 Chapter 1, Part 3 of Widdishins. He stood on the curb, plunged in misery, looking after her, as long as she remained in sight, but almost instantly with her disappearance he felt the heaviness lift a little from his spirit. She had given him his liberty, true, there was a sense in which he had never parted with it, but now was no time for splitting hairs. He was free to act, and all was clear ahead. Swiftly the sense of lightness grew on him. It became a positive rejoicing in his liberty, and before he was halfway home he had decided what must be done next. The vicar of the parish in which his dwelling was situated lived within ten minutes of the square. To his house Oleron turned his steps. It was necessary that he should have all the information he could get about this old house, with the insurance marks and the sloping to-let boards, and the vicar was the person most likely to be able to furnish it. This last preliminary out of the way, and, ah ha, Oleron chuckled, things might be expected to happen. But he gained less information than he had hoped for. The house, the vicar said, was old, but there needed no vicar to tell Oleron that. It was reputed, Oleron pricked up his ears, to be haunted, but there were few old houses about which some such rumour did not circulate among the ignorant, and the deplorable lack of faith of the modern world the vicar thought did not tend to dissipate these superstitions. For the rest his manner was the soothing manner of one who prefers not to make statements without knowing how they will be taken by his hearer. Oleron smiled as he perceived this. You may leave my nerves out of the question, he said. How long has the place been empty? A dozen years, I should say, the vicar replied. And the last tenant, did you know him or her? Oleron was conscious of a tingling of his nerves, as he offered the vicar the alternative of sex. Him, said the vicar, a man. If I remember rightly, his name was Maidley, an artist. He was a great recluse. Seldom went out of the place, and the vicar hesitated, and then broke into a little gush of candour, and since she appeared to have come for this information, and since it is better that the truth should be told than that garbled version should get about, I don't mind saying that this man Maidley died there, under somewhat unusual circumstances. It was ascertained at the post-mortem that there was not a particle of food in his stomach, although he was found to be not without money, and his frame was simply worn out. Suicide was spoken of, but you'll agree with me that deliberate starvation is, to say the least, an uncommon form of suicide. An open verdict was returned. Ah! said Oleron. Does there happen to be any comprehensive history of this parish? No, partial ones only. I myself am not guiltless of having made a number of notes on its purely ecclesiastical history, its registers and so forth, which I shall be happy to show you, if you would care to see them, but it is a large parish. I have only one curate, and my leisure, as you will readily understand the extent of the parish and the scantiness of the vicar's leisure occupied the remainder of the interview, and Oleron thanked the vicar, took his leave, and walked slowly home. He walked slowly for a reason, twice turning away from the house within a stone's throw of the gate, and taking another turn of twenty minutes or so. He had a very ticklish piece of work now before him. It required the greatest mental concentration. It was nothing less than to bring his mind, if he might, into such a state of unpreoccupation and receptivity, that he could see the place as he had seen it of that morning when his removal accomplished. He had sat down to begin the sixteenth chapter of the first Romilly. For could he recapture that first impression he now hoped for far more from it? Formerly he had carried no end of mental lumber. Before the influence of the place had been able to find him out at all, it had had the inertia of those dreary chapters to overcome. No results had shown. The process had been one of slow saturation, charging, filling up to a brim. But now he was light, unburdened, reared at last both of that Romilly and of her prototype. Now for the new unknown, coy, jealous, bewitching, beckoning fair. At half-past two of the afternoon he put his key into the Yale lock, entered and closed the door behind him. His fantastic attempt was instantly and astonishingly successful. He could have shouted with triumph as he entered the room. It was as if he had escaped into it. Once more, as in the days when his writing had had a daily freshness and wonder and promise for him, he was conscious of that new ease and mastery and exhilaration and release. The air of the place seemed to hold more oxygen, as if his own specific gravity had changed. His very tread seemed less ponderable. The flowers in the bowls, the fair proportions of the meadow-sweet coloured panels and mouldings, the polished floor and the lofty and faintly-starred ceiling, fairly laughed their welcome. Oloran actually laughed back and spoke aloud, Oh! You're pretty, pretty! He fluttered it. Then he lay down on his couch. He spent that afternoon as a convalescent who expected a dear visitor might have spent it, in a delicious vacancy, smiling now and then, as if in his sleep, and everlifting, drowsy and contented eyes to his alluring surroundings. He lay thus until darkness came, and, with darkness, the nocturnal noises of the old house. But if he waited for any specific happening, he waited in vain. He waited similarly in vain on the morrow, maintaining, though with less ease, that sensitised plate-like condition of his mind. Nothing occurred to give it an impression. Whatever it was which he so patiently wooed, it seemed to be both shy and exacting. Then on the third day he thought he understood. A look of gentle drollery and cunning came into his eyes, and he chuckled. Oh! Oh! Oh! Well! If the wind sits in that quarter we must see what else there is to be done. What is there now? No, I won't send for Elsie. We don't need a wheel to break the butterfly on. We won't go to those lengths, my butterfly. He was standing, musing, thumbing his lean jaw, looking a slant. Finally he crossed to his hall, took down his hat, and went out. My lady is coquettish, is she? Well, we'll see what a little neglect we'll do, he chuckled, as he went down the stairs. He sought a railway station, got into a train, and spent the rest of the day in the country. Oh! Yes! Oluon thought he was the man to deal with fair ones who beckoned, and invited, and then took a refuge in shyness and hanging back. He did not return till after eleven that night. Now, my fair beckoner, he murmured, as he walked along the alley and felt in his pocket for his keys. Inside his flat he was perfectly composed, perfectly deliberate, exceedingly careful not to give himself away. As if to intimate that he intended to retire immediately, he lighted only a single candle, and as he set out with it on his nightly round, he affected to yawn. He went first into his kitchen. There was a full moon, and a loss hinge of moonlight, almost peacock-blue by contrast with his candle-flame, lay on the floor. The window was uncurtained, and he could see the reflection of the candle, and faintly that of his own face as he moved about. The door of the powder-closet stood a little ajar, and he closed it before sitting down to remove his boots on the chair with the cushion made of the folded harp-bag. From the kitchen he passed to the bathroom. There another slant of blue moonlight cut the window-sill and lay across the pipes on the wall. He visited his seldom-used study, and stood for a moment gazing at the silvered roofs across the square. Then walking straight through his sitting-room, his stocking-feet making no noise, he entered his bedroom and put the candle on the chest of drawers. His face all this time wore no expression save that of tiredness. He had never been wilyer nor more alert. His small bedroom fireplace was opposite the chest of drawers on which the mirror stood, and his bed and the window occupied the remaining sides of the room. Oleron drew down his blind, took off his coat, and then stooped to get his slippers from under the bed. He could have given no reason for the conviction, but that the manifestation that for two days had been withheld was close at hand he never for an instant doubted, nor though he could not form the faintest guess of the shape it might take, did he experienced fear. Startling or surprising it might be, but he was prepared for that. But that was all. His scale of sensation had become depressed. His hand moved this way and that under the bed in search of his slippers. But for all his caution and method and preparedness, his heart all at once gave a leap and a pause that was almost horrid. His hand had found the slippers, but he was still on his knees, save for this circumstance he would have fallen. The bed was a low one, the groping for the slippers accounted for the turn of his head to one side, and he was careful to keep the attitude until he had partly recovered his self-possession. When presently he rose there was a drop of blood on his lower lip, where he had caught at it with his teeth, and his watch had jerked out of the pocket of his waistcoat, and was dangling at the end of its short leather guard. Then before the watch had ceased its little oscillation, he was himself again. In the middle of his mantelpiece there stood a picture, a portrait of his grandmother. He placed himself before this picture so that he could see in the glass of it the steady flame of the candle that burned behind him on the chest of drawers. He could see also in the picture-glass the little glancing of light from the bevels and facets of the objects about the mirror and candle. But he could see more. These twinklings and reflections and re-reflections did not change their position, but there was one gleam that had motion. It was fainter than the rest, and it moved up and down through the air. It was the reflection of the candle on Oleron's black vulcanite comb, and each of its downward movements was accompanied by a silky and crackling rustle. Oleron, watching what went on in the glass of his grandmother's portrait, continued to play his part. He felt for his dangling watch and began slowly to wind it up. Then for a moment, ceasing to watch, he began to empty his trousers' pockets, and to play them methodically, then a little row on the mantelpiece, the pennies and hapiness that he took from them. The sweeping, minutely electric noise filled the whole bedroom, and had Oleron altered his point of observation he could have brought the dim gleam of the moving comb so into position that it would almost have outlined his grandmother's head. Any other head of which it might have been following the outline was invisible. Oleron finished the emptying of his pockets, then undercover of another simulated yawn, not so much summoning his resolution as overmastered by exorbitant curiosity, he swung suddenly around. That which was being combed was still not to be seen, but the comb did not stop. It had altered its angle a little, and had moved a little to the left. It was passing, in fairly regular sweeps, from a point rather more than five feet from the ground, in a direction roughly vertical, to another point a few inches below the level of the chest of drawers. Oleron continued to act to admiration. He walked to his little wash stand in the corner, poured out water, and began to wash his hands. He removed his waistcoat, and continued his preparations for bed. The combing did not cease, and he stood for a moment in thought. Again his eyes twinkled. The next was very cunning. Hmm! I think I'll read for a quarter an hour, he said aloud. He passed out of the room. He was away a couple of minutes. When he returned again the room was suddenly quiet. He glanced at the chest of drawers. The comb lay still between the collar he had removed, and a pair of gloves. Without hesitation Oleron put out his hand and picked it up. It was an ordinary eighteen-penny comb taken from a card in a chemist's shop, of a substance of a definite specific gravity, and no more capable of rebellion against the laws by which it existed than all the worlds that keep their orbits through the void. Oleron put it down again. Then he glanced at the bundle of papers he held in his hand. What he had gone to fetch had been the fifteen chapters of the original Romilly. Hmm! He muttered as he threw the manuscript into a chair. As I thought, she's just blindingly, ragingly, murderously jealous. On the night after that, and on the following night, and for many nights and days, so many that he began to be uncertain about the count of them, Oleron courting, like a jowling, neglecting, threatening, beseeching, eaten out with the unappeased curiosity, and regardless that his life was a becoming one consuming passion and desire, continued his search for the unknown conumerator of his abode. As time went on, it came to pass that few except the postman mounted Oleron's stairs, and since men who do not write letters receive few, even the postman's tread became so infrequent that it was not heard more than once or twice a week. There came a letter from Oleron's publishers, asking when they might expect to receive the manuscript of his new book. He delayed for some days to answer it and finally forgot it. A second letter came which also he failed to answer. He received no third. The weather grew bright and warm, the brivet bushes among the chopper-like notice-boards flowered, and in the streets where Oleron did his shopping, the baskets of flower women lined the curbs. One purchased flowers daily, his room clamoured for flowers, fresh and continually renewed, and Oleron did not stint its demands. Nevertheless, the necessity for going out to buy them began to irk him more and more, and it was with a greater and even greater sense of relief that he returned home again. He began to be conscious that, again, his scale of sensation had suffered a subtle change, a change that was not restoration to its former capacity, but an extension and enlarging that once more included terror. It admitted it in an entirely new form, Luxorco, Tenebrae, Jovi. The name of this terror was agoraphobia. Oleron had begun to dread air and space and the horror that might pounce upon the unguarded back. Presently he so contrived it that his food and flowers were delivered daily at his door. He rubbed his hands when he had hit upon this expedient. That was better. Now he could please himself whether he went out or not. Quickly he was confirmed in his choice. It became his pleasure to remain immured. But he was not happy. Or if he was, his happiness took an extraordinary turn. He fretted discontentedly, could sometimes have wept for mere weakness and misery, and yet he was dimly conscious that he would not have exchanged his sadness for all the noisy mirth of the world outside. Unspeaking of noise, much noise now caused him the acutest discomfort. It was hardly more to be endured than that newborn fear that kept him on the increasingly rare occasions when he did go out, sidling close to the walls and feeling friendly railings with his hand. He moved from room to room softly and in slippers, and sometimes stood for many seconds closing a door so gently that not a sound broke the stillness that was in itself a delight. Monday now became an intolerable day to him for since the coming of the fine weather there had begun to assemble in the square under his window each Sunday morning certain members of the sect to which the long-nosed Barrett adhered. These came with a great drum and large brass-bellied instruments, men and women uplifted anguished voices struggling with their God, and Barrett himself with upraised face and closed eyes and working brows prayed that the sound of his voice might penetrate the ears of all unbelievers, as it certainly did Olerons. One day in the middle of one of these rhapsodies Olerons sprang to his blind and pulled it down, and heard as he did so his own name made the subject of a fresh torrent of outpouring. And sometimes, but not as expecting a reply, Oleron stood still and called softly, once or twice he called romily and then waited, but more often his whispering did not take the shape of a name. There was one spot in particular of his abode that he began to haunt with increasing persistency. This was just within the opening of his bedroom door. He had discovered one day that by opening every door in his place, always accepting the outer one, which he only opened unwillingly, and by placing himself on this particular spot, he could actually see to a greater or less extent into each of his five rooms without changing his position. He could see the whole of his sitting room, all of his bedroom except the part hidden by the open door, and glimpses of his kitchen, bathroom, and of his rarely used study. He was often in this place, breathless, and with his finger on his lip. One day, as he stood there, he suddenly found himself wondering whether this maidly, of whom the vicar had spoken, had ever discovered the strategic importance of the bedroom entry. Light moreover now caused him greater disquietude than did darkness. The sunlight of which, as the sun passed daily around the house, each of his rooms had now hit share, was like a flame in his brain, and even diffused light was a dull and numbing ache. He began at successive hours of the day, one after another, to lower his crimson blinds. He made short and daring excursions in order to do this, but he was ever careful to leave his retreat open, in case he should have sudden need of it. Presently this lowering of the blinds had become a daily methodical exercise, and his rooms, when he had been his round, had the blood-red half-light of a photographer's dark room. One day, as he drew down the blind of his little study, and backed in good order out of the room again, he broke into a soft laugh. That bilks, Mr. Barrett, he said, and the baffling of Barrett continued to afford him mirth for an hour. But on another day, soon after, he had a fright that left him trembling also for an hour. He had seized the cord to darken the window over the seat in which he had found the harp-bag, and was standing with his back well protected in the embersure, when he thought he saw the tail of a black-and-white, Czech skirt disappear round the corner of the house. He could not be sure. He had run to the window of the other wall, which was blinded. The skirt must have been already passed, but he was almost sure that it was Elsie. He listened in an agony of suspense for her tread on the stairs. But no tread came, and after three or four minutes he drew a long breath of relief. By Jove, but that would have compromised me horribly, he muttered. And he continued to mutter from time to time, horribly compromising. No woman would stand that. Not any kind of woman. Oh, compromising in the extreme! Yet he was not happy. He could not have assigned the cause of the fits of quiet weeping which took him sometimes. They came and went, like the fitful illumination of the clouds that travelled over the square. And perhaps after all, if he was not happy, he was not unhappy. Before he could be unhappy something must have been withdrawn, and nothing had yet been withdrawn from him, for nothing had been granted. He was waiting for that granting in that flower-laden, frightfully enticing apartment of his, with the pith-white walls tinged and subdued by the crimson blinds to a blood-like gloom. He paid no need to it that his stock of money was running perilously low, nor that he had ceased to work. Seized to work? He had not ceased to work? They knew very little about it, who suppose that Oloran had ceased to work. He was in truth only now beginning to work. He was preparing such a work, such a work. Such a mistress was a-making in the gestation of his art. Let him but get this period of probation and poignant waiting over, and men should see. How should men know her, this fair one of Olorans, until Oloran himself knew her? Lovely radiant creations are not thrown off like how did you do's. The men to whom it is committed to father them must weep wretched tears, as Oloran did, must swell with vain presumptuous hopes, as Oloran did, must pursue, as Oloran pursued, the capricious fair-mocking, slippery, eager spirit, that ever eluding ever seized to it that the chase does not slacken. Let Oloran but hunt this huntress a little longer. He would have her sparkling and panting in his arms yet. Oh, no! They were very far from the truth, who suppose that Oloran had ceased to work. And if all else was falling away from Oloran, gladly he was letting it go. So do we all, when our fair ones beckon. Quite at the beginning we wink, and promise ourselves that we will put her ladyship through her paces, neglect her for a day, turn her own jealous wiles against her, flout and ignore her when she comes weedling. Perhaps there lurks within us all the time a heartless sprite who is never fooled, but in the end all falls away. She beckons, beckons, and all goes. And so Oloran kept his strategic post within the frame of his bedroom-door, and watched and waited and smiled with his finger on his lips. It was his dutious service, his worship, his troth plighting, and all that he had ever known of love. And when he found himself, as he now and then did, hating the dead man madly, and wishing that he had never lived, he felt that that, too, was unacceptable service. But as he thus prepared himself, as it were, for a marriage, and moped and chafed more and more that the bride made no sign, he made a discovery that he ought to have made weeks before. It was through a thought of the dead madly that he made it. Since that night, when he had thought in his greenness that a little studded neglect would bring the lovely beckoner to her knees, and had made use of her own jealousy to banish her, he had not set eyes on those fifteen discarded chapters of Romilly. He had thrown them back into the window-seat, forgotten their very existence, but his own jealousy of madly put him in mind of hers of her jilted rival of flesh and blood, and he remembered them. Fool that he had been! Had he then expected his desire to manifest herself, while there still existed the evidence of his divided allegiance, what, and she, with a passion so fierce and centred that it had not hesitated at the destruction twice attempted of her rival! Fool that he had been! But if that was all the pledge and sacrifice she required, she should have it! Oh, yes, and quickly! He took the manuscript from the window-seat, and brought it to the fire. He kept his fire always burning now. The warmth brought out the last vestige of odor of the flowers with which his room was banked. He did not know what time it was, long since he had allowed his clock to run down. It had seemed a foolish measure of time in regard to the stupendous things that were happening to Oron, but he knew it was late. He took the Romilly manuscript and knelt before the fire. But he had not finished removing the fastening that held the sheets together before he suddenly gave a start, turned his head over his shoulder, and listened intently. The sound he had heard had not been loud. It had been, indeed, no more than a tap. Twice or thrice repeated, but it had filled Oron with alarm. His face grew dark as it came again. He heard a voice outside on his landing. Paul! Paul! It was Else's voice. Paul! I know you're in. I want to see you! He cursed her under his breath, but kept perfectly still. He did not intend to admit her. Paul! You're in trouble! I believe you're in danger. At least come to the door. Oron smothered a low laugh. It somehow amused him that she, in such danger herself, should talk to him of his danger. Well, if she was, serve her right. She knew, or said she knew all about it. Paul! Paul! Paul! Paul! You mimic her under his breath! Oh, Paul! It's horrible! Horrible was it, thought Oron. Then let her get away. I only want to help you, Paul. I didn't promise not to come if you needed me. He was impervious to the pitiful sob that interrupted the low cry. The devil take the woman. Should he shout to her to go away and not come back? No. Let her call and knock and sob. She had a gift for sobbing. She mustn't think her sobs would move him. They irritated him, so that he set his teeth and shook his fist at her. But that was all. Let us sob. Pull! Pull! With his teeth hard set, he dropped the first page of Romerly into the fire. Then he began to drop the rest in, sheet by sheet. For many minutes the calling behind his door continued, then suddenly it ceased. He heard the sound of feet slowly descending the stairs. He listened for the noise of a fall or a cry or the crash of a piece of the handrail of the upper landing, but none of these things came. She was spared. Apparently her rival suffered her to crawl, abject and beaten away, while Lauren heard the passing of her steps under his window. Then she was gone. He dropped the last page into the fire, and then with a low laugh rose. He looked fondly round his room. Lucky to get away like that, he remarked. She wouldn't have got away if I had given her as much as a word or a look. What devils these women are! But no, I ought to say that. One of them showed forbearance. Who showed forbearance? And what was foreborn? Ah! Alleron knew. Contempt, no doubt, had been at the bottom of it, but that didn't matter. The pestering creature had been allowed to go unharmed. Yes, she was lucky. Alleron hoped she knew it. But now, now, now for his reward! Alleron crossed the room, all his doors were open, his eyes shone as he placed himself within that of his bedroom, for that he had been not to think of destroying the manuscript sooner. How, in a house full of shadows, should he know his own shadow? How, in a house full of noises, distinguished the summons he felt to be at hand? Ha! Trust him. He would know. The place was full of a jugglery of dim lights. The blind at his elbow that allowed the light of a street-lamp to struggle vaguely through. The glimpse of a greeny-blue moonlight seen through the distant kitchen door, the sulky glow of the fire under the black ashes of the burnt manuscript, the glimmering of the tulips and the moon-dases and the narcission and the bowls and jugs and jars. These did not so trick and bewilder his eyes that he would not know his own. It was he, not she, who had been delaying the shadowy bridle. He hung his head for a moment in mute acknowledgement, then he bent his eyes on the deceiving, puzzling gloom again. He would have called her name had he known it, but now he would not ask her to share even a name with the other. His own face within the frame of the door glimmered white as the narcissus eye in the darkness. A shadow, light as fleece, seemed to take shape in the kitchen. The time had been when Oleron would have said that a cloud had passed over the unseen moon. The low illumination on the blind at his elbow grew dimmer. The time had been when Oleron would have concluded that the lamp-lighter going his rounds had turned low the flame of the lamp. The fire settled, letting down the black and charred papers. A flower fell from a bowl and lay indistinct upon the floor. All was still, and then a stray draft moved through the old house, passing before Oleron's face. Slowly inclining his head, he withdrew a little from the door-jump. The wandering draft caused the door to move a little on its hinges. Oleron trembled violently, stood for a moment longer, and then putting his hand out to the knob, softly drew the door, too. Sat down on the nearest chair and waited. As a man might await the calling of his name, that should summon him to some weighty, high and privy audience. One knows not whether there can be human compassion for anemia of the soul. When the pitch of life is dropped, and the spirit is so put over and reversed that that only is horrible which before was sweet and worldly, and of the day the human relation disappears. The sane soul turns appalled away, lest not merely itself but sanity should suffer. We are not gods, we cannot drive out devils. We must see selfishly to it that devils do not enter into ourselves. And this we must do even though love so transfuses that we may well deem our nature to be half-divine. We shall but speak of honour and duty in vain. The letter dropped within the dark door will lie unregarded, or if regarded for a brief instant between two unspeakable lapses, left and forgotten again. The telegram will be undelivered, nor will the whistling messenger, easily agguided than he knows to whistle, be conscious as he walks away of the drawn blind that is pushed aside an inch by a finger, and then fearfully replaced again. No, let the miserable wrestle with his own shadows. Let him, if indeed he be so mad, clip and strain and enfold and couch the succubus. But let him do so in a house into which not an air of heaven penetrates, nor a bright finger of the sun pierces the filthy twilight. The lost must remain lost. Humanity has other business to attend to. For the handwriting of the two letters that Oleron's stealing noiselessly one dune day into his kitchen to rid his sitting-room of an armful of fetid and decaying flowers had seen on the floor within his door had had no more meaning for him than if it had belonged to some dim and faraway dream, and at the beating of the telegraph boy upon the door. Within a few feet of the bed where he lay he had gnashed his teeth and stopped his ears. He had pictured the lad standing there just beyond his partition among packets of provisions and bundles of dead and dying flowers, for his outer landing was littered with these. Oleron had feared to open his door to take them in. After a week the errand lads had reported that there must be some mistake about the order and had left no more. Inside in the red twilight the old flowers turned brown and fell and decayed where they lay. Suddenly his power was draining away. The abomination fastened on Oleron's power. The steady sapping sometimes left him for many hours of prostration, gazing vacantly up at his red-tinged ceiling, idly suffering such fanciness as came of themselves to have their way with him. Even the strongest of his memories had no more than a precarious hold upon his attention. Sometimes a flitting half-memory of a novel to be written, a novel it was important that he should write tantalised him for a space before vanishing again. And sometimes whole novels perfect splendid, established to endure rows magically before him. And sometimes the memories were absurdly remote and trivial of garrets he had inhabited and lodgings that had sheltered him and so forth. Oleron had known a good deal about such things in his time, but all that was now past. He had at last found a place which he did not intend to leave until they fetched him out, a place that some might have thought a little on the green-sick side, that others might have considered to be a little too redolent of long dead and morbid things for a living man to be mewed up in, but are so irresistible with such an authority of its own, with such an associate of its own, and a place of such delights when once a man had ceased to struggle against its inexorable will. A novel? Somebody ought to write a novel about a place like that. There must be lots to write about in a place like that, if one could but get to the bottom of it. It had probably already been painted by a man called Maidley, who had lived there, but Oleron had not known this Maidley. Had a strong feeling that he wouldn't have liked him. Would rather he had lived somewhere else. Really couldn't stand the fellow. Hated him, Maidley, in fact. Ha! That was a joke. He seriously doubted whether the man had led the life he ought. Oleron was in two minds sometimes, whether he wouldn't tell that long-nosed guardian of the public morals across the way about him, but probably he knew, and had made his praying hullabloos for him also. That was his line. Why, Oleron himself had had a dust-up with him about something or other, some girl or other. Elsie Bengoff her name was, he remembered. Oleron had moments of deep uneasiness about this Elsie Bengoff, or rather he was not so much uneasy about her as restless about the things she did. Chief of these was the way in which she persisted in thrusting herself into his thoughts, and whenever he was quick enough he sent her packing the moment she made her appearance there. The truth was that she was not merely a bore, she had always been that. It had now come to the pitch when her very presence in his fancy was inimical to the full enjoyment of certain experiences. She had no tact. She ought to have known that people are not at home to the thoughts of everybody all the time, ought in mere politeness to have allowed him certain seasons quite to himself, and was monstrously ignorant of things if she did not know, as she appeared not to know, that there were certain special hours when a man's veins ran with fire and daring and power, in which—well, in which he had a reasonable right to treat folk as he had treated that prying barret to shut them out completely. But no, up she popped the thought of her and ruined all. Bright towering fabrics, by the side of which even those perfect magical novels of which he dreamed were done and grey, vanished utterly at her intrusion. It was as if a fog should suddenly quench some fair beaming star, as if at the threshold of some golden portal prepared for Oleron a pit should suddenly gape, as if a bat-like shadow should turn the growing dawn into murk and darkness again. Therefore Oleron strove to stifle even the nascent thought of her. Nevertheless there came an occasion on which this woman, Bengoff, absolutely refused to be suppressed. Oleron could not have told exactly when this happened. He only knew by the glimmer of the street-lamp on his blind that it was some time during the night, and that for some time she had not presented herself. He had no warning, none of her coming. She just came, was there. Strive as you would, he could not shake off the thought of her, nor the image of her face. She haunted him. But for her to come at that moment of all moments, really it was past belief. How she could endure it, Oleron could not conceive. Actually to look on, as it were, at the triumph of a rival. Good God! It was monstrous! Tacked reticence! He had never credited her with an overwhelming amount of either. But he had never attributed mere—oh, there was no word for it—monstrous! Monstrous! Did she intend, thenceforward, God to look on? Oleron felt the blood rush up to the roots of his hair with anger against her. Damnation-taker, he choked! But the next moment his heat and resentment had changed to a cold sweat of cowering fear, panic-strick, and he strove to comprehend what he had done. Although he knew not what, he knew he had done something fatal, irreparable, blasting, anger he had felt, but not this blaze of ire that suddenly flooded the twilight of his consciousness with a white, infernal light. That appalling flash was not his. Not his that open rift of bright and searing hell. Not his! Not his! His had been the hand of a child, preparing a puny blow. But what was this other horrific hand that was drawn back to strike in the same place? Had he set that in motion? Had he provided the spark that had touched off the whole accumulated power of that formidable and relentless place? He did not know. He only knew that that poor igniting particle in himself was blown out, that—oh, impossible—a clinging kiss! How else to express it? Had changed on his very lips to a gnashing and a removal, and that for very pity of the awful odds he must cry out to her against whom he had lately raged to guard herself—guard herself. Look out! he shrieked aloud. The revulsion was instant, as if a cold, slow billow had broken over him. He came too to find that he was lying in his bed, that the mist and horror that had for so long enwrapped him had departed, that he was Paul Oleron, and that he was sick, naked, helpless, and unutterably abandoned and alone. His faculties, though weak, answered at last to his calls upon them, and he knew that it must have been a hideous nightmare that had left him sweating and shaking thus. Yes, he was himself Paul Oleron, a tired novelist, already past the summit of his best work, and slipping down hill again empty-handed from it all. He had struck short in his life's aim. He had tried too much, had overestimated his strength, and was a failure—a failure. It all came to him in the single word, enwrapped and complete. It needed no sequential thought. He was a failure. He had missed. And he had missed not one happiness, but two. He had missed the ease of this world which men loved, and he had missed also that other shining prize for which men forego ease, the snatching and holding and triumphant bearing up aloft, of which is the only justification of the mad adventurer who hazards the enterprise, and there was no second attempt. Fate has no morrow. Oleron's morrow must be to sit down to profitless, ill-done, unrequired work again, and so on the morrow after that, and the morrow after that, and as many morrows as there might be. He lay there weakly, yet sanely, considering it. And since the whole attempt had failed, it was hardly worthwhile to consider whether a little might not be saved from the general wreck. No good would ever come of that half-finished novel. He had intended that it should appear in the autumn, was under contract that it should appear—no matter. It was better to pay forfeit to his publishers, than to waste what days were left. He was spent, age was not far off, and paths of wisdom and sadness were the properest for the remainder of the journey. If only he had chosen the wife, the child, the faithful friend at the fireslide, and let them follow an igneous fatuous that list. In the meantime it began to puzzle him exceedingly, that he should be so weak, that his room should smell so overpoweringly of decaying vegetable matter, and that his hand, chanceing to stray to his face in the darkness, should encounter a beard. Most extraordinary! He began to mutter to himself, Have I been ill? Am I ill now? And if so, why have they left me alone? Extraordinary! He thought he heard a sound from the kitchen or bathroom. He rose a little on his pillow and listened. Ah! He was not alone then. It certainly would have been extraordinary if they had left him ill and alone. Alone? Oh no! He would be looked after. He wouldn't be left ill to shift for himself. If everybody else had forsaken him he could trust Elsie Bengoff, the dearest chum he had for that, bless her faithful heart. But suddenly a short, stifled, spluttering cry rang sharply out. Paul! It came from the kitchen. And in the same moment it flashed upon Oleron. He knew not how. That's two, three, five. He knew not how many minutes before. Another sound, unmarked at the time, but suddenly transfixing his attention now, had striven to reach his intelligence. This sound had been the slight touch of metal on metal. Just such a sound as Oleron made when he put his key into the lock. Hello? Who's that? He called sharply from his bed. He had no answer. He called again. Hello? Who's there? Who is it? This time he was sure he heard noises soft and heavy in the kitchen. This is a queer thing altogether, he muttered. By Jove, I'm as weak as a kitten, too. Hello there? They called, didn't they? Elsie, is that you? Then he began to knock with his hand on the wall at the side of his bed. Elsie! Elsie, you called, didn't you? Please come here, whoever it is. There was a sound as of a closing door, and then silence. Oleron began to get rather alarmed. It may be a nurse, he muttered. Elsie had to get me a nurse, of course. She'd sit with me as long as she could spare the time. Brave lass! And she'd get a nurse for the rest. But it was awfully like her voice. Elsie! Or whoever it is—I can't make this out at all. I must go and see what's the matter. He put one leg out of bed, feeling its feebleness he reached out with his hand for the additional support of the wall. But before putting out the other leg he stopped and considered, picking at his newfound beard, he was suddenly wondering whether he dared go into the kitchen. It was such a frightfully long way. No man knew what horror might not leap and huddle on his shoulders if he went so far, when a man has an overmastering impulse to get back into bed, he ought to take heed of the warning and obey it. Besides, why should he go? What was there to go for? If it was that bengoth creature again, let her look after herself. Oleron was not going to have things cramp themselves, on his defenceless back for the sake of such a spoil-sport as she. If she was in, let her let herself out again, and the sooner the better for her. Oleron simply couldn't be bothered. He had his work to do. On the marrow he must set about the writing of a novel, with a heroine so winsome, capricious, adorable, jealous, wicked, beautiful, inflaming, and altogether evil, that man should stand amazed. She was coming over him now. He knew by the alteration of the very air of the room when she was near him, and that soft thrill of bliss that had begun to stir in him never came unless she was beckoning, beckoning. He let go of the wall, and fell back into bed again, as, oh, unthinkable! The other half of that kiss that Anash had interrupted was placed, how else convey it, on his lips, robbing him of very breath. In the bright June sunlight a crowd filled the square, and looked up at the windows of the old house, with the antique insurance-marks in its walls or red-brick, and the ancient gnosis-boards hanging like wooden choppers over the pailing. Two constables stood at the broken gate of the narrow entrance alley, keeping folk back. The women kept to the outskirts of the throng, moving now and then as if to see the drawn red blinds of the old house from a new angle, and talking in whispers. The children were in the houses behind closed doors. A long-nosed man had a little groove about him, and he was telling some story over and over again. And another man, little and fat and wide-eyed, sought to capture the long-nosed man's audience, with some relation in which a key figured. And it was revealed to me that there had been something that very afternoon, the long-nosed man was saying. I was standing there, where constable Saunders is, or rather I was passing about my business, one day came out. There was no deceiving me, oh, no deceiving me, I saw her face. What was it like, Mr. Barrett, a man asked. It was like her, as though my lord said to woman, doth any man accuse the whiteness paper, and no mistake, doth tell me. And so I walked straight across to Mrs. Barrett and I, and Jane I says, this must stop, and stop her once. We are commanded to avoid evil, I says, and it must come to an end now. Let him get out elsewhere. And she says to me, John, she says it's four and six prints a week, that was her words. Jane I says if it was forty-six thousand pounds it should stop, and from that date of this she hasn't set foot inside that gate. There was a short silence, and then, did Mrs. Barrett ever see anything like? Somebody vaguely inquired. Barrett turned, or steely, on the speaker. What Mrs. Barrett saw, and Mrs. Barrett didn't see, shall not pass these lips. Even as it is written, keep thy tongue from speaking evil, he said. Another man spoke. He was pretty near canned up in the wagon and horses that night, weren't he, Jim? Yeah, he unoff-coped it. Not standing treat much neither. He was in the bar all on his own. So he was. We talked about it. The fat, scared-eyed man made another attempt. She got the key off me. She had a number of it. She came into my shop with her Tuesday evening. Nobody heeded him. Shot your heads. A heavy labourer commented gruffly. She hasn't been found yet. Here's the inspectors. We shall know more in a bit. Two inspectors had come up and were talking to the constables who guarded the gate. The little fat man ran eagerly forward, saying that she had bought the key off him. I remember the number, because it's being three-wands-and-three-threes—one-one-one-three-three-three. He exclaimed excitedly, and Inspector put him inside. Nobody's been in. He asked one of the constables. No, sir. Thank you, Brackley. Come with us. You, Smith, keep the gate. There's a squad on its way. The two inspectors and the constable passed down the alley and entered the house. They mounted the wired carved staircase. This don't look as if he'd been out much lately. One of the inspectors muttered, as he kicked aside a litter of dead leaves and paper that lay outside Alleron's door. I don't think we need knock. Break the pane, Brackley. The door had two glazed panels. There was a sound of shuttered glass, and Brackley put his hand through the hole his elbow had made, and drew back the latch. Fwoah! Choked one of the inspectors as they entered. Let some light and air in. Quick, stinks like a hearse! The assembly out in the square saw the red blinds go up, and the windows of the old house flung open. That's better, said one of the inspectors, putting his head out of a window and drawing a deep breath. That seems to be the bedroom in there. Will you go in, Sims? Will I go over the rest? They had drawn up the bedroom blind also, and the waxy white emaciated man on the bed had made a blinker of his hand against the torturing flood of brightness. Nor could he believe that his hearing was not playing tricks with him, for there were two policemen in his room bending over him and asking where she was. He shook his head. This woman, Bengoff, goes by the name of Miss Elsie Bengoff. Do you hear? Where is she? No good, Brackley. Get him up. Be careful with him. I'll just shove my head out the window, I think. The other inspector had been through all her on study and had found nothing, and was now in the kitchen, kicking aside an ankle-deep mass of vegetable refuse that numbered the floor. The kitchen window had no blind and was overshadowed by the blank end of the house across the alley. The kitchen appeared to be empty. But the inspector, kicking aside the dead flowers, noticed that a shuffling track that was not of his making had been swept to a cupboard in the corner. In the upper part of the door of the cupboard was a square panel that looked as if it slid on runners. The door itself was closed. The inspector advanced, put out his hand to the little knob, and slid the hatch along its groove. Then he took an involuntary step back again. Framed in the aperture and falling forward a little before it jammed again in its frame, was something that resembled a large lumpy pudding done up in a pudding-bag of faded browny red frieze. Ah! said the inspector. To close the hatch again he would have had to thrust that pudding back with his hand, and somehow he did not quite like the idea of touching it. Instead he turned the handle of the cupboard itself. There was weight behind it, so much weight that, after opening the door three or four inches and peering inside, he had to put his shoulder to it in order to close it again. In closing it he left sticking out, a few inches from the floor, a triangle of black and white, Czech skirt. He went into the small hall. All right, he called. They had got Oler on into his clothes. He still used his hands as blinkers, and his brain was very confused. A number of things were happening that he couldn't understand. He couldn't understand the extraordinary mess of dead flowers. There seemed to be everywhere. He couldn't understand why there should be police officers in his room. He couldn't understand why one of these should be sent for a four-wheeler and a stretcher, and he couldn't understand what heavy article they seemed to be moving about in the kitchen. His kitchen? What's the matter? He muttered sleepily. Then he heard a murmur in the square, and the stopping of a four-wheeler outside. A police officer was at his elbow again, and Oleron wondered why, when he whispered something to him, he should run off a string of words, something about used in evidence against you. They had lifted him to his feet and were assisting him towards the door. No, Oleron couldn't understand it at all. They got him down the stairs and along the alley. Oleron was aware of confused, angry shoutings. He gathered that a number of people wanted to lynch somebody or other. Then his attention became fixed on a little fat, frightened-eyed man, who appeared to be making a statement that an officer was taking down in a notebook. I'd seen her with him. They was often together. She came into my shop and said it was for him. I thought it was all right. One, one, one, three, three, three, the number was, the man was saying. The people seemed to be very angry. Many police were keeping them back, but one of the inspectors had a voice that Oleron thought quite kind and friendly. He was telling somebody to get somebody else into the cab before something or other was brought out, and Oleron noticed that a four-wheeler was drawn up at the gate. It appeared that it was himself who was to be put into it, and as they lifted him up, he saw that the inspector tried to stand between him and something that stood behind the cab, but was not quick enough to prevent Oleron seeing that this something was a hooded stretcher. The angry voices sounded like the sea, something hard like a stone hit the back of the cab, and the inspector followed Oleron in and stood with his back to the window nearer the side where the people were. The door they had put Oleron in at remained open, apparently till the other inspector should come, and through the opening Oleron had a big glimpse of the hatchet-like to-let boards among the privet trees. One of them said that the key was at number six. Suddenly the raging of voices was hushed along the entrance alley, shuffling steps were heard, and the other inspector appeared at the cab door. Right away he said to the driver. He entered, fastened the door after him, and blocked up the second window with his back. Between the two inspectors Oleron slept peacefully. The cab moved down the square. The other vehicle went up the hill. The mortuary lay that way. End of chapter number one. Chapter two of Widdershins. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Recording by C. J. K. C. Widdershins by Oliver Onions. Chapter two. Phantas. Four, barring all pothor, with this or the other, still Britons are lords of the main. The chapter of admirals. One. As Abel Keeling lay on the galleon's deck, held from rolling down, it only by his own weight, and the sun-blackened hand that lay out stretched upon the planks, his gaze wandered, but ever returned to the bell that hung, jammed with a dangerous heel over the vessel, and the small ornamental bell-free immediately above the main mast. The bell was of cast bronze, with half obliterated bosses upon it that had been the heads of sherubs, but wind and salt spray had given it a thickened crust station of bright, beautiful, like-in-a-screen. It was this color that Abel Keeling's eyes liked. For wherever else on the galleon his eyes rested they found only whiteness. The whiteness of extreme-eld. There were slightly varying degrees in her whiteness. Here she was of a white that glistened like salt granules, there of a grayish-chalky white, and again her whiteness had the yellowish cast of decay, but everywhere it was the mild, disquieting whiteness of materials out of which the life had departed. Her cordage was bleached as old straws bleached, and half her ropes kept their shape little more firmly than the ash of a string keeps its shape after the fire has passed. Her pallid timbers were white and clean as bones found in sand. And even the wild frankincense with which, for lack of tar, at her last touching of land, she had been pitched, had dried to a pale hard gum that sparkled like quartz in her open seams. The sun was yet so pale a buckler of silver through the still white mist that not a cord or timber cast a shadow, and only Abel Keeling's face and hands were black, carked and cinder black from exposure to his pitiless rays. The gallium was the merry of the tower, and she had a frightful list to starboard, so canted was she that her manor dipped one of its steel sickles into the glassy water, and had a formast remain, or more than the broken stump of a bonaventure midson. She must have turned over completely. Many days ago they had stripped the manured of its corpse, and had passed the sail under the merry's bottom in the hope that it would stop the leak. This had partly done as long as the gallium had continued to glide one way, then without coming about she had begun to glide the other, the ropes had parted, and she had dragged the sail after her, leaving a broad tarnish on the silver sea, for it was broadside that the gallium glided, almost imperceptibly ever sucking down. She glided as if the loadstone drew her, and at first Evil Killing had thought that it was a loadstone pulling at her iron, drawing her through the pearly mists that lay like facecloths through the water and hid at a short distance the tarnish left by the sail. But later he had known that it was no loadstone drawing at her iron. The motion was due, must be due, to the absolute deadness of the calm in that silent, sinister three miles broad waterway. With the eye of his mind he saw that loadstone now as he lay against the gun truck, all but toppling down the deck. Soon though it happened again, which had happened for five days past. He would hear again the chattering of monkeys and the screaming of parrots, the matter of green and yellow weeds would creep in toward the merry over the quick silver sea. Once more the sheer wall of rock would rise, and the men would run. But no. The men would not run this time to drop the fenders. There are no men left to do so unless Bly was still alive. Perhaps Bly was still alive. He had walked halfway down the quarter-deck steps a little before the sudden nightfall the day before, had then fallen in lane for a minute. Dead, Evil Killing had supposed, watching him from his place by the gun truck, and had then got up again and totted forward to the folksal, his tall figures swaying in his long arms waving. Evil Killing had not seen him since. Most likely he had died in the folksal during the night. If he had not been dead, he would have come after again for water. At the remembrance of the water, Evil Killing lifted his head. The strands of lean muscle about his emaciated mouth worked, and he made a little pressure of his sun-blackened hand on the deck, as it to verify its steepness and his own balance. The main mass was some seven or eight yards away. He put one stiff leg under him and began, seated as he was, to make shuffling movements down the slope. To the main mass near the Belfry was a fixed as contrivance for catching water. It consisted of a collar of rope set lower at one side than at the other, but that had been before the mass had steved so many degrees away from the zenith, and talib beneath. The mists lingered later in that gully of a straight than they did on the open ocean, and the collar of rope served as a collector for the dues that condensed on the mast. The drops fell into a small earthen pipkin placed on the deck beneath it. Evil Killing reached the pipkin and looked into it. It was nearly a third full of fresh water. Good. If by the mate was dead, so much the more water for Evil Killing, master of the merry of the tower. He dipped two fingers into the pipkin and put them into his mouth. This he did several times. He did not dare to raise the pipkin to his black and broken lips, for dread of a remembered agony. He could not have told how many days ago when a devil had whispered to him, and he had gulped down the contents of the pipkin in the morning, and for the rest of the day had gone waterless. Again he moistened his fingers and sucked them. Then he lay sprawling against the mast, idly watching the drops of water as they fell. It was odd how the drops formed. Slowly they collected at the edge of the talib collar, trembled in their fullness for an instant, and fell. Another beginning of the process instantly. It amused Evil Killing to watch them. Why, he wondered, were all the drops the same size? What cause and compulsion did they obey that they never varied? And what frail tenuity held the little globules intact? It must be due to some cause. He remembered that the aromatic gum of the wild frankincense, with which they had parceled the seams that hung on the buckets in great sluggish gout's obedient to a different compulsion. So was different again, and so were juices and balsams. Only Quicksilver, perhaps the heavy and motionless sea, put him in mind of Quicksilver, seemed obedient to no law. Why was it so? Bly, of course, would have had his explanation. It was the hand of God. That's a feist for Bly, who had gone forward the evening before, in whom Evil Killing now seemed vaguely, and as at a distance to remember as the deep voice fanatic who had sung his hymns as, man by man, he had committed the bodies of the ship's company to the deep. Bly was that sort of man. Accepted things without question. Was content to take things as they were, and be ready with the fenders and the wall of rock rows out of the upolussent mists. Bly, too, like the water drops, had his law. That was his, and nobody else's. They flooded down from some rotten rope, up a loft of flake of scurf that settled in the pipkin. Evil Killing watched it dully as it settled toward the pipkin's rim. When presently he again dipped his fingers into the vessel, the water ran into a little vortex, drawing the flake with it. The water settled again, and again the minute flake determined toward the rim and adhered there, as if the rim had power to draw it. It was exactly so that the gallium was gliding toward the wall of rock. The yellow and green weeds and the monkeys and parrots put out into midwater again, while there had been men to put her out. She glided to the other wall. One force drew the chip in the pipkin and the chip over the Trent Sea. It was the hand of God, said Bly. Evil Killing, his mind now noting minute things, and now clotted up with torpor, did not at first hear a voice that was quakingly lifted up over by the foxel. A voice that drew nearer to an accompaniment of swirling water. O thou that Jonas in the fish three days did skip from pain, which was a figure of thy death and rising up again. It was Bly singing one of his eames. O thou that Noah kept from flood, and Abraham day by day, as he along, through Egypt passed, did skyte him in a way. The voice ceased, leaving the pious period uncompleted. Bly was alive at any rate. Evil Killing resumed his fitful musing. Yes, that was the law of Bly's life. To call things the hand of God. But Evil Killing's law was different. No better, no worse, only different. The hand of God that drew chips and gallions must work by some method. And Evil Killing's eyes were dully on the pipkin again, as if he'd sought the method there. Then conscious thought left him for a space. And when he resumed, it was without obvious connection. Ores, of course, were the thing. With ores, men would laugh at combs. Ores that only pinnaces and gallions is now used. Ed had their advantages. But ores, which was to say a method, for you could say if you like, that the hand of God grasped the orloom, as the breath of God filled the sail. Ores were antiquated. Belonged to the past. It meant a throwing over of all that was good, and new in a return to fine lines. A battle formation of breasts to give effect to the shock of the ram, and a day or two at sea, and then to port again for provisions. Ores, no. Evil Killing was one of the new men, the men who swore by the line ahead, the broad-side fire of Sakers and Demi-Canon, weeks and months without a landfall. Perhaps one day the wits of such men as he would devise a craft, not ore-driven, because ores could not penetrate into the remote seas of the world, not sail-driven, because men who trusted to sail found themselves in an airless three miles straight, suspended motionless between cloud and water, ever gliding to a wall of rock. But a ship, a ship, to Noah and his sons with him, God's spake, and said, He, a covenant set high up with you, and your posterity. It was black and wandering somewhere in the west. Evil Killing's mind was once more blank, then slowly, slowly, as the water drops collected on the collar of rope, his thought took shape again. A Galleus? No, not a Galleus. The Galleus made shift to be two things, and was neither. This ship, that the hand of man should one day make for the hand of God to manage, should be a ship that should take and conserve the force of the wind, take it and store it, as she stored her victuals, at rest when she wished, going ahead when she wished, turning the forces both of calm and storm against themselves. For, of course, her force must be wind, stored wind, a bag of the winds, as the children's tale had it, wind probably directed upon the water a stern, driving it away and urging forward the ship, acting by reaction. She would have a wind chamber, into which wind would be pumped with pumps. Bly would call that equally the hand of God, this driving force of the ship, of the future, that Abel Killing dimly foreshadowed as he lay beneath the main mass and the belfry, turning his eyes now and then from ashy white timbers to the vivid green bronze rust of the bell above him. Bly's face, liver-coloured with the sun and ravaged from inwards by the faith that consumed him, appeared at the head of the quarter-deck steps. His voice beat uncontrollably out, and in the refuge here is no place of refuge to be found, nor in the deep and water-course that passeth underground, too. Bly's eyes were lidded, as if in contemplation of his inner ecstasy. His head was thrown back, and his brows worked up and down tormentedly. His wide mouth remained open as his hymn was suddenly interrupted on a long-drawn note. From somewhere in the shimmering mist the note was taken up, and there drummed and rang and reverberated through the straight to windy horse and dismal bellow, alarming and sustained. A tremor rang through Bly, moving like a sightless man. He stumbled forward from the head of the quarter-deck steps, and Abel Killing was aware of his gaunt figure behind him, taller for the steepness of the deck. As that vast empty sound died away, Bly laughed in his mania. Lord, hath the grave's wide mouth the tongue to praise thee? Lo, again, again the cavernous sound possessed the air of louder and nearer. Through it came another sound, a stow, throb, throb, throb, throb. Again the sound ceased. Even Leviathan lifted up his voice and praise. Bly sobbed. Abel Killing did not raise his head. There had returned to him the memory of that day when, before the morning mist said lifted from the straight, he had emptied the pipkin of the water that was the allowance until night should fall again. During that agony of thirst he had seen shapes and heard sounds with other than his mortal eyes and ears, and even in the moments that had alternated with his likeness, when he had known these to be hallucinations, they had come again. He had heard the bells on a Sunday in his own kentish home, the calling of children at play, the unconcerned singing of men at their daily labour, and the laughter and gossip of the women as they had spread the linen on the hedge, or distributed bread upon the platters. These voices had rung in his brain, interrupted now on them by the groans of Bly and of two other men who had been alive then. Some of the voices he had heard had been silent on earth this many a long year, but Abel Keeling, thirst tortured, had heard them, even as he was now hearing that vacant moaning with the intermittent throbbing that filled the straight with alarm. Praise him, praise him, praise him! Bly was calling deliriously. Then a bell seemed to sound in Abel Keeling's ears, and, as if something in the mechanism of his brain had slipped another picture rose in his fancy, the scene when the merry of the tower had put out to a bravery as swinging bells and shrill-fights and valiant trumpets. She had not been a leper white galleon then. The scrollwork on her prow had twinkled with fielding. Her bell-free and stern galleries and elaborate lanterns had flashed in the sun with gold, and her fighting tops in the war pavesse about her waist had been gay with painted coats and stuchens. To her sails had been stitched gaudy ramping lions of scarlet seah, and from her manured now dipping in the water had hung the broad two-tailed pennant with a virgin and child embroidered upon it. Then suddenly a voice about him seemed to be saying, And a half-seven, and a half-seven, and in a twink the picture in Abel Keeling's brain changed again. He was at home again, instructing his son, Young Abel, in the casting of the lead from the skiff they had pulled out of the harbor. And a half-seven, the boy seemed to be calling. Abel Keeling's blackened lips muttered, Excellently well cast, Abel. Excellently well cast. And a half-seven, and a half-seven, seven, seven. Ah, Abel Keeling murmured. The last was not a clear cast. Give me the line. Thuzher should go. Ah, so. Soon you shall sail the seas with me in the merry of the tower. You are already perfect in the stars and emotions of the planets. Tomorrow I will instruct you in the use of the black staff. For a minute or two he continued to mutter, then he dozed. When again he came to semi-consciousness, it was once more to the sound of bells, at first faint, then louder, and finally becoming a noisy clamor immediately above his head. It was Bly. Bly, in a fresh attack of delirium, had seized the bell that neared him, was ringing the bell insanely. The cord broke in his fingers, but he thrust of the bell with his hand, and again called aloud, Upon an arp and an instrument of ten strings, let heaven and earth praise thy name. He continued to call loud, and to beat on the bronze-rusted bell. Ship ahoy, what ships that? One would have said that a veritable ale had come out of the mists, but Abel Keeling knew that those ailes that came out of the mists, they came from ships which were not there. Aye, aye, keep a good lookout, and have a care out here load-manage. He muttered again to his son. But as sometimes a sleeper sits up in his dreams, or rises from his couch and walks, so all of a sudden Abel Keeling found himself on his hands and knees on the deck, looking back over his shoulder, and some deep-seated region of his consciousness. He was dimly aware that the cant of the deck had become more perilous, but his brain received the intelligence and forgot it again. He was looking out into the bright and baffling mists. The buckler of the sun was of a more ardent silver. The sea below it was lost in brilliant evaporation, and between them suspended in the haze, no more substantial than the vague darknesses that float before dazzled eyes. A pyramidal phantom-shape hung. Abel Keeling passed his hand over his eyes, but when he removed it the shape was still there, gliding slowly toward the Mary's quarter. Its form changed as he watched it. The spirit-gray shape that had been a pyramid seemed to dissolve into four upright members, slightly graduated in tallness. That nearest the Mary's turn, the tallest, and that to the left the lowest. It might have been the shadow of the gigantic set of reed-pipes on which that vacant mournful note had been sounded. And as he looked with fooled eyes, again his ears became fooled. Oh, hey there! What ship's that? Are you a ship? Here, give me that trumpet! Then a metallic parking. Oh, hey there! What the devil are you? Didn't you ring a bell? Ring it again, or blow blasts or something, and go dead slow! All this came, as it were, indistinctly, and through a sort of highest singing enabled Keeling's own ears. Then he fancied a short, bewildered laugh, followed by a colloquial from somewhere between sea and sky. Here, well, just pinch me, will you? Tell me what you see there. I want to know if I'm awake. See where? There, on the starboard bow. Stop that ventilating fan. I can't hear myself think. See anything? Don't tell me it's that damn Dutchman. Don't pinch me with that old van der Denkentail. Give me an easy one first. Something about a sea serpent. You did hear that bell, didn't you? Shut up a minute. Listen. Again, Bly's voice was lifted up. This is the covenant that I make. From henceforth, nevermore, will I again the world destroy with water as before. Bly's voice died away again, enabled Keeling's ears. Oh, my fat Aunt Julia! The voice that seemed to come from between sea and sky sounded again. Then it spoke more loudly. I say it began with careful politeness. If you are a ship, do you mind telling us where the masquerade is to be, or where this is out of order, and we haven't heard of it? Oh, you do see it, won't you? Please, please, tell us what the hell you are. Again, Abel Keeling had moved as a sleepwalker moves. He had raised himself up by the belfry timbers, and Bly had sunk in a heap on the deck. Abel Keeling's movement overturned the pipkin, which raced the little trickle of its contents down the deck in lodge where the still and brimming sea made, as it were, a chain with a carved belly shod of the quarter deck. One link a still gleaming edge, then a dark baluster, and then another gleaming link. For one moment only Abel Keeling found himself noticing that that which had driven Bly aft had been the rising of the water and the waste as the galleon had settled by the head. The waste was now entirely submerged. Then once more he is absorbed in his dream, its voices and its shape in the mist, which had again taken the form of a pyramid before his eyeballs. Of course, the voice seemed to be complaining anew, and still, through that confused, dinning, Abel Keeling's ears, we can't turn a forage on it. Of course, Ward, I don't believe in him. Dear Ward, I don't believe in him, I say. Shall I call down to old AB? This might interest his scientific skippership. And it overbought and pulled out to it, into it, over it, through it. Look at the traps crawled on the bobbed yonder. They've seen it. Better not give an order, you know, won't be obeyed. Abel Keeling, cremped against the antique belfry, had begun to find his dream interesting. For though he did not know her build, that mirage was the shape of a ship. No doubt it was projected from his brooding on ships of half an hour before, and that was odd. But perhaps, after all, it was not very odd. He knew that she did not really exist, only the appearance of her existed. But things had to exist like that before they really existed. Before the Mary of the Tower had existed, she had been a shape in some men's imagination. Before that, some dreamer had dreamed the form of a ship with oars. And before that, far away in the dawn and infancy of the world, some seer had seen in a vision the raft before man had ventured to push out over the water on his own two planks. And since this shape rode before Abel Keeling's eyes, with a shape in his, Abel Keeling's dream, he, Abel Keeling, was the master of it. His own brooding brain had contrived her, and she was launched upon the illimitable ocean of his own mind. And there will not unmindful be of this, my covenant past, twigs me anew, and every flesh dwells that the world should last. Sangly, wrapped. But as a dreamer, even in his dream, will scratch upon the wall by his couch, some key or word to put him in mind of his vision on the morrow when it has left him. So Abel Keeling found himself seeking some sign to be a proof to those to whom no vision is vouchsafed. Even though I sought that, could not be silent in his bliss, but lay on the deck there uttering great passionate amens and praising his maker, as he said, upon an arp and an instrument of ten strings. So with Abel Keeling, it would be the amen of his life. To have praised God, not upon a harp, but upon a ship that should carry her own power, that should store wind, or its equivalent, as she stored her victuals, that should be something rested from the chaos of uninvention, and ordered, and disciplined, and subordinated. Abel Keeling's will. And there she was, that ship-shaped thing of spirit gray, with the four pipes that resembled a phantom organ, now a broadside and of equal length. And the ghost crew of that ship was speaking again. The interrupted silver chain by the quarter-deck balistrade had now become continuous, and the balisters made an airing-bone over their own motionless reflections. The spilt water from the pipkin had dried, and the pipkin was not to be seen. Abel Keeling stood beside the mast, erect as God-baid-man to go. With his leathery hand, he smote upon the bill. He waited for the space of a minute, and then cried, Oi! Ship ahoy! What ships that? Three. We are not conscious in a dream that we are playing a game, the beginning and end of which are in ourselves. In this dream of Abel Keeling's, the voice replied, Hello! It's found its tongue! Oi there! What are you? Loudly, and in a clear voice, Abel Keeling called, Are you a ship? With a nervous giggle, the answer came. We are a ship, aren't we, Ward? I hardly feel sure. Yes, of course we're a ship. No question about us. The question is, what the dickens you are? Not all the words these voices use were intelligible to Abel Keeling, and he knew not what it was in the tone of these last words that reminded him of the honour due to the merry of the tower. Blister-white, and at the end of her life as she was, Abel Keeling was still jealous of her dignity. The voice had a younger string, and it was not fitting that young Chin should be wagged about his galleon. He spoke curtly. You that spoke! Are you the master of that ship? Also the watch! The words floated back. The captain's below. Then sinned for him. It is with masters that masters hold speech. Abel Keeling replied. He could see the two shapes, flat and without relief, standing on a high, narrow structure with rails. One of them gave a low whistle and seemed to be fanning his face, but the other rumbled something into a sort of funnel. Presently the two shapes became three. There was a murmuring, as of a consultation, and then suddenly a new voice spoke. At its thrill and tone a sudden tremor ran through Abel Keeling's frame. He wondered what response it was that the voice found in the forgotten recesses of his memory. Ohoy! Seemed to call this new yet faintly remembered voice. What's all this about? Listen. Where his majesty's destroyer, C. Pink, out of Devonport last October, nothing particularly the matter with us. Now who are you? The Mary of the Tower, out of the port of Rye on the day of Sinan, and only two men, a gasp, interrupted him. Out of where? That voice that so strangely moved Abel Keeling said, unsteadily, or by a broken necrone's renewed rapture. Out of the port of Rye in the county of Sussex, nay, give ear, else I cannot make you hear me while this man's spirit and flesh wrestle so together. Ohoy! Are you gone? For the voices had become a low murmur, and the ship's shape had faded before Abel Keeling's eyes. Again and again he called. He wished to be informed of the disposition and economy of the Wind Chamber. The Wind Chamber, he called, in an agony less than knowledge, all most within his grasp should be lost. I would know about the Wind Chamber. Like an echo there came back the words, uncomprehendingly uttered. The Wind Chamber? The driver's the vessel, for chance does not wind. A steel bow that is bent also can serve as the force the force you stir to move at will through calm and storm. Can you make out what it's driving at? Oh, we shall all wake up in a minute. Quiet, I have it. The engines? We'll also know about our engines. We'll be wanting to see our papers presently. Rye, port. Let's see what it can make of this. Oh, there came the voice Abel Keeling, a little more strongly, as if a shifting wind carried it, and speaking faster and faster as it went on, not wind, but steam. Do you hear? Steam, steam, steam, in eight-year-old water tube boilers. S-T-E-A-M, steam, got it. And we've twin-screwed triple-expansion engines, indicated horsepower of 4,000, and we can do 430 revolutions per minute. Savvy, is there anything our phantom hood would like to know about our armament? Abel Keeling was muttering fruitfully to himself, and annoyed him that words in his own vision should have no meaning for him. How did words come to him in a dream that he had no knowledge of when wide awake? The sea-pink, that was the name of this ship, but a pink was long and narrow, low-carg, and square-built aft. And as for our armament, the voice of the tones a so profoundly troubled Abel Keeling's memory continued. We've two revolving white-head torpedo tubes, three six-punders on the upper deck, and that's a 12-pounder four there by the Konning Tower. Forgotten to mention that we're nickel-steel with a coal capacity of 60 tons and most inevitably placed bunkers, and that thirty-and-a-quarter knots is about our top. Get a cold-board, but the voice of speaking still more rapidly and feverishly as if to fill a silence with no matter what, and the shape that was uttering it was straining forward anxiously over the rail. Oh, I'm glad this happened in the daylight, I know the voice is muttering. I wish I was sure it was happening at all, poor old Sprook. I suppose it would keep its feet if a deck was quite vertical, think she'll go down or just melt, kind of go down without wash. Listen, here's the other one now, for Bly was singing again. For the Lord down notes our nature such, if we agree things obtain, and in the getting of the same, do feel no grief or pain. We little do esteem thereof, but hardly brought to pass a thousand times we do esteem more than the other was. But, oh, look, look, look at the other. Oh, I say, wasn't he a grand old boy? Look. For transfiguring a book healing's form as a prophet's form is transfigured in the instant of his rapture, flooding his brain with the white Eureka light of perfect knowledge, that for which he in his dream had been at a standstill, a gum. He knew her, the ship of the future. As if God's finger had bitten her lines into his brain, he knew her as those already sinking into the grave know things miraculously, completely accepting life's impossibilities at the nodded, of course. From the ardent mouths of her eight furnaces to the last drip from her lubricators, from her bed plates to the breeches of her quick-fires, he knew her, read her gauges, thumbed her bearings, gave the ranges from her rangefinders, and lived the life he lived who was in command with her. And he would not forget on the morrow as he had forgotten the many morrows for at last he had seen the water about his feet, and knew that there would be no moral for him in this world. And even in that moment with but a sand or two to run in his glass, indomitable, insatiable, dreaming dream on dream, he could not die until he knew more. He had two questions to ask, and a master question, and but a moment remained, sharply his voice rang out. Ho there, this ancient ship, the merry of the tower, cannot steam thirty and a quarter knots, but she can yet sail the waters. What more does your ship? Can she soar above them as the fowls of the air soar? Oh, what, he thinks he were a narrow plain. No, she can't. Can you dive? Even as the fishes to the deep? No. Those are submarines. We are on the submarine, but Abel Keeling waited for no more. He gave an exulting chuckle. Ha ha, thirty knots, and but on the face of the waters. No more than that. Oh, now my ship, the ship I see as a mother sees full grown, the child she has but conceived. My ship, I say. Oh, my ship shall. Below there, trip that gun. The cry came suddenly and alertly, as a muffled sound came from below, and an ominous tremor shook the galleon. Watch over, guns are breaking loose below. That's a finish. Trip that gun and double-breach the others. Abel Keeling's voice rang out, as if there had been a need to obey him. He had braced himself within the belfry frame, and then in the middle of the next order, his voice suddenly failed him. His ship's shape, that for the moment he had forgotten, rode once more before his eyes. This was the end, and his master questioned apprehension for the answer to which he was now torturing his face, and Will and I bursting his heart was still unasked. Oh, he thus spoke with me, the master. He cried in a voice that ran high. Is he there? Yes, yes. Came the other voice across the water, sick with suspense. It'd be quick. There's a moment in which horse cries, from many voices, a heavy thud and rumble on wood, and a crash of timbers and a gurgle and a splash were indescribably mingled, the gun under which Abel Keeling had lain had snapped her rotten breechings and plunged down the deck. Carrying by his unconscious form with it, the deck came up vertical, and for one instant longer, Abel Keeling clung to the belfry. I cannot see her face, he screamed, but me seems her voice is a voice I know. What is your name? And a torn sob the answer came across the water. Keeling, Abel Keeling. Oh, my God! And Abel Keeling's cry of triumph, then mounted to a victorious, zah! was lost in the downward plunge of the merry of the tower, that left the straight empty save for the sun's fiery blaze, and the last smoke-like evaporation of the mists. End of Chapter 2 FANTAS Chapter 3 OF WITTERSIONS This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by C. J. Casey. Witterians. By Oliver Onion. Chapter 3 ROOM For all I ever knew to the contrary, it was his own name. And something about him, name or man or both, always put me in mind, I can't tell you how, of Negroes. As regards a name, I daresay it was something hugger mugger is the mere sound, something that I classed, for no particular reason, with a dark and ignorant sort of word, such as Ubi and Huru. I only know that after I learned that his name was ROOM, I couldn't for the life of me have thought of him as being called anything else. The first impression that you got of his head was that it was a patchwork of black and white, black bushy hair and short white beard, or else the other way about. As a matter of fact, both hair and beard were piebald, so that if you saw him in the gloom a dim patch of white showed down one side of his head, and dark tufts cropped up here and there in his beard. His eyebrows alone were entirely black, with a little sprouting of hair almost joining them, and perhaps his skin helped to make me think of Negroes, for it was very dark, of the dark brown that always seems to have more than a hint of green behind it. His forehead was, though, and scored across with deep horizontal furrows. We never knew when he was going to turn up on a job. We might not have seen him for weeks, but his face was always as likely as not to appear over the edge of a crane platform just when that marvelous mechanical intuition of his was badly needed. He wasn't certificated, he wasn't even trained, as the rest of us understood training, and he scoffed at the drawing-office, and laughed out right at logarithms and our laborious methods of getting out quantities. But he could set shears and tackle in a way that made the rest of us look silly. I remember once how, through the parting of the train, a sixty foot girder had come down and lay under a ruck of other stuff, as the bottom chip lies under a pile of spillikins, a hopeless-looking smash. Myself, I'm certificated twice or three times over, but I can only assure you that I wanted to kick myself when, after I had spent a day and a sleepless night over the job, I saw the game of tic-tac-toe that room had made of it in an hour or two. Certificated or not, a man isn't a fool who can do that sort of thing, and he was one of these fellows, too, who can find water, tell you where water is and what amount of getting it is likely to take, by just walking over the place. We aren't certificated up to that yet. He was offered good money to stick to us, to stick to our firm, but he always shook his black-and-white-pibald head. He'd never be able to keep the bargain if he were to make it, he told us quite fairly. I know there are these chaps who can't endure to be clocked to their work with a patent time clock in the morning and released of an evening with a whistle, and it's one of those things that no master can ever understand. So Roon came and went erratically, showing up maybe in Leeds or Liverpool, perhaps next on Plymouth Breakwater, and once he turned up in an out-of-the-way place in Glamorganshire, just when I was wondering what had become with him. The way I got to know him, I mean more than just a nod, was that he tacked himself onto me one night down Vahalway, when we were setting up some small plant or other. We had knocked off for the day, and I was walking in the direction of the bridge when he came up. We walked along together, and we had not gone far before it appeared that his reason for joining me was that he wanted to know what a molecule was. I stared at him a bit. What do you want to know that for? I said. What is a chap like you who can do it all backwards, want with molecules? Oh, he just wanted to know, he said. So in the way across the bridge, I gave it to him more or less from the book. Molecular theory and all the rest of it. But from the childish questions he put, it was plain that he hadn't got the hang of it at all. Did the molecular theory allow things to pass through one another? He wanted to know. Could things pass through one another? Had a lot of ridiculous things like that. I gave it up. You're a genius in your own way, Rune. I said, finally. You know these things without the books we plotters have to depend on. If I had luck like that, I think I should be content with it. But he didn't seem satisfied, though he dropped the matter for that time. But I had his acquaintance, which was more of the most of a sad. He asked me, rather timidly, if I'd lend him a book or two. I did, sir, but they didn't seem to contain what he wanted to know, and he soon returned them without remark. No, you'd expect a fellow to be specially sensitive one way or other, who can tell when there's water a hundred feet beneath him. And as you know, the big men are squabbling yet about this water-finding business. But somehow the water-finding puzzled me less than it did that room should be extraordinarily sensitive to something far commoner and easier to understand. Ordinary echoes. He couldn't stand echoes. He'd go a mile around, rather than pass a place that he knew had an echo. And if he came on one by chance, sometimes he'd hurry through as quick as he could, and sometimes he'd loiter in this one very intently. I rather joked about this at first, though I found it really distressed him. Then, of course, I pretended not to notice. We're all cranky somewhere, and for that matter, I can't touch a spider myself. For the remarkable thing that overtook room, that, by the way, is an odd way to put it, as you'll see presently. But the words came that way into my head, so let them stand. For the remarkable thing that overtook room, I don't think I can begin better than with the first time, or very soon after the first time, that I noticed a peculiarity about the echoes. It was early on a particularly dismal November evening, and this time we were somewhere out southeast London Way, just beyond what they're pleased to call the building line. You know these districts of wretched trees and grammy fields and market gardens that are about the same to real country that a slum is to a town. It rained that night. Rain was the most appropriate weather for the brick fields and sewage farms and yards of old carts and railway sleepers we were passing. The rain shone on the black handbag that a room always carried, and I sucked the doll of a pipe that was much too trouble to fill and light again. We were walking in the direction of Lewisham. I think it would be. And we're still a little away from that eruption of red brick houses that, but you've doubtless seen them. You know how, when they're laying out new roads, they lay down the narrow strip of curb first, with neither sets on the one and nor flagstones on the other. We had come upon one of these. I had noticed how, as we had come a few minutes before under a tall, hollow, ringing railway arch room at all, it once stopped talking. It was the echo, of course, that bothered him. The unmade road to which we had come had headless lampstandards at intervals and ramparts of gray road metal ready for use. And save for the strip of curb, it was a broth of mud and stiff clay. A red-lighter too showed where the road barriers were. They were laying the mains. A green railway light showed on an embankment, and Lewisham lamps made a rusty glare through the rain. Room went first, walking along the narrow strip of curb. Lampstandards were a little difficult to see. And when I heard room stopped suddenly and drawn his breath sharply, I thought he had walked into one of them. Heard yourself, I said. He walked on without replying. By half a dozen yards farther on, he stopped again. He was listening again. He waited for me to come up. I say, he said, in an odd sort of voice. Go yard or two ahead, will you? What's the matter? I asked as I passed ahead. He didn't answer. Well, I hadn't been leading for more than a minute before he wanted to change again. He was breathing very quick and short. Why, what else do you—? I demanded, stopping. It's all right. You're not playing any tricks, are you? I saw him pass his hand over his brow. Come, get on, I said shortly. And we didn't speak again till we struck the pavement with the lighted lamps. Then I happened to glance at him. Here, I said, brusquely, taking him by the sleeve. You're not well. We'll call somewhere and get a drink. Yes, he said, again wiping his brow. I say, did you hear? Hear what? Ah, you didn't. Of course, you didn't feel anything. Come, you're shaking. When presently we came to a brightly lighted public-house or hotel, I saw that he was shaking even worse than I had thought. The shirt sleeve barman noticed it too and watched us curiously. I made room, sit down, and got him some brandy. What was the matter? I asked, as I held the glass to his lips. But I could get nothing out of him except that it was all right, all right. With his head twitching over his shoulder almost as if he had touched the dance. He began to come round a little. He wasn't the kind of man you pressed for explanations, and presently we set out again. He walked with me as far as my lodgings, refused to come in, but for all that lingered at the gate as if loathed to leave. I watched him turn the corner in the rain. We came home together again the next evening, but by a different way, quite half a while longer. He had waited for me a little pertinaciously. It seemed he wanted to talk about molecules again. Well, when a man of his age, he'd be near fifty, begins to ask questions he's rather worse than a child who wants to know where heaven is, or some such thing, for you can't put him off as you can the child. Somewhere or other he picked up the word osmosis, and seemed to have some glimmering of its meaning. He dropped the molecules and began to ask me about osmosis. It means, doesn't it? He demanded. The liquids all worked their way into one another, through a bladder or something. Say, a thick food and a thin. You'd find some of the thick and the thin and the thin and the thick. Yes, the thick and the thin is exosmosis, and the other end osmosis. That takes place more quickly, but I don't know a good deal about it. Was that ever take place with solids? he next asked. What was he driving at, I thought? But replied, I believe that is what is commonly called adhesion, as something of the sort, under another name. A good deal this book work seems to be finding a dozen names for the same thing, he grunted, and continued to ask his questions. But what it was he really wanted to know I couldn't for the life of me make out. Well, he was due any time now to disappear again, having worked quite six weeks in one place, and he disappeared. He disappeared for a good many weeks. I think it would be about February before I saw or heard of him again. It was February weather anyway, and in an echoing enough place that I found him, the subway of one of the metropolitan stations. He'd probably forgotten the echoes when he'd taken the train, but of course the railway folk won't let a man who happens to dislike echoes go wandering across the middles where he likes. He was twenty yards ahead when I saw him. I recognized him by his patched head and his black handbag. I ran along the subway after him. It was very curious. He'd been walking close to the white tile wall, and I saw him suddenly stop. But he didn't turn. He didn't even turn when I pulled up, close behind him. He put out one hand to the wall as if to steady himself. But the moment I touched his shoulder he just dropped, just dropped, half on his knees against the white tiling. The face he turned round and up to me was transfixed with fright. There were half a hundred people about. The train was just in, and it isn't a difficult matter in London to get a crowd for much less than a man crutching terrified against the wall, looking over his shoulder as room looked. At another man almost as terrified. I felt somebody's hand on my own arm. Evidently, somebody thought I'd knocked room down. The terror went slowly from his face. He stumbled to his feet. I shipped myself free of the man who held me and stepped up to room. What the devil's all this about? I'd demand it, roughly enough. It's all right. It's all right. He stammered. Heavens, man, you shouldn't play tricks like that. No, no. For the love of God, don't do it again. I'll not explain here, I said. Still in a good deal of the huff. And the small crowd melted away. Disappointed, I daresay, that it wasn't a fight. Now, I said, whom we were outside in the crowded street, you might let me know what all this is about, and what it is that for the love of God I'm not to do again. He was half apologetic, but at the same time half blustering, as if I had committed some sort of an outrage. A senseless thing like that. He mumbled to himself, but there, you didn't know. You don't know, do you? I tell you, do you hear? You're not to run at all when I'm about. You're a nice fellow and all that. And get your quantity somewhere near right. If you do go a long way around to do it, I don't answer for myself if you run. Do you hear? Putting a hand on a man's shoulder like that just went. Certainly I might have spoken, I agreed, a little stiffly. Of course you ought to have spoken. Just see you don't do it again. It's monstrous. I put a quick question. Are you sure you're quite right in your head room? Ha, he cried. Don't you think I just fancy it, my lad? Nothing's so easy. I thought you guessed that all the time. I'm on the new road. It's as plain as a pike staff. No, no, no. I shall be telling you something about molecules one of these days. We walked for a time in silence. Suddenly he asked, what are you doing now? I myself, do you mean? Oh, the firm. A railway job. Past Pinner. We have a big contract coming in the West End soon. They might want you for it. They call it alterations, but it's one of these big shop-rebuildings. I'll come along. Yo, it isn't here for a month or two yet. I don't mean that. I mean, I'll come along to Pinner with you now, tonight, wherever you go. Oh, I said. I don't know that I especially wanted him. It's a little wearing, the company of a chap like that. You never know what he's going to let you in for next. But, as this didn't seem to accord to him, I didn't say anything. If he really liked catching the last train down a three-mile walk and then sharing a double-bedded room at a poor sort of alehouse, which was my own program, he was welcome. We walked a little farther, then I told him of the time of the train and left him. He turned up at Houston a little after twelve. We went down together. It was forgetting on for one when we left the station at the other end, and then we began the tramp across the wheel to the inn. A little to my surprise, for I began to expect unaccountable behavior from him, we reached the inn without room, having dodged about changing places with me, having fallen cowering under a gorge's bush, or anything of that kind. Our talk, too, was about work, not molecules and osmosis. The inn was only a roadside beer-house. I'd forgotten its name, and all its sleeping accommodation was the one double-bedded room. Over the head of my own bed the ceiling was cut away, following the roofline, and the wallpaper was perfectly shocking. Faded bouquets and made Vs and As, interlacing everywhere. The other bed was made up, and lay across the room. I think I only spoke once while we were making ready for bed. And that was when Rome took from his black handbag a brush and a torn nightgown. That's what you always carry about, is it? I remarked, and Rome grunted something. Yes. Never know where you'd be next. No harm, was it? We tumbled into bed. But for all the lateness of the hour I wasn't sleepy, so from my own bag I took a book, set the candle on the end of the mantle, and began to read. Mark you, I don't say I was much better informed for the reading I did, for I was watching the Vs on the wallpaper mostly. That, I'm wondering what was wrong with the man in the other bed who had fallen down at a touch in the subway. He was already asleep. I don't know whether I can make the next clear to you. I'm quite certain he was sound asleep, so that it wasn't just the fact that he spoke. Even that is a little unpleasant, I always think, and he's sort of sleep talking. But it's a very queer sort of sensation when a man actually answers a question that's put to him, knowing nothing whatever about it in the morning. Perhaps not to have put that question, having put it. I did the next next thing afterwards, as you'll see in a moment. But let me tell you, he'd been asleep perhaps an hour or an hour while gathering about the wallpaper, when suddenly, far more clear than the odd voice than he ever used when awake, he said, What the devil is it prevents me seeing him then? That startled me, rather, for the second time that evening, and I really think I had spoken before I fully realized what was happening. I'm seeing whom, I said, sitting up in bed, whom you're not attending. The fellow I'm telling you about, who runs after me, he answered, answered perfectly plainly. I could see his head there on the pillow, black and white, and his eyes were closed. He made a slight movement with his arm, but that did not wake him. Then it came to me, with a sort of start, what was happening? I slipped half out of bed. Would he answer another question? I risked it breathlessly. If you had an idea who he is, well, that too, he answered. Who he is? The runner. Don't be silly. Who else could it be? With every nerve in me tingling, I tried again. What happens to him when he catches you? This time I really don't know whether his words were an answer or not. They were these, to hear him catching you up, and then patting away ahead again. All right, all right. I guess it's weakening him a bit, too. Without noticing it, I got out of bed, and it advanced quite to the middle of the floor. What did you say his name was? I breathed. But that was a dead failure. He watered brokenly for a moment, gave a deep troubled sigh, and then began to snore loudly and regularly. I made my way back to bed, but I assure you that before I did so, I filled my basin with water, dipped my face into it, and then set the candle stick afloat in it, leaving the candle burning. I thought I'd like to have a light. It burned down by morning. Rome, I remember, remarked on the silly practice of reading in bed. Well, it was a pretty kind of obsession for a man to have, wasn't it? Somebody running after him all the time, and then running on ahead. And of course, on a broad pavement, there would be plenty of room for this running gentleman to run around, but on an eight or nine-inch curb, such as that of the new road out Levesham Way. But perhaps he's a jumping gentleman, too, and could jump over a man's head. You'd think he'd have to get past some way, wouldn't you? I remember vaguely wondering whether the name of that runner was not Conscience. But Conscience isn't a matter of molecules and osmosis. One thing, however, was clear. I'd got to tell Rome what I'd learned. For you can't get hold of a fellow's secrets in ways like that. I lost no time about it. I told him, in fact, soon after he'd left the inn the next morning, told him how he'd answered me in the sleep. And what do you think of this? You seem to think I ought to have guessed it. Guessed a monstrous thing like that. I lost clever than I thought with your books in that. If you didn't, you grunted. But good God, man! Queer, isn't it? For you don't know the queerest, he pondered for a moment. And then suddenly he put his lips to my ear. I'll tell you, he whispered. He gets hotter every time. At first he just threw a bit of a catch on my heart. Like when you're not off to sleep in a chair and jerk up a wick again. And away he went. But now it's getting grinding sluggish in the pain. You'd notice that night on the road the little checker gave me. That's past long since. And last night when I just braced myself up stiff to meet it and you tapped me on the shoulder and passed the back of his hand over his brow. I'll tell you, he continued. It's an agony each time. I could scream at the thought of it. It's often our tune now and he's getting stronger. The end osmosis is getting the exosmosis. Is that right? Just let me tell you one more thing. But I'd had enough. I had asked questions the night before, but now, well, I knew quite as much as and more than I wanted. Stop, please. I said, are you either off your head or what? Let's call it the first. Don't tell me any more, please. Frightened, what? Well, I don't blame you. But what would you do? I should see a doctor. I'm only an engineer, I replied. Doctors? He said in spat. I hope you see how the matter stood with Rome. What do you make of it? Could you have believed it? Do you believe it? He made a nearest guess when he'd said that much of our knowledge is giving names of things we know nothing about. Only rule of thumb physics think everything's explained in the manual. And you've always got to remember one thing. You can call it force or what you like, but it's a certainty that things solid, things of wood and iron and stone would explode, just go off in a puff into space. If it wasn't for something just as inexplicable as that, that room said he felt in his own person. And if you can follow that, it's a relatively small matter whether rooms like footed familiar sit through him unperceived or had to struggle through obstinately. You see now why I said that a queer thing overtook room more? I saw it. This thing, that outrageous reason, I saw it happen. That is to say, I saw its effects. And it was in broad daylight on an ordinary afternoon in the middle of Oxford Street of all places. There wasn't a shadow of doubt about it. People were pressing and jostling about him, and suddenly I saw him turn his head and listen. As I'd seen him before, I'd tell you a nicey creeping ran all over my skin. I fancied, I felt it approaching too, nearer and nearer. The next moment he had made a sort of gathering of himself, as if against a gust. He stumbled and thrust, thrust to his body. He swayed, physically, as a tree sways in a wind. He clutched my arm and gave a loud scream. Then, after seconds, minutes, I don't know how long. He was free again. And for the color of his face, when by and by, I glanced at it. Well, I once saw a swore of the Italian fall under sunstroke and his face as much the same color that Rooms Negro face had gone. A cloudy, whitish green. Well, you seen it. What do you think of it? He gasped presently, turning a ghastly grin on me. But it was night before the full horror of it had soaked into me. Soon after that he disappeared again. I wasn't sorry. Our big contract in the West End came on. It was a time contract, with all manner of penalty clauses, if we didn't get through. And I assure you that we were busy. I myself was far too busy to think of Rooms. As a shop now, the place we were working at, or rather one of these huge buildings of fifty shops where you can buy anything, and if you'd seen us there. But perhaps you did see us. For people stood up on the tops of omnibuses as they passed, to look over the mud-splash hoarding into the great excavation we'd made. It was a sight. Staging rows on, staging tear on tear, with interminable ladders all over the steel structure. Three or four squatters this crouched like iron turtles on top, and a lattice crane on a towering three-quarter platform rose a hundred and twenty feet into the air. At one end of the vast quarry was the demolished house, showing flues and fireplaces and a score of thicknesses of old wallpaper. And at night they might well have stood up on the tops of the buses. A dozen great spluttering violet arc lights half-binded you, down below where the watchman's fires overhead. The riveters had their fire baskets, and in all corners napped the lights guttered and flared. And the steel rang with the riveters' hammers, and the crane chains rattled and clashed. There was not much doubt in my mind. It's the engineers who are the architects nowadays, which I absolutely think that the architects are only a sort of paper hangers who hang brick and terracotta on our work and clap the pinnacle or two on top, but never mind that. There we were, sweating and clanging and napping until the day shift came to relieve us. And I ought to say that fifty feet above our great gap, and from end to end across it there ran a traveling crane on a skeleton line, with platform engine and wooden cab all compact and one. It happened that they had pitched in as one of the foremen, some fellow or other, a friend of the firm's, a ranked duffer who pestered me incessantly with his questions. I had had half his work and all my own, and I hadn't improved my temper much. On this night that I'm telling about, he'd been playing the fool of his questions as if a time contract was a sort of summer holiday, and he'd filled me up to that point that I really can't say just what it was that room put in an appearance again. I think I'd had somebody mention his name, but I'd paid no attention. Well, our Johnny Fresh came up to me for the twentieth time that night, this time wanting to know something about the overhead crane. At that I fairly lost my temper. What else a crane, I cried. It's doing its work, isn't it? Isn't everybody doing their work except you? Why can't you hear us, Hopkins? Isn't Hopkins there? I don't know, he said. Ten, I snapped. In that particular I'm as ignorant as you, and I hope it's the only one. But he grabbed my arm. Look at him now, he cried, pointing, and I looked up. Either Hopkins or somebody was dangerously exceeding the speed limit. The thing was flowing along its thirty yards of rail as fast as a tram, and the heavy fall blocks swung like a ponderous kite tail, thirty feet below. As I watched the engine brought up within a yard at the end of the way, the box crashed like a ram into the broken house in, fetching down plaster and brick, and then the mechanism was reversed. The crane set off at a tear back. Who in hell? I began, but it wasn't a time to talk. Hi! I yelled. I made a spring for a ladder. The others had noticed it too, for there were shouts all over the place. By that time I was halfway up the second stage. Again the crane tore past, with a massive tackle sweeping behind it, and again I heard the crash at the other end. Whoever had the handling of it was managing it skillfully, for there was barely a foot to spare when it turned again. On the fourth platform, at the end of the way, I found Upkins. He was white, and seemed to be counting on those fingers. What's the matter here? I cried. It's room. He answered. I went and stepped out of the cab, and all a minute, when I heard the lever go. He's running somebody down, he says, hearing the whole shit down in a minute. Look! The crane was coming back again. Half out of the cab, I could see rooms mottled hair and beard. His brow was ribbed like a gridiron. And as he ripped past one of the arcs his face shown, like porcelain with the sweat that bathed it. No! You! Now! Damn you! He was shouting. Get ready to board him when he reverses. I shouted to Upkins. Just how he scrambled on, I don't know. I got one arm over the lifting gear, which of course wasn't going, and heard Upkins on the other foot plate. Room put the brakes down and reversed. Again came the thud of the fall blocks, and we were speeding back again over the gulf of Missy Orange Light. The Sajings were thronged with gaping men. Ready! Now! I cried to Upkins, and we sprang into the cab. Upkins hit room's wrist of the spanner. Then he seized the lever, jammed the brake down and tripped the room all, as it seemed, in one movement. I fell on top of room. The crane came to a stand still half way down the line. I held room, panting. But either room was stronger than I, or else he took me very much unawares. Well, once he twisted clear from my grasp and stumbled on his knees to the rear door of the cab. He threw up one elbow and staggered to his feet as I made another clutch at him. Keep still, you fool! I bawled. Hit him over the head, Upkins! Room screamed in a high voice. Run him down! Cut him up with the wheels! Down you! Down I say! Oh, my God! He sprang clear out from the crane door. Well, and I had taken me with him. I told you it was a skeleton line, two rails and a tire or two. He'd actually jumped to the right hand rail and he was running along it, running along the iron type route, out over that well of light and watching men. Upkins had started the traveling gear, as if some insane idea of catching him, but there was only one possible end to it. He'd gone fully a dozen yards while I watched, horribly fascinated. And then I saw the turn of his head. He didn't meet it this time. He sprang to the other rails to evade it. Even if the take-off he missed, as far as I could see he made no attempt to stave himself with his hands. He just went down out of the field of my vision. There was an awful silence. Then, from far below, there weren't the men on the lower stages who moved first. The men above went a little way down. And then they too stopped. Presently two of them descended, but by a distant way. They returned with two bottles of brandy. There was a hasty consultation. Two men drank the brandy off there, and then, getting on for a pint of brandy apiece, then they went down, drunk. Aye, Hopkins tells me it got down on my knees in the crane cab and was driving away cheerfully to myself. When I asked him what I said, he hesitated, and then said, You don't want to know that, sir. And I haven't asked him since. What do you make of it? End of chapter 3.