rossiter, afraid of putting his back up. That was the truth. His recognition of it made him furious.

“Tell us another, Sandy McKay,” said the veteran. “There’s a lot in such tales. They’re found the world over—men turning into animals and the like.”

And Sandy, yet nearer to his moment of collapse, but still showing no effects, obeyed willingly. He noticed nothing; the whisky was good, his tales were appreciated, and that sufficed him. He thanked Tom, who just then refilled his glass, and went on with his tale. But Tom,[23] hatred and fury in his heart, had reached the point where he could no longer contain himself, and Rossiter’s last words inflamed him. He went over, under cover of a tremendous clap of wind, to fill the old man’s glass. The latter refused, covering the tumbler with his big, lean hand. Tom stood over him a moment, lowering his face. “You keep still,” he whispered ferociously, but so that no one else heard it. He glared into his eyes with an intensity that held danger, and Rossiter, without answering, flung back that glare with equal, but with a calmer, anger.

The wind, meanwhile, had a trick of veering, and each time it shifted, Jim shifted his seat too. Apparently, he preferred to face the sound, rather than have his back to it.

“Your turn now for a tale,” said Rossiter with purpose, when Sandy finished. He looked across at him, just as Jim, hearing the burst of wind at the walls behind him, was in the act of moving his chair again. The same moment the attack rattled the door and windows facing him. Jim, without answering, stood for a moment still as death, not knowing which way to turn.

“It’s beatin’ up from all sides,” remarked Rossiter, “like it was goin’ round the building.”

There was a moment’s pause, the four men listening with awe to the roar and power of the terrific wind. Tom listened too, but at the same time watched, wondering vaguely why he didn’t cross the room and crash his fist into the old man’s chattering mouth. Jim put out his hand and took his glass, but did not raise it to his lips. And a lull came abruptly in the storm, the wind sinking into a moment’s dreadful silence. Tom and Rossiter turned their heads in the same instant and stared into each other’s eyes. For Tom the instant seemed enormously prolonged. He realized the challenge in the other and that his rudeness had roused it into action. It had become a contest of wills—Justice battling against Love.[24]

Jim’s glass had now reached his lips, and the chattering of his teeth against its rim was audible.

But the lull passed quickly and the wind began again, though so gently at first, it had the sound of innumerable swift footsteps treading lightly, of countless hands fingering the doors and windows, but then suddenly with a mighty shout as it swept against the walls, rushed across the roof and descended like a battering-ram against the farther side.

“God, did you hear that?” cried Sandy. “It’s trying to get in!” and having said it, he sank in a heap beside his chair, all of a sudden completely drunk. “It’s wolves or panthersh,” he mumbled in his stupor on the floor, “but whatsh’s happened to Malay?” It was the last thing he said before unconsciousness took him, and apparently he was insensible to the kick on the head from a heavy farmer’s boot. For Jim’s glass had fallen with a crash and the second kick was stopped midway. Tom stood spell-bound, unable to move or speak, as he watched his brother suddenly cross the room and open a window into the very teeth of the gale.

“Let be! Let be!” came the voice of Rossiter, an authority in it, a curious gentleness too, both of them new. He had risen, his lips were still moving, but the words that issued from them were inaudible, as the wind and rain leaped with a galloping violence into the room, smashing the glass to atoms and dashing a dozen loose objects helter-skelter on to the floor.

“I saw it!” cried Jim, in a voice that rose above the din and clamour of the elements. He turned and faced the others, but it was at Rossiter he looked. “I saw the leader.” He shouted to make himself heard, although the tone was quiet. “A splash of white on his great chest. I saw them all!”

At the words, and at the expression in Jim’s eyes, old Rossiter, white to the lips, dropped back into his chair as if a blow had struck him. Tom, petrified, felt his own[25] heart stop. For through the broken window, above yet within the wind, came the sound of a wolf-pack running, howling in deep, full-throated chorus, mad for blood. It passed like a whirlwind and was gone. And, of the three men so close together, one sitting and two standing, Jim alone was in that terrible moment wholly master of himself.

Before the others could move or speak, he turned and looked full into the eyes of each in succession. His speech went back to his wilderness days:

“I done it,” he said calmly. “I killed him—and I got ter go.”

With a look of mystical horror on his face, he took one stride, flung the door wide, and vanished into the darkness.

So quick were both words and action, that Tom’s paralysis passed only as the draught from the broken window banged the door behind him. He seemed to leap across the room, old Rossiter, tears on his cheeks and his lips mumbling foolish words, so close upon his heels that the backward blow of fury Tom aimed at his face caught him only in the neck and sent him reeling sideways to the floor instead of flat upon his back.

“Murderer! My brother’s death upon you!” he shouted as he tore the door open again and plunged out into the night.

And the odd thing that happened then, the thing that touched old John Rossiter’s reason, leaving him from that moment till his death a foolish man of uncertain mind and memory, happened when he and the unconscious, drink-sodden Sandy lay alone together on the stone floor of that farm-house room.

Rossiter, dazed by the blow and his fall, but in full possession of his senses, and the anger gone out of him owing to what he had brought about, this same John Rossiter sat up and saw Sandy also sitting up and staring at[26] him hard. And Sandy was sober as a judge, his eyes and speech both clear, even his face unflushed.

“John Rossiter,” he said, “it was not God who appointed you executioner. It was the devil.” And his eyes, thought Rossiter, were like the eyes of an angel.

“Sandy McKay,” he stammered, his teeth chattering and breath failing him. “Sandy McKay!” It was all the words that he could find. But Sandy, already sunk back into his stupor again, was stretched drunk and incapable upon the farm-house floor, and remained in that condition till the dawn.

Jim’s body lay hidden among the dunes for many months and in spite of the most careful and prolonged searching. It was another storm that laid it bare. The sand had covered it. The clothes were gone, and the flesh, torn but not eaten, was naked to the December sun and wind.

---

THE END OF THE WORLD The snow had fallen many nights and days; The sky was come upon the earth at last, Sifting thinly down as endlessly As though within the system of blind planets Something had been forgot or overdriven. The dawn now seemed neglected in the grey Where mountains were unbuilt and shadowless trees Rootlessly paused or hung upon the air. There was no wind, but now and then a sigh Crossed that dry falling dust and rifted it Through crevices of slate and door and casement. Perhaps the new moon's time was even past. Outside, the first white twilights were too void Until a sheep called once, as to a lamb, And tenderness crept everywhere from it; But now the flock must have strayed far away. The lights across the valley must be veiled, The smoke lost in the greyness or the dusk. [Pg 61]For more than three days now the snow had thatched That cow-house roof where it had ever melted With yellow stains from the beasts' breath inside; But yet a dog howled there, though not quite lately. Someone passed down the valley swift and singing, Yes, with locks spreaded like a son of morning; But if he seemed too tall to be a man It was that men had been so long unseen, Or shapes loom larger through a moving snow. And he was gone and food had not been given him. When snow slid from an overweighted leaf Shaking the tree, it might have been a bird Slipping in sleep or shelter, whirring wings; Yet never bird fell out, save once a dead one— And in two days the snow had covered it. The dog had howled again—or thus it seemed Until a lean fox passed and cried no more. All was so safe indoors where life went on Glad of the close enfolding snow—O glad To be so safe and secret at its heart, Watching the strangeness of familiar things. They knew not what dim hours went on, went For while they slept the clock stopt newly wound [Pg 62]As the cold hardened. Once they watched the road, Thinking to be remembered. Once they doubted If they had kept the sequence of the days, Because they heard not any sound of bells. A butterfly, that hid until the Spring Under a ceiling's shadow, dropt, was dead. The coldness seemed more nigh, the coldness deepened As a sound deepens into silences; It was of earth and came not by the air; The earth was cooling and drew down the sky. The air was crumbling. There was no more sky. Rails of a broken bed charred in the grate, And when he touched the bars he thought the sting Came from their heat—he could not feel such cold ... She said "O do not sleep, Heart, heart of mine, keep near me. No, no; sleep. I will not lift his fallen, quiet eyelids, Although I know he would awaken then—He closed them thus but now of his own will. He can stay with me while I do not lift them."

Certain it should be that, beyond and about this World of Length, and Breadth, and Thickness, there is another World, or State of Existence, consisting of these and another dimension of which only those beings who are privileged to enter or dwell in it can have any conception. Now, if this postulate be granted, it follows that a dweller in this State would be freed from those conditions of Time and Space which bind those beings who are confined within the limits of Tri-Dimensional Space, or Existence. For example, he would be able to make himself visible or invisible to us at will by entering into or withdrawing himself from this State, and returning into that of Four Dimensions, whither our eyes could not follow him—even though he might be close to us in our sense of nearness. Moreover, he could be in two or more places at once, and cause two bodies to occupy the same space—which to us is inconceivable. Stranger still, he might be both alive and dead at the same time—since Past, Present, and Future would be all one to him; the world without beginning or end ...—From the "Geometrical Possibilities," of Abd'el Kasir, of Cordoba, circa. 1050 A.D.