Title:      The Gap in the Curtain (1932)
Author:     John Buchan
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      The Gap in the Curtain (1932)
Author:     John Buchan





TO

SYBIL

AND

LAMBERT MIDDLETON





CONTENTS


I.  WHITSUNTIDE AT FLAMBARD

II.  MR ARNOLD TAVANGER

III.  THE RT. HON. DAVID MAYOT

IV.  MR REGINALD DAKER

V.  SIR ROBERT GOODEVE

VI.  CAPTAIN CHARLES OTTERY




I

WHITSUNTIDE AT FLAMBARD


"Si la conscience qui sommeille dans l'instinct se réveillait, s'il
s'intériorisait en connaissance au lieu de s'extérioriser en
action, si nous savions l'interroger et s'il pouvait répondre, il
nous livrerait les secrets de la vie."

BERGSON, L'Evolution Créatrice.


"But no!" cried Mr Mantalini.  "It is a demn'd horrid dream.  It is
not reality.  No!"

Nicholas Nickleby.


I


As I took my place at the dinner-table I realised that I was not
the only tired mortal in Lady Flambard's Whitsuntide party.  Mayot,
who sat opposite me, had dark pouches under his eyes and that
unwholesome high complexion which in a certain type of physique
means that the arteries are working badly.  I knew that he had been
having a heavy time in the House of Commons over the Committee
stage of his Factory Bill.  Charles Ottery, who generally keeps
himself fit with fives and tennis, and has still the figure of an
athletic schoolboy, seemed nervous and out of sorts, and scarcely
listened to his companion's chatter.  Our hostess had her midseason
look; her small delicate features were as sharp as a pin, and her
blue eyes were drained of colour.  But it was Arnold Tavanger
farther down the table who held my attention.  His heavy, sagacious
face was a dead mask of exhaustion.  He looked done to the world,
and likely to fall asleep over his soup.

It was a comfort to me to see others in the same case, for I was
feeling pretty near the end of my tether.  Ever since Easter I had
been overworked out of all reason.  There was a batch of important
Dominion appeals before the Judicial Committee, in every one of
which I was engaged, and I had some heavy cases in the Commercial
Court.  Of the two juniors who did most of my "devilling" one had a
big patent-law action of his own, and the other was in a nursing-
home with appendicitis.  To make matters worse, I was chairman of a
Royal Commission which was about to issue its findings, and had had
to rewrite most of the report with my own hand, and I had been
sitting as a one-man Commission in a troublesome dispute in the
shipbuilding trade.  Also I was expected to be pretty regularly in
the House of Commons to deal with the legal side of Mayot's
precious Bill, and the sittings had often stretched far into the
next morning.

There is something about a barrister's spells of overwork which
makes them different in kind from those of other callings.  His
duties are specific as to time and place.  He must be in court at a
certain hour.  He must be ready to put, or to reply to, an argument
when he is called upon; he can postpone or rearrange his work only
within the narrowest limits.  He is a cog in an inexorable machine,
and must revolve with the rest of it.  For myself I usually enter
upon a period of extreme busyness with a certain lift of spirit,
for there is a sporting interest in not being able to see your way
through your work.  But presently this goes, and I get into a mood
of nervous irritation.  It is easy enough to be a carthorse, and it
is easy enough to be a racehorse, but it is difficult to be a
carthorse which is constantly being asked to take Grand National
fences.  One has to rise to hazards, but with each the take-off
gets worse and the energy feebler.  So at the close of such a spell
I am in a wretched condition of soul and body--weary, but without
power to rest, and with a mind so stale that it sees no light or
colour in anything.  Even the end of the drudgery brings no
stimulus.  I feel that my form has been getting steadily poorer,
and that virtue has gone out of me which I may never recapture.

I had been in two minds about accepting Sally Flambard's
invitation.  She is my very good friend, but her parties are rather
like a table d'hôte.  Her interests are multitudinous, and all are
reflected in her hospitality, so that a procession goes through her
house which looks like a rehearsal for the Judgement Day.
Politics, religion, philanthropy, letters, science, art and the
most brainless fashion--she takes them all to her capacious heart.
She is an innocent lion-hunter, too, and any man or woman who
figures for the moment in the Press will be a guest at Flambard.
And she drives her team, for all are put through their paces.
Sally makes her guests work for their entertainment.  In her own
way she is a kind of genius, and what Americans call a wonderful
"mixer."  Everyone has got to testify, and I have seen her make a
bishop discourse on Church union, and a mathematician on hyper-
space to an audience which heard of the topics for the first time.
The talk is apt to be a little like a magazine page in a popular
newspaper--very good fun, if you are feeling up to it, but not
quite the thing for a rest-cure.

It was my memory of Flambard itself that decided me.  The place is
set amid the greenest and quietest country on earth.  The park is
immense, and in early June is filled with a glory of flowers and
blossoming trees.  I could borrow one of Evelyn's horses and ride
all day through the relics of ancient forests, or up on to the
cool, windy spaces of the Downs.  There was good dry-fly fishing in
the little Arm, which runs through a shallow vale to the young
Thames.  At Whitsuntide you can recover an earlier England.  The
flood of greenery hides modern blemishes which are revealed by the
bareness of winter, and an upland water-meadow is today just as it
met the eye of the monks when they caught their Friday's trout, or
of the corsleted knights as they rode out to the King's wars.  It
is the kind of scene that comforts me most, for there, as some poet
says, "old Leisure sits knee-deep in grass."  Also the house is
large enough for peace.  It is mostly Restoration period, with some
doubtful Georgian additions, but there is a Tudor wing, the remnant
of the old house, which the great Earl of Essex once used as a
hunting lodge.  Sally used to give me a room at the top of the
Essex wing, with a wide prospect north into the Cotswold dales.
The hall and the drawing-rooms and the great terrace might be as
full of "turns" as a music-hall stage, but somewhere in the house
fatigue could find sanctuary.

I had arrived just in time to dress for dinner, and had spoken to
none of my fellow-guests, so my inspection of the table had a
speculative interest.  It was a large party, and I saw a good many
faces that I knew.  There were the Nantleys, my best of friends,
and their daughter Pamela, who was in her first season . . .  There
was old Folliot, the bore of creation, with his little grey
imperial, and his smirk, and his tired eyes.  He was retailing some
ancient scandal to Mrs Lamington, who was listening with one ear
and devoting the other to what Lady Altrincham was saying across
the table.  George Lamington a little farther down was arguing with
his host about the Ascot entries--his puffy red face had that
sudden shrewdness which it acquires when George's mind is on
horses . . .  There was a man opposite him of whom I could only
catch the profile--a dark head with fine-drawn features.  I heard
his voice, a pleasant voice, with full deep tones like a tragic
actor's, and, as he turned, I had an impression of a face full of
swift, nervous strength . . .  There was a good deal of youth in the
party, four girls besides Pamela Brune, and several boys with sleek
hair and fresh voices.  One of them I knew, Reggie Daker, who was a
friend of my nephew's.

I was on Sally's left hand, and as she was busy with Mayot, and the
lady on my left was deep in a controversy with her neighbour over
some book, I was free to look about me.  Suddenly I got a queer
impression.  A dividing line seemed to zigzag in and out among us,
separating the vital from the devitalised.  There was a steady
cackle of talk, but I felt that there were silent spaces in it.
Most of the people were cheerful, eupeptic souls who were enjoying
life.  The Nantleys, for example, sedate country gentlefolk, whose
days were an ordered routine of pleasant cares . . .  Pamela Brune?
I was not so sure of her, for a young girl's first season is a
trying business, like a boy's first half at school . . .  Old
Folliot, beyond doubt--he was perfectly happy as long as he was in
a great house with somebody to listen to his archaic gossip . . .
Evelyn Flambard and George Lamington and the boys who were talking
Ascot and next winter's hunting plans . . .  Lady Altrincham, sixty
but with the air of thirty, who lives for her complexion and her
famous pearls . . .  But I realised that there were people here who
were as much at odds with life as myself--Mayot and Tavanger and
Charles Ottery, and perhaps the dark fellow who sat opposite George
Lamington.

Sally turned to me, hiding a yawn with her small hand.  Her head on
its slim neck was as erect as a bird's, and her body had a darting,
bird-like poise, but I could see that the poise required some
effort to maintain it.  She patted my sleeve in her friendly way.

"I am so glad you came," she said.  "I know you want a rest."  She
screwed up her eyes and peered at me.  "You look as if you hadn't
been in bed for a month!"

"I'm nearly all out," I said.  "You must let me moon about by
myself, please, for I'm no sort of company for anybody."

"You shall do exactly as you like.  I'm pretty tired also, and I'm
giving a ball next week, and there's Ascot looming ahead.  Happily
we're having quite a small party--and a very quiet one."

"Is this the lot?" I asked, looking down the table.  I knew her
habit of letting guests appear in relays during a weekend till the
result was a mob.

"Practically.  You know all the people?"

"Most of them.  Who's the dark fellow opposite George Lamington?"

Her face brightened into interest.  "That's my new discovery.  A
country neighbour, no less--but a new breed altogether.  His name
is Goodeve--Sir Robert Goodeve.  He has just succeeded to the place
and title."

Of course I knew Goodeve, that wonderful moated house in the lap of
the Downs, but I had never met one of the race.  I had had a notion
that it had died out.  The Goodeves are one of those families about
which genealogists write monographs, a specimen of that unennobled
gentry which is the oldest stock in England.  They had been going
on in their undistinguished way since Edward the Confessor.

"Tell me about him," I said.

"I can't tell you much.  You can see what he looks like.  Did you
ever know a face so lit up from behind? . . .  He was the son of a
parson in Northumberland, poor as a church mouse, so he had to
educate himself.  Local grammar school, some provincial university,
and then with scholarships and tutoring he fought his way to
Oxford.  There he was rather a swell, and made friends with young
Marburg, old Isaac's son, who got him a place in his father's
business.  The War broke out, and he served for four years, while
Marburgs kept his job open.  After that they moved him a good deal
about the world, and he was several years in their New York house.
It is really a romance, for at thirty-five he had made money, and
now at thirty-eight he has inherited Goodeve and a good deal
more . . .  Yes, he's a bachelor.  Not rich as the big fortunes go,
but rich enough.  The thing about him is that he has got his
jumping-off ground reasonably young, and is now about to leap.
Quite modest, but perfectly confident, and terribly ambitious.  He
is taking up politics, and I back him to make you all sit up.  I
think he's the most impressive mortal I have ever met.  Bored
stiff with women--as stony-hearted as you, Ned.  He's a sort of
ascetic, vowed to a cause."

"His own career?" I asked.

"No.  No.  He's not a bit of an egotist.  There's a pent-up force
that's got to come out.  He's a fanatic about some new kind of
Empire development, and I know people who think him a second
Rhodes.  I want you to make friends with him and tell me what you
think, for in your fish-like way you have good judgement."

Sally yawned again, and I respected more than ever the courage of
women who can go on till they drop and keep smiling.  She turned
away in response to a question of Mayot's, and I exchanged
banalities with the lady on my other side.  Presently I found
myself free again to look round the table.  I was right: we were
the oddest mixture of the fresh and the blasé, the care-free and
the care-worn.  To look at Tavanger's hollow eyes and hear in one's
ear the babble of high young voices made a contrast which was
almost indecent . . .  I had a feeling as if we were all on a vast,
comfortable raft in some unknown sea, and that, while some were
dancing to jazz music, others were crowding silently at the edge,
staring into the brume ahead.  Staring anxiously, too, for in that
mist there might be fearful as well as wonderful things . . .  I
found myself studying George Lamington's face, and felt a childish
dislike of him.  His life was so padded and cosseted and bovine.
He had just inherited another quarter of a million from an uncle,
and he had not the imagination of a rabbit in the use of money.
Why does wealth make dull people so much duller?  I had always
rather liked George, but now I felt him intolerable.  I must have
been very tired, for I was getting as full of silly prejudices as a
minor poet.

Sally was speaking again, as she collected eyes.

"Don't be afraid.  This is going to be a very peaceful party."

"Will you promise me," I said, "that I won't come down tomorrow and
find half a dozen new faces at breakfast?"

"Honest Injun," she replied.  "They are all here except one, and he
arrives tonight."

When the women had gone Evelyn Flambard brought his port to my
side.  Having exhausted horses during dinner, he regaled me with
the Englishman's other main topic, politics.  Evelyn despaired of
the republic.  He had grievances against the Budget, the new rating
law, and the Government's agricultural policy.  He was alarmed
about the condition of India, where he had served in his old Hussar
days, and about Egypt, where he had large investments.  His views
on America were calculated to make a serious breach between the two
sections of the Anglo-Saxon race.  But if he feared the Government
he despised the Opposition, though for politeness' sake he added
that his strictures did not apply to me.  There was no honest
Toryism left, so his plaint ran; there was not a pin to choose
between the parties; they were all out to rob struggling virtue--
meaning himself and other comfortable squires.  He nodded down the
table towards Goodeve.  "Look at that chap," he whispered darkly.
"I mean to say, he don't care a straw what he says or does, and
he'll have Tommy Twiston's seat, which is reckoned the safest in
England.  He as good as told George Lamington this afternoon that
he'd like to see a Soviet Government in power for a week in England
under strict control, for it was the only way to deal with men like
him.  Hang it all, there's nothing wrong with old George except
that he's a bit fussy, if you see what I mean."

I said that I rather agreed with Goodeve, and that set Evelyn
pouring out his woes to the man on the other side.  Reggie Daker
had come up next me, his eye heavy with confidences.  I had acted
as a sort of father-confessor to Reggie ever since he came down
from the University, but I hadn't much credit by my disciple.  He
was infinitely friendly, modest, and good-humoured, but as hard to
hold as a knotless thread.  Usually he talked to me about his
career, and I had grown very tired of finding him jobs, which he
either shied off or couldn't hold for a week.  Now it seemed that
this was not his trouble.  He had found his niche at last, and it
was dealing in rare books.  Reggie considered that a lad like
himself, with a fine taste and a large acquaintance, could make a
lot of money by digging out rarities from obscure manor-houses and
selling them to American collectors.  He had taken up the study
very seriously, he told me, and he actually managed to get a few
phrases of bibliophile's jargon into his simple tale.  He felt that
he had found his life's work, and was quite happy about it.

The trouble was Pamela Brune.  It appeared that he was deeply in
love, and that she was toying with his young heart.  "There's a
strong lot of entries," he explained, "and Charles Ottery has
been the favourite up till now.  But she seems a bit off Charles,
and . . . and . . . anyhow, I'm going to try my luck.  I wangled an
invitation here for that very purpose.  I say, you know--you're her
godfather, aren't you?  If you could put in a kind word . . ."

But my unreceptive eye must have warned Reggie that I was stony
soil.  He had another glass of port, and sighed.

I intended to go to bed as soon as I decently could.  I was not
sleepy, but I was seeing things with the confusion of a drowsy man.
As I followed my host across the hall, where someone had started a
gramophone, I seemed more than ever to be in a phantasmal world.
The drawing-room, with the delicate fluted pilasters in its
panelling and the Sir Joshuas and Romneys between them, swam in a
green dusk, which was partly the afterglow through the uncurtained
windows and partly the shading of the electric lamps.  A four at
bridge had been made up, and the young people were drifting back
towards the music.  Lady Nantley beckoned me from a sofa.  I could
see her eyes appraising my face and disapproving of it, but she was
too tactful to tell me that I looked ill.

"I heard that you were to be here, Ned," she said, "and I was very
glad.  Your god-daughter is rather a handful just now, and I wanted
your advice."

"What's wrong?" I asked.  "She's looking uncommonly pretty."  I
caught a glimpse of Pamela patting her hair as she passed a mirror,
slim and swift as a dryad.

"She's uncommonly perverse.  You know that she has been having an
affair with Charles Ottery ever since Christmas at Wirlesdon.  I
love Charles, and Tom and I were delighted.  Everything most
suitable--the right age, enough money, chance of a career, the same
friends.  There's no doubt that Charles adores her, and till the
other day I thought that she was coming to adore Charles.  But now
she has suddenly gone off at a tangent, and has taken to snubbing
and neglecting him.  She says that he's too good for her, and that
his perfections choke her--doesn't want to play second fiddle to an
Admirable Crichton--wants to shape her own life--all the rubbish
that young people talk nowadays."

Mollie's charming eyes were full of real distress, and she put an
appealing hand on my arm.

"She likes you, Ned, and believes in you.  Couldn't you put a
little sense into her head?"

I wanted to say that I was feeling like a ghost from another
sphere, and that it was no good asking a tenuous spectre to meddle
with the affairs of warm flesh and blood.  But I was spared the
trouble of answering by the appearance of Lady Flambard.

"Forgive me, Mollie dear," she said, "but I must carry him off.
I'll bring him back to you presently."

She led me to a young man who was standing near the door.  "Bob,"
she said, "this is Sir Edward Leithen.  I've been longing for you
two to meet."

"So have I," said the other, and we shook hands.  Now that I saw
Goodeve fairly, I was even more impressed than by his profile as
seen at dinner.  He was a finely made man, and looked younger than
his thirty-eight years.  He was very dark, but not in the least
swarthy; there were lights in his hair which suggested that he
might have been a blond child, and his skin was a clear brown, as
if the blood ran strongly and cleanly under it.  What I liked about
him was his smile, which was at once engaging and natural, and a
little shy.  It took away any arrogance that might have lurked in
the tight mouth and straight brows.

"I came here to meet you, sir," he said.  "I'm a candidate for
public life, and I wanted to see a man who interests me more than
anybody else in the game.  I hope you don't mind my saying that . . .
What about going into the garden?  There's a moon of sorts, and
the nightingales will soon begin.  If they're like the ones at
Goodeve, eleven's their hour."

We went through the hall to the terrace, which lay empty and quiet
in a great dazzle of moonlight.  It was only about a fortnight till
midsummer, a season when in fine weather in southern England it is
never quite dark.  Now, with a moon nearing the full, the place was
bright enough to read print.  The stone balustrade and urns were
white as snow, and the two stairways that led to the sunk garden
were a frosty green like tiny glaciers.

We threaded the maze of plots and lily-ponds and came out on a
farther lawn, which ran down to the little river.  That bit of the
Arm is no good for fishing, for it has been trimmed into a shallow
babbling stretch of ornamental water, but it is a delicious thing
in the landscape.  There was no sound except the lapse of the
stream, and the occasional squattering flight of a moorhen.  But as
we reached the brink a nightingale began in the next thicket.

Goodeve had scarcely spoken a word.  He was sniffing the night
scents, which were a wonderful blend of early roses, new-mown hay,
and dewy turf.  When we reached the Arm, we turned and looked back
at the house.  It seemed suddenly to have gone small, set in a
great alley-way of green between olive woods, an alley-way which
swept from the high downs to the river meadows.  Far beyond it we
could see the bare top of Stobarrow.  But it looked as perfect as a
piece of carved ivory--and ancient, ancient as a boulder left
millenniums ago by a melting ice-cap.

"Pretty good," said my companion at last.  "At Flambard you can
walk steadily back into the past.  Every chapter is written plain
to be read."

"At Goodeve, too," I said.

"At Goodeve, too.  You know the place?  It is the first home I have
had since I was a child, for I have been knocking about for years
in lodgings and tents.  I'm still a little afraid of it.  It's a
place that wants to master you.  I'm sometimes tempted to give
myself up to it and spend my days listening to its stories and
feeling my way back through the corridors of time.  But I know that
that would be ruin."

"Why?"

"Because you cannot walk backward.  It is too easy, and the road
leads nowhere.  A man must keep his eyes to the front and resist
the pull of his ancestors.  They're the devil, those ancestors,
always trying to get you back into their own rut."

"I wish mine would pull harder," I said.  "I've been badly
overworked lately, and I feel at this moment like a waif, with
nothing behind me and nothing before."

He regarded me curiously.  "I thought you looked a little done up.
Well, that's the penalty of being a swell.  You'll lie fallow for a
day or two and the power will return.  There can't be much looking
backward in your life."

"Nor looking forward.  I seem to live between high blank walls.  I
never get a prospect."

"Oh, but you are wrong," he said seriously.  "All your time is
spent in trying to guess what is going to happen--what view the
Courts will take of a case, what kind of argument will hit the
prospective mood of the House.  It is the same in law and politics
and business and everything practical.  Success depends on seeing
just a little more into the future than other people."

I remembered my odd feeling at dinner of the raft on the misty sea,
and the anxious peering faces at the edge.

"Maybe," I said.  "But just at the moment I'm inclined to envy the
people who live happily in the present.  Our host, for example, and
the boys and girls who are now dancing."  In the stillness the
faint echo of music drifted to us from the house.

"I don't envy them a bit," he said.  "They have no real sporting
interest.  Trying to see something solid in the mist is the whole
fun of life, and most of its poetry."

"Anyhow, thank Heaven, we can't see very far.  It would be awful to
look down an avenue of time as clear as this strip of lawn, and see
the future as unmistakable as Flambard."

"Perhaps.  But sometimes I would give a good deal for one moment of
prevision."

After that, as we strolled back, we talked about commonplace
things--the prospects of a not very secure Government, common
friends, the ways of our hostess, whom he loved, and the abilities
of Mayot, which--along with me--he doubted.  As we entered the
house again we found the far end of the hall brightly lit, since
the lamps had been turned on in the porch.  The butler was ushering
in a guest who had just arrived, and Sally had hastened from the
drawing-room to greet him.

The newcomer was one of the biggest men I have ever seen, and one
of the leanest.  A suit of grey flannel hung loose upon his
gigantic bones.  He reminded me of Nansen, except that he was dark
instead of fair.  His forehead rose to a peak, on which sat one
solitary lock, for the rest of his head was bald.  His eyes were
large and almost colourless, mere pits of light beneath shaggy
brows.  He was bowing over Sally's hand in a foreign way, and the
movement made him cough.

"May I present Sir Edward Leithen?" said Sally.  "Sir Robert
Goodeve . . .  Professor Moe."

The big man gave me a big hand, which felt hot and damp.  His eyes
regarded me with a hungry interest.  I had an impression of power--
immense power, and also an immense fragility.


II


I did not have a good night; I rarely do when I have been
overworking.  I started a chapter of Barchester Towers, dropped off
in the middle, and woke in two hours, restless and unrefreshed.
Then I must have lain awake till the little chill before dawn which
generally sends me to sleep.  The window was wide open, and all the
minute sounds of a summer night floated through it, but they did
not soothe me.  I had one of those fits of dissatisfaction which
often assail the sleepless.  I felt that I was making very little
of my life.  I earned a large income, and had a considerable
position in the public eye, but I was living, so to speak, from
hand to mouth.  I had long lost any ordinary ambitions, and had
ceased to plan out my career ahead, as I used to do when I was a
young man.  There were many things in public life on which I was
keen, but it was only an intellectual keenness; I had no ardour in
their pursuit.  I felt as if my existence were utterly shapeless.

It was borne in on me that Goodeve was right.  What were his
words?--"Trying to see something solid in the mist is the whole fun
of life, and most of its poetry."  Success, he had argued, depended
upon looking a little farther into the future than other people.
No doubt; but then I didn't want success--not in the ordinary way.
He had still his spurs to win, whereas I had won mine, and I didn't
like the fit of them.  Yet all the same I wanted some plan and
policy in my life, for I couldn't go on living in the mud of the
present.  My mind needed prospect and horizon.  I had often made
this reflection before in moments of disillusionment, but now it
came upon me with the force of a revelation.  I told myself that I
was beginning to be cured of my weariness, for I was growing
discontented, and discontent is a proof of vitality . . .  As I
fell asleep I was thinking of Goodeve and realising how much I
liked him.  His company might prove the tonic I required.

I rose early and went for a walk along the Arm to look for a
possible trout.  The May-fly season was over, but there were one or
two good fish rising beyond a clump of reeds where the stream
entered the wood.  Then I breakfasted alone with Evelyn, for
Flambard is not an early house.  His horses were mostly at grass,
but he lent me a cob of Sally's.  I changed into breeches, cut a
few sandwiches, and set out for the high Downs.  I fancied that a
long lonely day on the hills would do me as much good as anything.

It was a quiet dim morning which promised a day of heat.  I rode
through a mile of woods full of nesting pheasants, then over a
broomy common, and then by way of a steep lane on to the turf of
the Downs.  I found myself on the track where Evelyn exercised his
race-horses, for he trained at home, so I gave my beast its head,
and had that most delectable of experiences, a gallop over perfect
turf.  This brought me well up on the side of Stobarrow, and by the
time I reached its summit the haze was clearing, and I was looking
over the Arm and the young Thames to the blue lift of Cotswold.

I spent the whole day on the uplands.  I ate my sandwiches in a
clump of thorns, and had a mug of rough cider at an alehouse.  I
rode down long waterless combes, and ascended other tops besides
Stobarrow.  For an hour I lay on a patch of thyme, drowsy with the
heat and the aromatic scents.  I smoked a pipe with an old
shepherd, and heard slow tales of sheep and dogs and storms and
forgotten fox-hunts.  In the end I drugged myself into a sort of
animal peace.  Thank God, I could still get back when I pleased to
the ancient world of pastoral.

But when on my return I came over the brink of Stobarrow I realised
that I had gained little.  The pastoral world was not mine; my
world was down below in the valley where men and women were
fretting and puzzling . . .  I no longer thought of them as on a
raft looking at misty seas, but rather as spectators on a ridge,
trying to guess what lay beyond the next hill.  Tavanger and Mayot
and Goodeve--they were all at it.  A futile game, maybe, but
inevitable, since what lay beyond the hill was life and death to
them.  I must recapture the mood for this guessing game, for it was
the mainspring of effort, and therefore of happiness.

I got back about six, had a bath, and changed into flannels.  Sally
gave me a cup of tea at a table in the hall which carried food for
a multitude, but did not look as if it had been much patronised.
Evelyn and the Lamingtons had gone to see the Wallingdon training
stables; the young people had had tea in the tennis-court pavilion;
Mayot had motored to Cirencester to meet a friend, and Tavanger had
gone to Goodeve to look at the pictures, in which subject he was a
noted connoisseur; Charles Ottery had disappeared after luncheon,
and she had sent the Professor to bed till dinner.

Sally's face wore something between a smile and a frown.

"Reggie Daker is in bed, too.  He was determined to try Sir Vidas
over the jumps in the park, though Evelyn warned him that the horse
was short of exercise and was sure to give trouble.  The jumps
haven't been mended for months, and the take-off at some of them is
shocking.  Well, Sir Vidas came down all right, and Reggie fell on
his head and nearly cracked his skull.  He was concussed, and
unconscious for a quarter of an hour.  Dr Micklem sewed him up, and
he is now in bed, covered with bandages, and not allowed to speak
or be spoken to till tomorrow.  It's hard luck on poor Reggie, but
it will keep him for a little from making a fool of himself about
Pamela Brune.  He hasn't a chance there, you know, and he is such a
tactless old donkey that he is spoiling the field for Charles
Ottery."

But it was not Reggie's misfortunes that made my hostess frown.
Presently I learned the reason.

"I'm very glad of the chance of a quiet talk with you," she said.
"I want to speak to you about Professor Moe.  You saw him when he
arrived last night.  What did you think of him?"

"He seemed a formidable personage," I replied.  "He looked very
ill."

"He IS very ill.  I had no notion how ill he was.  He makes light
of it, but there must be something mortally wrong with his lungs or
his heart.  He seems to be always in a fever, and now and then he
simply gasps for breath.  He says he has been like that for years,
but I can't believe it.  It's a tragedy, for he is one of the
greatest minds in the world."

"I never heard of him before."

"You wouldn't.  You're not a scientist.  He's a most wonderful
mathematician and physicist--rather in the Einstein way.  He has
upset every scientific law, but you can't understand just how
unless you're a great scientist yourself.  Our own people hush
their voices when they mention him."

"How did you come across him?"

"I met him last year in Berlin.  You know I've a flair for clever
people, and they seem to like me, though I don't follow a word they
say.  I saw that he was to be in London to read a paper to some
society, so I thought I'd ask him to Flambard to show him what
English country life was like.  Rather to my surprise he accepted--
I think London tired him and he wanted a rest."

"You're worried about him?  Are you afraid that he'll die on your
hands?"

"No-o," she answered.  "He's very ill, but I don't think he'll die
just yet.  What worries me is to know how to help him.  You see,
he took me into his confidence this morning.  He accepted my
invitation because he wanted the quiet of the country to finish
a piece of work.  A tremendous piece of work--the work of his
life . . .  He wants something more.  He wants our help.  It seems
that some experiment is necessary before he can be quite sure of
his ground."

"What sort of experiment?"

"With human beings--the right kind of human beings.  You mustn't
laugh at me, Ned, for I can't explain what he told me, though I
thought I understood when he was speaking . . .  It has something
to do with a new theory of Time.  He thinks that Time is not a
straight line, but full of coils and kinks.  He says that the
Future is here with us now, if we only knew how to look for it.
And he believes he has found a way of enabling one to know what is
going to happen a long time ahead."

I laughed.  "Useful for Evelyn and George.  They'll be able to back
all the Ascot winners."

But Sally did not laugh.

"You must be serious.  The Professor is a genius, and I believe
every word he says.  He wants help, he told me.  Not people like
Evelyn and George.  He has very clear ideas about the kind of man
he needs.  He wants Mr Mayot and Mr Tavanger and perhaps Charles
Ottery, though he's not quite sure about Charles.  Above all, he
wants you and Bob Goodeve.  He saw you last night, and took a
tremendous fancy to you both."

I forbore to laugh only out of deference to Sally's gravity.  It
seemed a reduction to the absurd of Goodeve's talk the night before
and my reflections on the Downs.  I had decided that I must be more
forward-looking, and here was a wild foreigner who believed that he
had found the exact technique of the business.

"I don't like it," I said.  "The man is probably mad."

"Oh, no, he isn't.  He is brilliantly sane.  You have only to talk
to him to realise that.  Even when I couldn't follow him I could
see that he was not talking nonsense.  But the point is that he
wants to put it all before you.  He is certain that he can make a
convert of you."

"But I don't know the first thing about science.  I have often got
up a technical subject for a case, and then washed it out of my
mind.  I've never been instructed in the first principles.  I don't
understand the language."

"That is just why Professor Moe wants you.  He says he wants a
fresh mind, and a mind trained like yours to weigh evidence.  It
wasn't your beaux yeux, Ned, that he fell for, but your reputation
as a lawyer."

"I don't mind listening to what he has got to say.  But look here,
Sally, I don't like this experiment business.  What does he
propose?"

"Nothing in the least unpleasant.  It only means one or two people
preparing themselves for an experience, which he says he can give
them, by getting into a particular frame of mind.  He's not sure if
he can bring it off, you know.  The experiment is to be the final
proof of his discovery.  He was emphatic that there was no danger
and no unpleasantness, whether it was successful or not . . .  But
he was very particular about the people he wanted.  He was looking
at us all this morning with the queerest appraising eyes.  He wants
you and Bob especially, and Mr Mayot and Mr Tavanger, and possibly
Charles.  Oh, yes, and he thinks he may want me.  But nobody else.
He was perfectly clear about that."

I must say that this rather impressed me.  He had chosen exactly
those whom I had selected at dinner the previous night as the care-
full as opposed to the care-free.  He wanted people whose physical
vitality was low, and who were living on the edge of their nerves,
and he had picked them unerringly out of Sally's house-party.

"All right," I said.  "I'll have a talk to him after dinner.  But I
want you to be guided by me, and if I think the thing fishy to call
it off.  If the man is as clever as you say, he may scare somebody
into imbecility."

Before I dressed I rang up Landor, and was lucky enough to find him
still in London.  Landor, besides being a patent-law barrister
pretty near the top of his branch, is a Fellow of the Royal
Society, and a devotee of those dim regions where physics,
metaphysics, and mathematics jostle each other.  He has published
and presented me with several works which I found totally
incomprehensible.

When I asked him about Professor Moe he replied with a respectful
gurgle.  "You don't mean to say you've got him at Flambard?  What
astounding luck!  I thought he had gone back to Stockholm.  There
are scores of people who would walk twenty miles barefoot to get a
word with him."

Landor confirmed all that Sally had said about the Professor's
standing.  He had been given the Nobel Prize years ago, and was
undoubtedly the greatest mathematician alive.  But recently he had
soared into a world where it was not easy to keep abreast of him.
Landor confessed that he had only got glimmerings of meaning from
the paper he had read two days before to the Newton Club.  "I can
see the road he is travelling," he said, "but I can't quite grasp
the stages."  And he quoted Wordsworth's line about "Voyaging
through strange seas of thought alone."

"He's the real thing," I asked, "and not a charlatan?"

I could hear Landor's cackle at the other end of the line.

"You might as well ask a conscript to vouch for Napoleon's
abilities as ask me to give a certificate of respectability to
August Moe."

"You're sure he's quite sane?

"Absolutely.  He's only mad in so far as all genius is mad.  He is
reputed to be a very good fellow and very simple.  Did you know
that he once wrote a book on Hans Andersen?  But he looked to me a
pretty sick man.  There's a lot of hereditary phthisis in his
race."

Dinner that evening was a pleasanter meal for me.  I had more of an
appetite, there was a less leaden air about my companions in
fatigue, the sunburnt boys and girls were in good form, and Reggie
Daker's woebegone countenance was safe on its pillow.  Charles
Ottery, who sat next to Pamela Brune, seemed to be in a better
humour, and Mrs Lamington was really amusing about the Wallingdon
stables and old Wallingdon's stable-talk.  I had been moved farther
down the table, and had a good view of Professor Moe, who sat next
to our hostess.  His was an extraordinary face--the hollow cheeks
and the high cheekbones, the pale eyes, the broad high brow, and
the bald head rising to a peak like Sir Walter Scott's.  The
expression was very gentle, like a musing child, but now and then
he seemed to kindle, and an odd gleam appeared in his colourless
pits of eyes.  For all his size he looked terribly flimsy.
Something had fretted his body to a decay.

He came up to me as soon as we left the dining-room.  He spoke
excellent English, but his voice made me uneasy--it seemed to come
with difficulty from a long way down in his big frame.  There was a
vague, sad kindliness about his manner, but there was a sense of
purpose too.  He went straight to the point.

"Some time you are going to give me your attention, Sir Edward, and
I in return will give you my confidence.  Her ladyship has so
informed me.  She insists, that gracious one, that I must go to
bed, for I am still weary.  Shall our talk be tomorrow after
breakfast?  In the garden, please, if the sun still shines."


III


I find it almost impossible to give the gist of the conversation
which filled the next forenoon.  We sat in wicker chairs on the
flags of the Dutch garden in a grilling sun, for heat seemed to be
the one physical comfort for which the Professor craved.  I shall
always associate the glare of a June sky with a frantic effort on
my part to grasp the ultimate imponderables of human thought.

The Professor was merciful to my weakness.  He had a great writing-
pad on his knee, and would fain have illustrated his argument with
diagrams, but he desisted when he found that they meant little to
me and really impeded his exposition.  Most scientists use a kind
of shorthand--formulas and equations which have as exact a meaning
for them as an ordinary noun has for the ordinary man.  But there
was no chance for this shorthand with me.  He had to begin from the
very beginning, taking nothing for granted.  I realised his
difficulty.  It was as if I had had to argue an intricate case, not
before a learned judge, but before an intelligent ignoramus, to
whom each technical legal term had to be laboriously explained.

There was another difficulty, which applied not to me only, but to
the most intelligent auditor in the world.  Suppose you are trying
to expound to a man who has been stone-deaf from birth the meaning
of sound.  You can show him the physical effects of it, the brain
and sense reactions, but the FACT of sound you cannot bring home to
him by any diagram or calculation.  It is something for him without
sensory vividness, altogether outside his realised universe.  It
was the same with the Professor's exposition of strange new
dimensions, the discovery of which depended on logical processes.
I could not grasp them imaginatively, and, not having lived as he
had done with the arguments, I could not comprehend them
intellectually.

But here--very crudely and roughly--is the kind of thing he tried
to tell me.



He began by observing that in the blind instinct of man there was
something which the normal intellect lacked--a prevision of future
happenings, for which reason gave no warrant.  We all of us had
occasionally dim anticipations of coming events, lurking somewhere
in our nerves.  A man walking in the dark was aware subconsciously
of a peril and subconsciously braced himself to meet it.  He quoted
the sentences from Bergson which I have put at the head of the
chapter.  His aim was to rationalise and systematise this
anticipatory instinct.

Then he presented me with a theory of Time, for he had an orderly
mind, and desired to put first things first.  Here he pretty well
bogged me at the start.  He did not call Time a fourth dimension,
but I gathered that it amounted to that, or rather that it involved
many new dimensions.  There seemed to be a number of worlds of
presentation travelling in Time, and each was contained within a
world one dimension larger.  The self was composed of various
observers, the normal one being confined to a small field of
sensory phenomena, observed or remembered.  But this field was
included in a larger field and, to the observer in the latter,
future events were visible as well as past and present.

In sleep, he went on, where the attention was not absorbed, as it
was in waking life, with the smaller field of phenomena, the larger
field might come inside the pale of consciousness.  People had
often been correctly forewarned in dreams.  We all now and then
were amazed at the familiarity with which we regarded a novel
experience, as if we recognised it as something which had happened
before.  The universe was extended in Time, and the dreamer, with
nothing to rivet his attention to the narrow waking field, ranged
about, and might light on images which belonged to the future as
well as to the past.  The sleeper was constantly crossing the
arbitrary frontier which our mortal limitations had erected.

At this point I began to see light.  I was prepared to assent to
the conclusion that in dreams we occasionally dip into the future,
though I was unable to follow most of the Professor's proofs.  But
now came the real question.  Was it possible to attain to this form
of prevision otherwise than in sleep?  Could the observer in the
narrow world turn himself by any effort of will into the profounder
observer in the world of ampler dimensions?  Could the anticipating
power of the dreamer be systematised and controlled, and be made
available to man in his waking life?

It could, said the Professor.  Such was the result of the
researches to which he had dedicated the last ten years of his
life.  It was as a crowning proof that he wished an experiment at
Flambard.

I think that he realised how little I had grasped of his exposition
of the fundamentals of his theory.  He undertook it, I fancy, out
of his scrupulous honesty; he felt bound to put me in possession of
the whole argument, whether I understood it or not.  But, now that
he had got down to something concrete which I could follow, his
manner became feverishly earnest.  He patted my knee with a large
lean hand, and kept thrusting his gaunt face close to mine.  His
writing-pad fell into the lily-pond, but he did not notice it.

He needed several people for his experiment--the more the better,
for he wanted a variety of temperaments, and he said something,
too, about the advantage of a communal psychical effort . . .  But
they must be the right kind of people--people with highly developed
nervous systems--not men too deeply sunk in matter.  (I thought of
Evelyn and the Lamingtons and old Folliot.)  He deprecated
exuberant physical health or abounding vitality, since such
endowments meant that their possessors would be padlocked to the
narrower sensory world.  He ran over his selection again, dwelling
on each, summing each up with what seemed to me astounding
shrewdness, considering that he had met them for the first time two
days before.  He wanted the hungry and the forward-looking.
Tavanger and Mayot.  "They will never be content," he said, "and
their hunger is of the spirit, though maybe an earthy spirit . . ."
Myself.  He turned his hollow eyes on me, but was too polite to
particularise what my kind of hunger might be . . .  Charles
Ottery.  "He is unhappy, and that means that his hold on the
present is loose . . ."  Sally Flambard.  "That gracious lady lives
always sur la branche--is it not so?  She is like a bird, and has
no heavy flesh to clog her.  Assuredly she must be one."  Rather to
my surprise he added Reggie Daker.  Reggie's recent concussion, for
some reason which I did not follow, made him a suitable object . . .
Above all, there was Goodeve.  He repeated his name with
satisfaction, but offered no comment.

I asked him what form his experiment would take.

"A little training.  No more.  A little ascesis, partly of the
body, but mainly of the mind.  It must be disciplined to see what
it shall see."

Then, speaking very slowly, and drawing words apparently from as
deep a cavern as that from which he drew his breath, he explained
his plan.

There must be a certain physical preparation.  I am as unlearned in
medical science as in philosophy, but I gathered that recently
there had been some remarkable advances made in the study of the
brain and its subsidiary organs.  Very likely I am writing
nonsense, for the Professor at this point forgot about tempering
the wind to the shorn lamb, and poured forth a flood of
technicalities.  But I understood him to say that, just as the
cortex of the brain was the seat of the intellectual activities, so
the subcortical region above the spinal cord was the home of the
instinctive faculties.  He used a lot of jargon, which, not being
an anatomist, I could not follow, but he was obliging enough to
draw me a diagram in his pocket-book, the writing-pad being in the
lily-pond.

In particular there was a thing which he called an "intercalated
cell," and which had a very special importance in his scheme.  Just
as the faculty of sight, he said, had for its supreme function the
creation of an extended world, a world of space perception, so the
instinct which had its seat in this cell specialised in time-
perception . . .  I had been reading lately about telegnosis, and
mentioned that word, but he shook his head impatiently.  The
faculty he spoke of had nothing to do with telegnosis.  "You have
not understood my exposition," he said.  "But no matter.  It is
enough if you understand my purpose."

It was desirable to stimulate the functioning of this cell.  That
could only be done in a small degree.  A certain diet was
necessary, for he had discovered that the cell was temporarily
atrophied by the wrong foods.  Also there was a drug, which acted
upon it directly.

At this I protested, but he was quick to reassure me.  "On my
honour," he cried, "it is the mildest drug.  Its bodily effect is
as innocuous as a glass of tonic water.  But I have proved
experimentally that it lulls the other faculties, and very slightly
stimulates this one of which I speak."

Then he revealed his main purpose.

"I am still groping at the edge of mysteries," he said.  "My theory
I am assured is true, but in practice I can only go a very little
way.  Some day, when I am ashes, men will look at the future as
easily as today they look out of a window at a garden.  At present
I must be content to exemplify my doctrine by small trivial things.
I cannot enable you to gaze at a segment of life at some future
date, and watch human beings going about their business.  The most
I hope for is to show you some simple matter of sense-perception as
it will be at that date.  Therefore I need some object which I am
assured will be still in existence, and which I am also assured
will have changed from what it now is.  Name to me such an object."

I suggested, rather foolishly, the position of the planets in the
sky.

"That will not do, for now we can predict that position with
perfect certainty."

"A young tree?"

"The visible evidence of change would be too minute.  I cannot
promise to open up the future very far ahead.  A year--two years
maybe--no more."

"A building which we all know, and which is now going up?"

Again he shook his head.  "You may be familiar with the type of the
completed structure, and carry the picture of it in your memory . . .
There is only one familiar object, which continues and likewise
changes.  You cannot guess?  Why, a journal.  A daily or weekly
paper."

He leaned towards me and laid a hand on each of my knees.

"Today is the sixth of June.  Four days from now, if you and the
others consent, I will enable you to see for one instant of time--
no longer--a newspaper of the tenth day of June next year."

He lay back in his chair and had a violent fit of coughing, while I
digested this startling announcement . . .  He was right on one
point--a newspaper was the only thing for his experiment; that at
any rate I saw clearly.  I own to having been tremendously
impressed by his talk, but I was not quite convinced; the thing
appeared to be clean out of nature and reason.  You see, I had no
such stimulus to belief as a scientist would have had who had
followed his proofs . . .  Still, it seemed harmless.  Probably it
would end in nothing--the ritual prepared, and the mystics left
gaping at each other . . .  No.  That could scarcely happen, I
decided; the mystagogue was too impressive.

The Professor had recovered himself, and was watching me under
drooped eyelids.  All the eagerness had gone out of his face, but
that face had the brooding power and the ageless wisdom of the
Sphinx.  If he were allowed to make the experiment something must
happen.

Lady Flambard had promised to abide by my decision . . .  There
could be no risk, I told myself.  A little carefulness in diet,
which would do everybody good.  The drug?  I would have to watch
that.  The Professor seemed to read my thoughts, for he broke in:

"You are worrying about the drug?  It is of small consequence.  If
you insist, it can be omitted."

I asked how he proposed to prepare the subjects of his experiment.
Quite simply, he replied.  A newspaper--The Times, for example--
would be made to play a large part in our thoughts . . .  I
observed that it already played a large part in the thoughts of
educated Englishmen, and he smiled--the first time I had seen him
smile.  There was an air of satisfaction about him, as if he knew
what my answer would be.

"I see no objection to what you propose," I said at last.  "I warn
you that I am still a bit of a sceptic.  But I am willing, if you
can persuade the others."

He smiled again.  "With the others there will be no difficulty.
Our gracious hostess is already an enthusiast.  Before luncheon I
will speak to Mr Tavanger and Mr Mayot--and to Mr Ottery when he
returns.  I shall not speak to them as I have spoken to you."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because they are longing for such a revelation as I propose,
whereas you care not at all.  But I would beg of you to say a word
on my behalf to Sir Robert Goodeve.  His co-operation I especially
seek."

He raised with difficulty his huge frame from the wicker chair,
blinking his eyes in the hot sun, and leaning on a sundial as if he
were giddy.  I offered my arm, which he took, and together we went
under the striped awning, which shaded one part of the terrace,
into the coolness of the great hall.

You know the kind of banality with which, out of shyness, one often
winds up a difficult conversation.  I was moved to observe, as I
left him, that in four days I hoped to be introduced to a new
world.  He made no answer.  "To enter, waking, into the world of
sleep," I added fatuously.

Then he said a thing which rather solemnised me.

"Not only the world of sleep," he said.  "It is the world to which
we penetrate after death."

As I watched his great back slowly mounting the staircase, I had a
sudden feeling that into the peace of Flambard something fateful
and tremendous had broken.


IV


I do not know what Professor Moe said to Tavanger and Mayot.  I
knew both men, but not intimately, for they were a little too much
of the unabashed careerist for my taste, and I wondered how, in
spite of his confidence, he was going to interest their most
practical minds.

After luncheon I wanted to be alone, so I took my rod and went down
to the Arm, beyond the stretch where it ran among water-meadows.

It was a still, bright afternoon, with a slight haze to temper the
glare of the sun.  The place was delicious, full of the scents of
mint and meadowsweet, yellow flag-irises glowing by the water's
edge, and the first dog-roses beginning to star the hedges.  There
was not much of a rise, but I caught a few trout under the size
limit, and stalked and lost a big fellow in the mill pool.  But I
got no good of the summer peace, and my mind was very little on
fishing, for the talk of the morning made a merry-go-round in my
head.

I had moments of considering the whole business a farce, and
wondering if I had not made a fool of myself in consenting to it.
But I could not continue long in that mood.  The Professor's ardent
face would come before me like a reproachful schoolmaster's, and
under those compelling eyes of his I was forced back into something
which was acquiescence, if not conviction.  There was a shadow of
anxiety at the back of my mind.  The man was an extraordinary
force, with elemental powers of brain and will; was it wise to let
such an influence loose on commonplace people who happened to be at
the moment a little loose from their moorings?  I was not afraid of
myself, but what about the high-strung Sally, and the concussed
Reggie, and Charles Ottery in the throes of an emotional crisis?  I
kept telling myself that there was no danger, that nothing could
happen . . .  And then I discovered, to my amazement, that, if that
forecast proved true, I should be disappointed.  I wanted something
to happen.  Nay, I believed at the bottom of my heart that
something would happen.

In the smoking-room, before dinner, I found Charles Ottery and
Reggie Daker--a rather pale and subdued Reggie, with a bandage
round his head and a black eye.  They were talking on the window
seat, and when I entered they suddenly stopped.  When they saw who
it was, Charles called to me to join them.

"I hear you're in this business, Ned," he said.  "I got the
surprise of my life when the Professor told me that you had
consented.  It's a new line of country for a staid old bird like
you."

"The man's a genius," I replied.  "I see no harm in helping him in
his experiment.  Did you understand his argument?"

"I didn't try.  He didn't argue much, but one could see that he had
any quantity of scientific stuff behind him.  He hopes to make us
dream while we're awake, and I thought it such a sporting
proposition that I couldn't refuse.  It must all be kept deadly
secret, of course.  We have to get into the right atmosphere, and
tune our minds to the proper pitch, and it would never do to rope
in a born idiot like George Lamington.  He'd guy it from the
start."

"You were convinced by the Professor?" I asked.

"I won't say convinced.  I was interested.  It's an amusing game
anyhow, and I want to be amused."

Charles spoke with a lightness which seemed to me to be assumed.
He had obviously been far more impressed than he cared to admit.  I
could see that, since Pamela was giving him a difficult time, he
longed for something to distract him, something which was
associated with that world of new emotions in which he was living.

The lady's other suitor made no concealment.  Reggie was honestly
excited.  He was flattered, perhaps, by being made one of the
circle, and may have attributed his choice to his new role as an
authority on books.  At last he was being taken seriously.  Also
his recent concussion may have predisposed him to some research
into the mysteries of mind, for as he explained, he could not
remember one blessed thing that happened between putting Sir Vidas
at a fence which he cleared with a yard to spare, and finding
himself in bed with clouts on his head.  He was insistent on the
need of confidence in the experiment.  "What I mean to say is,
we've got to help the old boy out.  If we don't believe the thing
will come off, then it won't--if you see what I mean."

He dropped his voice as Evelyn Flambard and his terriers came
noisily into the room.

As I was going upstairs to dress, I found Goodeve's hand on my
shoulder.

"I hear you're on in this piece," he whispered jovially, as if the
whole thing was a good joke.

"And you?" I whispered back.

"Oh, I'm on.  I rather like these psychical adventures.  I'm a
hopeless subject, you know, and calculated to break up any séance.
I haven't got enough soul--too solidly tied to earth.  But I never
mind offering myself as a victim."

He laughed and passed into his bedroom, leaving me wondering how
the Professor had so signally failed with the man who was his
special choice.  He had obtained Goodeve's consent, so there was no
need of pressure from me, but clearly he had not made any sort of
convert of him.

At dinner we all tried to behave as if nothing special was afoot,
and I think we succeeded.  George Lamington had never had so good
an audience for his dreary tales.  He was full of racing
reminiscences, the point of which was the preternatural cunning
with which he had outwitted sundry rivals who had tried to beguile
him.  I never knew anyone whose talk was so choked with adipose
tissue, but he generally managed to wallow towards some kind of
point, which he and Evelyn found dramatic . . .  During most of the
meal I talked to his wife.  She could be intelligent enough when
she chose, and had a vigorous interest in foreign affairs, for she
was an Ambassador's daughter.  When I first knew her she had
affected a foreign accent, and professed to be more at home in
Paris and Vienna than in London.  Now she was English of the
English, and her former tastes appeared only in intermittent
attempts to get George appointed to a Dominion Governorship, where
he would most certainly have been a failure.  For the present,
however, the drums and trumpets did not sound for her.  The recent
addition to the Lamington fortunes had plunged her deep in the
upholstery of life.  She was full of plans for doing up their place
in Suffolk, and, as I am as ignorant as a coal-heaver about bric-à-
brac, I could only listen respectfully.  She had the mannerism of
the very rich, whose grievance is not against the price of things,
but the inadequacy of the supply.

The Professor's health appeared to have improved, or it may have
been satisfaction with his initial success, for he was almost
loquacious.  He seemed to have acute hearing, for he would catch
fragments of conversation far down the table, and send his great
voice booming towards the speaker in some innocent interrogation.
As I have said, his English was excellent, but his knowledge of
English life seemed to be on the level of a South Sea islander.  He
was very inquisitive, and asked questions about racing and horses
which gave Evelyn a chance to display his humour.  Among the
younger people he was a great success.  Pamela Brune, who sat next
to him, lost in his company her slight air of petulance and
discontent, and became once again the delightful child I had known.
I was obliged to admit that the Flambard party had improved since
yesterday, for certain of its members seemed to have shaken off
their listlessness.

While youth was dancing or skylarking on the terrace, and the rest
were set solidly to bridge, we met in the upper chamber in the
Essex wing, which had been given me as a sitting-room.  At first,
while we waited for the Professor, we were a little self-conscious.
Tavanger and Mayot, especially, looked rather like embarrassed
elders at a children's party.  But I noticed that no one--not even
Reggie Daker--tried to be funny about the business.

The Professor's coming turned us into a most practical assembly.
Without a word of further explanation he gave us our marching
orders.  He appeared to assume that we were all ready to surrender
ourselves to his directions.

The paper chosen was The Times.  For the next three days we were to
keep our minds glued to that news-sheet, and he was very explicit
about the way in which we were to do it.

First of all, we were to have it as much as possible before our
eyes, so that its physical form became as familiar to each of us as
our razors and cigarette cases.  We started, of course, with a
considerable degree of knowledge, for we were all accustomed to
look at it every morning.  I remember wondering why the Professor
had fixed so short a time as three days for this intensive
contemplation, till he went on to give his further orders.

This ocular familiarity was only the beginning.  Each of us must
concentrate on one particular part to which his special interest
was pledged--Tavanger on the first City page, for example, Mayot on
the leader page, myself on the Law Reports--any part we pleased.
Of such pages we had to acquire the most intimate knowledge, so
that by shutting our eyes we could reconstruct the make-up in every
detail.  The physical make-up, that is to say; there was no
necessity for any memorising of contents.

Then came something more difficult.  Each of us had to perform a
number of exercises in concentration and anticipation.  We knew the
kind of things which were happening, and within limits the kind of
topic which would be the staple of the next day's issue.  Well, we
had to try to forecast some of the contents of the next day's
issue, which we had not seen.  And not merely in a general sense.
We had to empty our minds of everything but the one topic, and
endeavour to make as full as possible a picture of part of the
exact contents of The Times next morning--to see it not as a
concept but as a percept--the very words and lines and headings.

For example.  Suppose that I took the Law Reports pages.  There
were some cases the decisions on which were being given by the
House of Lords today, and would be published tomorrow.  I could
guess the members of the tribunal who would deliver judgement, and
could make a fair shot at what that judgement would be.  Well, I
was to try so to forecast these coming pages that I could picture
the column of type, and, knowing the judges' idiosyncrasies, see
before my eyes the very sentences in which their wisdom would be
enshrined . . .  Tavanger, let us say, took the first City page.
Tomorrow he knew there would be a report of a company meeting in
which he was interested.  He must try to get a picture of the
paragraph in which the City Editor commented on the meeting . . .
If Mayot chose the leader page, he must try to guess correctly what
would be the subject of the first or second leader, and, from his
knowledge of The Times policy and the style of its leader-writers,
envisage some of the very sentences, and possibly the headings.

It seemed to me an incredibly difficult game, and I did not believe
that, for myself, I would get any results at all.  I have never
been much good at guessing.  But I could see the general lay-out.
Everything would depend upon the adequacy of the knowledge we
started with.  To make an ocular picture which would have any
exactitude, I must be familiar with the Lord Chancellor's
mannerisms, Tavanger with the mentality and the style of the City
Editor, and Mayot with the policy of the paper and the verbal
felicities of its leader-writers . . .  Some of us found the
prescription difficult, and Reggie Daker groaned audibly.

But there was more to follow.  We were also to try to fling our
minds farther forward--not for a day, but for a year.  Each morning
at seven--I do not know why he fixed that hour--we were to engage
in a more difficult kind of concentration--by using such special
knowledge as we possessed to help us to forecast the kind of
development in the world which June of next year would show.  And
always we had to aim at seeing our forecasts not in vague concepts,
but in concrete black and white in the appropriate corner of The
Times.

I am bound to say that, when I heard this, I felt that we had been
let in for a most futile quest.  We had our days mapped out in a
minute programme--certain hours for each kind of concentration.  We
would meet the Professor in my sitting-room at stated times . . .
I think that he felt the atmosphere sceptical, for on this last
point his manner lost its briskness and he became very solemn.

"It is difficult," he said, "but you must have faith.  And I myself
will help you.  Time--all time--is with us NOW, but we are confined
to narrow fields of presentation.  With my help you will enlarge
these fields.  If you will give me honestly all your powers, I can
supplement them."

Lastly he spoke of the necessary régime.  Too much exercise was
forbidden, for it was desirable that our health should be rather an
absence of ailments than a positive, aggressive well-being.  There
were to be no cold baths.  We might smoke, but alcohol was strictly
forbidden--not much of a hardship, for we were an abstemious lot.
As to diet, we had to behave like convalescents--no meat, not even
fish--nothing which, in the Professor's words, "possessed
automobility."  We were allowed weak tea, but not coffee.  Milk,
cheese, fruit, eggs and cereals were to be our staples.

It all reminded me rather eerily of the ritual food which used to
be given to human beings set apart for sacrifice to the gods.

"Our gracious hostess has so arranged it that the others will not
be curious," said the Professor, and Sally nodded a mystified head.

I went to bed feeling that I should probably get a liver attack
from lack of exercise, if I did not starve from lack of food.  Next
morning I found a Times on the tray which brought my morning tea.
Sally must have sent ten miles to a main-line station to get it.


V


It is difficult to write the consecutive story of the next three
days.  I kept a diary, but on consulting it, I find only a bare
record of my hours of meditation on that confounded newspaper, and
of our conferences with the Professor.  I began in a mood which was
less one of scepticism than of despair.  I simply did not believe
that I could get one step forward in this preposterous business.
But I was determined to play the game to the best of my capacity,
for Moe's talk last night had brought me fairly under his spell.

I did as I had been told.  I emptied my mind of every purpose
except the one.  I read the arguments in the case--it was an appeal
by an insurance company--and then sat down to forecast what the
report of the judgement would be, as given by The Times next day.
Of the substance of the judgement I had not much doubt, and I was
pretty certain that it would be delivered by the Lord Chancellor,
with the rest of the Court concurring.  I knew Boland's style,
having listened often enough to his pronouncements, and it would
have been easy enough to forecast the kind of thing he would say,
using some of his pet phrases.  But my job was to forecast what The
Times reporters would make him say--a very different matter.  I
collected a set of old copies of the paper and tried to get into
their spirit.  Then I made a number of jottings, but I found myself
slipping into the manner of the official Law Reports, which was not
what I wanted.  I remember looking at my notes with disfavour, and
reflecting that this guessing game was nothing but a deduction from
existing knowledge.  If I had made a close study of The Times
reports, I should probably get a good deal right, but since I had
only a superficial knowledge I would get little.  Moe's grandiose
theories about Time had nothing to do with it.  It was not a
question of casting the mind forward into a new field of
presentation, but simply of a good memory from which one made the
right deductions.

After my first attempt I went for a walk, and tried to fix my mind
on something different.  I had been making a new rock-garden at
Borrowby, and I examined minutely Sally's collection of Tibetan
alpines.  On my return the butler handed me a note.  The Professor
had decided to have conferences with each of us separately, and my
hour was three in the afternoon.

Before that hour I had two other bouts of contemplation.  I
wrestled honourably with the incurably evasive, and filled several
sheets of foolscap with notes.  Then I revised them, striking out
phrases which were natural enough to Boland, but unsuitable for a
newspaper summary.  The business seemed more ridiculous than ever.
I was simply chewing the cud of memories--very vague, inexact
memories.

The Professor received me in Sally's boudoir.  Now, the odd thing
was that in his presence I had no self-consciousness.  If anyone
had told me that I should have been unburdening my mind in a
ridiculous game to a queer foreigner, with the freedom of a novice
in the confessional, I should have declared it impossible.  But
there it was.  He sat before me with his gaunt face and bottomless
pits of eyes, very grave and gentle, and without being asked I told
him what I had been doing.

"That is a beginning," he said, "only a beginning.  But your mind
is too active as yet to PERCEIVE.  You are still in the bonds of
ratiocination.  Your past knowledge is only the jumping-off stage
from which your mind must leap.  Suffer yourself to be more
quiescent, my friend.  Do not torture your memory.  It is a deep
well from which the reason can only draw little buckets of water."

I told him that I had been making notes, and he approved.  "But do
not shape them as you would shape a logical argument.  Let them be
raw material out of which a picture builds itself.  Your business
is perception, not conception, and perception comes in flashes."
And then he quoted what Napoleon had once said, how after long
pondering he had his vision of a battle plan in a blinding flash of
white light.

He said a great deal more which I do not remember very clearly.
But one thing I have firm in my recollection--the compelling
personality of the man.  There must have been some strange hypnotic
force about him, for as he spoke I experienced suddenly a new
confidence and an odd excitement.  He seemed to wake unexpected
powers in me, and I felt my mind to be less a machine clamped to a
solid concrete base, than an aeroplane which might rise and soar
into space.  Another queer thing--I felt slightly giddy as I left
him.  Unquestionably he was going to make good his promise and
supplement our efforts, for an influence radiated from him, more
masterful than any I have ever known in a fellow mortal.  It was
only after we had parted that the reaction came, and I felt a faint
sense of antagonism, almost of fear.

In my last effort before dinner I struggled to follow his advice.
I tried to picture next day's Times.  The judgement, from its
importance, would occupy a column at least; I saw that column and
its heading, and it seemed to me to be split up into three
paragraphs.  I saw some of the phrases out of my notes, and one or
two new ones.  There was one especially, quite in Boland's manner,
which seemed to be repeated more than once--something like this:
"It is a legal commonplace that a contract of insurance is one
uberrimae fidei, which is vitiated by any nondisclosure, however
innocent, of material facts."  I scribbled this down, and found,
when I re-read it, that I had written uberrimi, and deplored my
declining scholarship.

At dinner our group were as glum as owls.  I did not know how the
Professor had handled the others, but I assumed that his methods
had been the same as with me, and certainly he had produced an
effect.  We all seemed to have something on our minds, and came in
for a good deal of chaff, the more as we refrained from so many
dishes.  Reggie Daker escaped, for he was a convalescent, but
Evelyn had a good deal to say about Goodeve's abstinence.  Goodeve
was supposed to be entering for a tennis contest which the young
people had got up, while George Lamington started the legend that I
was reducing my weight for the next Bar point-to-point.  Happily
this interest in our diet diverted their attention from our
manners, which must have been strange.  All seven of us were
stricken with aphasia, and for myself I felt that I was looking on
at a movie-show.

The Professor gathered us together in my sitting-room a little
before midnight.  As I looked at the others I had an impression of
a kindergarten.  Compared with him we all seemed ridiculously
young, crude, and ignorant.  Mayot's alert intelligence was only
the callow vivacity of a child; Tavanger's heavy face was merely
lumpish; even Goodeve looked the bright schoolboy.  As for Sally
and Reggie and Charles Ottery, something had happened to them which
drained the personality from their faces, and made them seem slight
and wispish.  Moe himself brooded over us like a vital Buddha.  I
had an uneasy sense of looking at a man who lived most of his time
in another world than ours.

He did not instruct us; he talked, and his talk was like a fierce
cordial.  Looking back at what I can remember of it, it does not
seem to make any kind of sense, but it had an overwhelming effect
on his hearers.  It was as if he were drawing aside curtain after
curtain, and, though we could not see into the land beyond the
curtains, we were convinced of its existence.  As I have said, I
cannot make sense of my recollection of it, but while I was
listening it seemed to be quite simple and intelligible . . .

He spoke of the instinct which gave perceptions, and of its immense
power as compared to our petty reason which turned percepts into
concepts.  He spoke of what he called the "eye of the mind," and
said the very phrase pointed to some intuition in the ordinary
being of a gift which civilisation had atrophied . . .  Then Reggie
Daker became important.  The Professor elicited from the coy Reggie
that in his childhood he had been in the habit of seeing abstract
things in a concrete form.  For Reggie the different days of the
week had each a special shape, and each of the Ten Commandments a
special colour.  Monday was a square and Saturday an oval, and
Sunday a circle with a segment bitten out; the Third Commandment
was dark blue, and the Tenth a pale green with spots.  Reggie had
thought of Sin as a substance like black salt, and the Soul as
something in the shape of a kidney bean . . .

It all sounds the wildest nonsense, but the Professor made out of
Reggie's confidences a wonderful thing.  His images might seem
ridiculous, but they showed perception struggling to regain its
rightful place.  He had some theory of the relation between the
concrete vision and the abstract thought, which he linked somehow
or other to his doctrine of Time.  In the retrospect I cannot
remember his argument, but he convinced me absolutely . . .  He had
a lot to say about the old astrologers and magic-makers who worked
with physical charms and geometrical figures, and he was clear that
they had had a knowledge of mysteries on which the door had long
been locked.  Also he talked about certain savage beliefs in
ancient Greece and in modern Africa--which he said were profundity
and not foolishness . . .  He spoke, too, about the world of
dreams, and how its fantasy had often a deeper reality than waking
life.  "We are children on the seashore," he said, "watching the
jetsam of the waves, and every fragment of jetsam is a clue to a
land beyond the waters which is our true home."

Not for a moment did any of us think him mad.  We sat like beggars,
hungrily picking up crumbs from a feast.  Of one thing I was
presently convinced.  Moe had cast a stronger spell over the others
than over myself.  I found my mind trying feebly to question some
of his sayings, to link them with the ordinary world of thought;
but it was plain that the rest accepted everything as inspired and
infallible gospel.

I dare say I was tired, for I slept more soundly than I had done
for weeks.  I was called at seven, and set myself, according to
instructions, to a long-range forecast--what would be likely to
happen on June tenth a year ahead.  It sounds a futile job, and so
I found it.  My head soon grew dizzy with speculations, some of
them quite outside the legal sphere which I had marked out as my
own.  But I found one curious thing.  I had lost the hopelessness
which had accompanied my contemplations of the previous day.  I
BELIEVED now that I could make something of the task.  Also I found
my imagination far more lively.  I convinced myself that in a
year's time there would be a new Lord Chancellor and a new Lord of
Appeal.  I beheld them sitting in the Lords, but the figure on the
Woolsack was so blurred that I could not recognise it.  But I saw
the new Lord clearly, and his face was the face of young Molsom,
who had only taken silk two years ago.  Molsom's appointment was
incredible, but, as often as the picture of the scarlet benches of
the Upper House came before me, there was Molsom, with his dapper
little figure and his big nose and his arms folded after his habit.
I realised that I was beginning to use the "mind's eye," to see
things, and not merely to think them.

The Times was brought to my bedside at eight, and I opened it
eagerly.  There was the judgement in my case, delivered, as I had
expected, by Boland.  It ran not to a whole column, but to less
than three-quarters; but I had been right on one point--it was
broken up into three paragraphs.  The substance of the judgement
was much as I had foreseen, but I had not been lucky in guessing
the wording, and Boland had referred to only two of the cases I had
marked down for him . . .

But there was one amazing thing.  He had used the sentence about
uberrimae fidei--very much in the form I had anticipated.  More--
far more.  The Times had that rare thing, a misprint: it had
uberrimi, the very blunder I had made myself in my anticipatory
jottings.

This made me feel solemn.  My other correct anticipations might be
set down to deductions from past knowledge.  But here was an
indubitable instance of anticipatory perception.



From that hour I date my complete conversion.  I was as docile now
as Sally, and I stopped trying to reason.  For I understood that,
behind all the régime and the exercises, there was the tremendous
fact of Professor Moe himself.  If we were to look into the future
it must be largely through his eyes.  By the sheer power of
intellect he had won a gift, and by some superabundant force of
personality he was able to communicate in part that gift to others.

I am not going to attempt to write in detail the story of the next
two days, because external detail matters little; the true history
was being made in the heads of the seven of us.  I went obediently
through the prescribed ritual.  I pored over The Times as if my
salvation depended upon it.  I laboured to foresee the next day's
issue, and I let my mind race into the next year.  I felt my
imagination becoming more fecund and more vivid, and my confidence
growing hourly.  And always I felt behind me some mighty impetus
driving me on and holding me up.  I was in the charge of a Moses,
like the puzzled Israelites stumbling in the desert.

I spent the intervals with a rod beside the Arm, and there I first
became conscious of certain physical symptoms.  An almost morbid
nervous alertness was accompanied by a good deal of bodily
lassitude.  This could not be due merely to the diet and lack of
exercise, for I had often been sedentary for a week on end and
lived chiefly on bread and cheese.  Rather it seemed that I was
using my nervous energy so lavishly in one direction that I had
little left for the ordinary purposes of life . . .  Another thing.
My sight is very good, especially for long distances, and in dry-
fly fishing I never need to use a glass to spot a fish.  Well, in
the little fishing I did that day, I found my eyes as good as ever,
but I noted one remarkable defect.  I saw the trout perfectly
clearly, but I could not put a fly neatly over him.  There was
nothing wrong with my casting; the trouble was in my eye, which had
somehow lost its liaison with the rest of my body.  The fly fell on
the water as lightly as thistledown, but it was many inches away
from the fish's nose.

That day the Professor made us fix our minds principally on the
lay-out of June tenth, next year.  He wanted to have that date
orientated for us with relation to other recurrent events--the
Derby, Ascot, the third reading of the Budget, the conference of
Empire Journalists and so forth.  Also he provided us with sheets
of blank paper, the size of The Times, which were to be, so to
speak, the screen on which the magic lantern of our prevision cast
its picture.  He was very careful, almost fussy, about this
business.  The sheets had nothing printed on them, but they had to
be exactly right in size, and he rejected the first lot that Sally
provided.

But I cannot say that I paid much attention to these or any other
details.  I was in a mood of utter obedience, simply doing what I
was told to do to the best of my power.  I was in the grip of a
power which I had no desire to question, and which by some strong
magic was breaking down walls for me and giving me a new and
marvellous freedom.  For there was no doubt about it--I could now
set my mind at will racing into the future, and placing before me
panoramas which might or might not be true, but which had all the
concrete sharpness of reality.  There were moments when I seemed
almost to feel one sphere of presentation give place to another, as
the driver of a car changes gear.

Dinner that night--Sally had sent the Professor to bed after tea--
was as lively as the meal of the previous evening had been dull--
lively, that is, for the rest of the party, not for us seven.  For
we seven suddenly developed a remarkable capacity for making sport
for the populace, by a kind of mental light-heartedness, similar to
my clumsiness with the trout.  Our minds seemed to have jolted out
of focus.  There is a species of bêtise, which I believe at
Cambridge is named after some don, and which consists in missing
completely the point of a metaphor or a joke, in setting the heavy
heel of literalness on some trivial flower of fancy.  It is a fault
to which the Scots are supposed to be prone, and it is the staple
of most of the tales against that nation.  The classic instance is
Charles Lamb's story of how he was once present at a dinner given
in honour of Burns, at which a nephew of the poet was to be
present.  As the company waited on the arrival of the guest, Lamb
remarked that he wished the uncle were coming instead of the
nephew: upon which several solemn Scotsmen arose to inform him that
that was impossible, because Burns was dead.

That night we seven became unconscious Caledonians.  Reggie Daker
began it, by asking a ridiculous question about a story of
Evelyn's.  At first Evelyn looked wrathful, suspecting irony, and
then, realising Reggie's guilelessness, he turned the laugh against
that innocent.  The extraordinary thing was that we all did it.
Sally was the worst, and Charles Ottery a good second.  Even Mayot
fell into the trick--Mayot, who had a reputation for a quick and
caustic wit.  George Lamington was talking politics.  "A Bengali
Cabinet in England," George began, and was interrupted by Mayot
with, "But, hang it, man, there's no Bengali Cabinet in England!"
The fact that I noted our behaviour would seem to prove that I was
not so deeply under the spell as the others.

We made sport, as I have said, for the company, and some of them
enjoyed the pleasant sense of superiority which comes when people
who have a reputation for brains make fools of themselves.  Yet the
mirth struck me as a little uneasy.  There was a sense somewhere
that all was not well, that odd things were going on beneath the
surface.  Pamela Brune, I remember, let her eyes rest on Charles
Ottery as she left the room, and in those eyes I read bewilderment,
almost pain.

Next morning we began the drug.  There were in all three doses--the
first with morning tea, the second at three in the afternoon, and
the third after dinner.  For myself I felt no particular effects,
but I can testify that that day, the last day of our preparation,
my mood changed.

For the first time I found some dregs of fear in my mind.  My
confidence in Moe was in no way abated, but I began to feel that we
were moving on the edge of things, not mysterious only but
terrible.  My first cause for uneasiness was the Professor himself.
When I met him that morning I was staggered by his looks.  His
colour was like white wax, and the gauntness of his face was such
that it seemed that not only flesh had gone but muscle and blood,
so that there remained only dead skin stretched tight over dead
bone.  His eyes were alive, and no longer placid pools, but it was
a sick life, and coughing shook him as an autumn wind shakes the
rafters of a ruined barn.  He professed to be well enough, but I
realised that his experiment was draining his scanty strength.  The
virtue was going out of him into us, and I wondered if before the
appointed time the dynamo might not fail us.

My other anxiety was Goodeve.  He had begun by being the most
sceptical of the lot of us, but I noticed that at each conference
with Moe he grew more silent, his face more strained, and his eyes
more unquiet.  There was now something positively furtive in them,
as if he were in dread of some menace springing out at him from
ambush.  He hung upon the Professor's words with dog-like devotion,
very odd in a personality so substantial and well defined.  By
tacit consent none of us ever spoke of the experiment, as if we
felt that any communication among ourselves might weaken the strong
effluence from our leader's mind, so I could not put out any
feelers.  But the sight of Goodeve at luncheon increased my lurking
fear that we were getting very near the edge of some indefinable
danger.

I felt very drowsy all day, and dozed in a garden chair between the
exercises.  I usually dream a good deal of nights, but now I slept
like a log--which may have been due to nervous fatigue, or more
likely to the switching of the dream-world over into the waking
hours.  The strangest thing about the whole experience was that I
never felt one moment of boredom.  I was doing something infinitely
monotonous, and yet my powers bent themselves to it as readily as
if every moment were a new excitement.  That, too, rather
frightened me.  If this stimulus was so potent for a flat nature
like mine, what must be its power over more mercurial souls?

I must record what happened at tea.  Nearly all the guests were
there, and a cheerful party of young people had come over from a
neighbouring house.  Now Sally had a much-loved terrier, a Dandie
Dinmont called Andrew, who had been on a visit to the vet and had
only returned that afternoon.  Andrew appeared when tea was
beginning, and was received by his mistress with every kind of
endearment.  But Andrew would not go near her; he fled, knocking
over a table, and took refuge between Evelyn's legs, and nothing
would draw him from his sanctuary.  He used to be a friend of mine,
but he met my advances with a snap and the most dismal howling.
There he stood, pressed against Evelyn's shins, his teeth bared,
his big head lowered and bristling.  He seemed to have no objection
to the others, only to Sally and me.  Then Mayot came in with
Tavanger, and again Andrew wailed to the skies.  Charles Ottery and
Reggie received the same greeting; Goodeve, too, who sat down next
to Evelyn, and thereby drove Andrew yelping to a corner.  After
that he recovered a little and accepted a bit of bread and butter
from Pamela Brune, by whose side he had ensconced himself.  I was
deeply interested in the whole performance, for it was not humanity
that Andrew disliked, but that section of it which was engaged in
the experiment.  I was pondering on this marvel, when there came a
howl like nothing on earth, and I saw Andrew streaking out of the
drawing-room, slithering over rugs and barging into stools, with
Evelyn after him.  I also saw that Moe had just entered by another
door, looking like a death-in-life.

The Professor sat himself by me, and drank his tea thirstily.  The
tiny cup seemed almost too great a weight for the mighty hand to
raise.  He turned to me with the ghost of a smile.

"That dog pays tribute to our success," he said.  "The animal has
instinct and the man reason, and on those terms they live together.
Let a man attain instinct and the animal will flee from him.  I
have noted it before."

Some neighbours came to dinner, so we made a big party, and the
silent conclave passed unnoticed, though Sally's partner must have
wondered what had become of her famous sparkle, for she was the
palest and mutest of spectres.  I felt myself an observer set at a
distance not only from the ordinary members of the party but from
our coterie--which proves that I must have been less under Moe's
spell than my companions.  For example, I could not only watch with
complete detachment the behaviour of the cheerful young people, and
listen to George Lamington's talk of his new Lancia, but I could
observe from without Sally's absent-mindedness and stammered
apologies, and Goodeve's look of unhappy expectation, and Charles
Ottery's air of one struggling with something on the edge of
memory, and Tavanger's dry lips--the man drank pints of water.  One
thing I noticed.  They clearly hated those outside our group.
Sally would shrug her shoulders as if unbearably tried, and Mayot
looked murderously now and then at Evelyn, and Charles Ottery, who
sat next to Pamela Brune, regarded her with hard eyes.  I was
conscious of something of the same sort myself, for most of my
fellows had come to look to me like chattering mannikins.  They
bored me, but I did not feel for them the overwhelming distaste
which was only too apparent in the other members of the group.
Their attitude was the opposite of Miranda's cry--


     "O brave new world
      That has such people in't."


I doubt if they thought the world brave, and for certain they had
no illusion about its inhabitants.

It was a very hot night, and I went out beyond the terrace to sniff
the fragrance of Sally's rock garden.  As I sat dangling my legs
over the parapet I felt a hand on my arm, and turned to find Pamela
Brune.

"Come for a walk, Uncle Ned," she said.  "I want to talk to you."

She slipped her arm through mine, and we went down the long alley
between yews at the end of the Dutch garden.  I felt her arm
tremble, and when she spoke it was in a voice which she strove to
make composed.

"What has happened to you all?" she asked.  "I thought this
Whitsuntide was going to be such fun, and it began well--and now
everybody is behaving so oddly, Sally hasn't smiled for two days,
and Reggie is more half-witted than ever, and you look most of the
time as if you were dropping off to sleep."

"I am pretty tired," I replied.

"Oh yes, I know," she said impatiently.  "There are excuses for
you--and for Sally perhaps, for she has been overdoing it badly . . .
But there is a perfect epidemic of bad manners abroad.  Tonight
at dinner I could have boxed Charles Ottery's ears.  He was
horribly rude."

"You haven't been very kind to him," I said lamely.

She withdrew her hand.

"What do you mean?  I have always been civil . . . and he has been
very, very unkind to me . . .  I hate him.  I'll never speak to him
again."

Pamela fled from me down the shadowed alley like a nymph surprised
by Pan, and I knew that she fled that I might not see her tears.

Later that night we had our last conference with Moe, for next
morning at seven in my sitting-room we were to meet for the final
adventure.  It was a short conference, and all he seemed to do was
to tighten the cords with which he had bound us.  I felt his
influence more sharply than ever, but I was not in such perfect
thraldom as the others, for with a little fragment of my mind I
could still observe and think objectively . . .

I observed the death-mask of the Professor.  That is the only word
by which to describe his face.  Every drop of blood seemed to have
fled from it, and in his deep pits of eyes there was no glimmer of
life.  It was a mask of death, but it was also a mask of peace.  In
that I think lay its compelling power.  There was no shadow of
unrest or strife or doubt in it.  It had been purged of human
weakness as it had been drained of blood.  I remembered "grey-
haired Saturn, quiet as a stone."

I thought--what did I think?  I kept trying as a desperate duty to
make my mind function a little on its own account.  I cast it back
over the doings of the past days, but I could not find a focus . . .
I was aware that somehow I had acquired new and strange gifts.
I had become an adept at prospecting the immediate future, for,
though I made many blunders, I had had an amazing percentage of
successes.  But the Professor did not set much store apparently by
this particular expertise, and my main task had been long-range
forecasts a year ahead.  These, of course, could not be verified,
but I had managed to create a segment of a future world as shot
with colour and as diversified with incident as the world of sense
around me . . .

About that there were some puzzles which I could not solve.  In
guessing the contents of the next day's Times I had a mass of
concrete experience to build on, but I had not that experience to
help me in constructing what might happen across the space of a
year, with all a year's unaccountable chances . . .  Then I
reflected that the power of short-range forecasts had come in only
a small degree from the exercise of my reason upon past experience.
That was but a dim light: it was the daemonic power of the
Professor's mind which had given me those illuminations.  Could the
strong wings of that spirit carry seven humdrum folk over the
barriers of sense and habit into a new far world of presentation?

That was my last thought before I fell asleep, and I remember that
I felt a sudden horror.  We were feeding like parasites upon
something on which lay the shadow of dissolution.


VI


I was up and dressed long before seven.  The drug, or the diet,
or the exercises, or all combined, made me sleepy during the day,
but singularly alert at first waking.  Alert in body, that is--
the feeling that I could run a mile in record time, the desire
for something to task my bodily strength.  But my brain these
last mornings had not been alert.  It had seemed a passive stage
over which a pageant moved, a pageant of which I had not the
direction . . .  But this morning the pageant had stopped, the
stage was empty, or rather it was brooded over by a vast vague
disquiet.

It was a perfect midsummer morning, with that faint haze in the
distance which means a hot noon.  The park under my window lay
drenched and silvered with dew.  The hawthorns seemed to be bowed
over the grasses under their weight of blossom.  The birds were
chattering in the ivy, and two larks were singing.  Just under me,
beyond the ha-ha, a foal was standing on tottering legs beside its
mother, lifting its delicate nozzle to sniff the air.  The Arm,
where the sun caught it, was a silver crescent, and there was a
little slow drift of amethyst smoke from the head keeper's cottage
in a clump of firs.  The scene was embodied, deep, primordial
peace, and though, as I have said, my ordinary perception had
become a little dulled, the glory of the June morning smote me like
a blow.

It wakened a thousand memories, and memories of late had been rare
things with me . . .  I thought of other such dawns, when I had
tiptoed through wet meadows to be at the morning rise--water
lilies, and buckbean, and arrowhead, and the big trout feeding;
dawn in the Alps, when, perched on some rock pinnacle below the
last ridge of my peak, I had eaten breakfast and watched the world
heave itself out of dusk into burning colour; a hundred hours when
I had thanked God that I was alive . . .  A sudden longing woke in
me, as if these things were slipping away.  These joys were all
inside the curtain of sense and present perception, and now I was
feeling for the gap in the curtain, and losing them.  What mattered
the world beyond the gap?  Why should we reach after that which God
had hidden? . . .

Fear, distaste, regret chased each other through my mind.
Something had weakened this morning.  Had the mystica catena
snapped? . . .  And then I heard a movement in my sitting-room, and
turned away from the window.  My mind might be in revolt, but my
will was docile.



We sat in a semicircle round the Professor.  It was a small room
with linen-fold panelling, a carved chimney-piece, and one picture--
a French hunting scene.  The morning sun was looking into it, so
the blinds were half-lowered.  We sat in a twilight, except in one
corner, where the floor showed a broad shaft of light.  I was next
to Sally at the left-hand edge of the circle.  That is all I
remember about the scene, except that each of us had a copy of The
Times--not the blank paper we had had before, but that morning's
Times, the issue for the tenth of June in that year of grace.

I must have slipped partly out of the spell, for I could use my
eyes and get some message from them.  I dare say I could have
understood one of The Times leaders.  But I realised that the
others were different.  They could not have made sense of one word.
To them it was blank white paper, an empty slate on which something
was about to be written.  They had the air of dull, but obedient
pupils, with their eyes chained to their master.

The Professor wore a dressing-gown, and sat in the writing-table
chair--deathly white, but stirred into intense life.  He sat
upright, with his hands on his knees, and his eyes, even in the
gloom, seemed to be probing and kneading our souls . . .  I felt
the spell, and consciously struggled against it.  His voice helped
my resistance.  It was weak and cracked, without the fierce
vitality of his face.

"For three minutes you will turn your eyes inward--into the
darkness of the mind which I have taught you to make.  Then--I will
give the sign--you will look at the paper.  There you will see
words written, but only for one second.  Bend all your powers to
remember them."

But my thoughts were not in the darkness of the mind.  I looked at
the paper and saw that I could read the date and the beginning of
an advertisement.  I had broken loose; I was a rebel, and was glad
of it.  And then I looked at Moe, and saw there something which
sent a chill to my heart.

The man was dying--dying visibly.  With my eyes I saw the body
shrink and the jaw loosen as the vital energy ebbed.  Now I knew
how we might bridge the gap of Time.  His personality had lifted us
out of our world, and, by a supreme effort of brain and will, his
departing soul might carry us into a new one--for an instant only,
before that soul passed into a timeless eternity.

I could see all this, because I had shaken myself free from his
spell, yet I felt the surge of his spirit like a wind in my face.
I heard the word "Now," croaked with what must have been his last
breath.  I saw his huge form crumple and slip slowly to the floor.
But the eyes of the others did not see this; they were on The Times
pages.

All but Sally.  The strain had become more than she could bear.
With a small cry she tilted against my shoulder, and for the few
seconds before the others returned to ordinary consciousness and
realised that Moe was dead, she lay swooning in my arms.



In that fateful moment, while the soul of a genius was quitting the
body, five men, staring at what had become the simulacrum of a
Times not to be printed for twelve months, read certain things.

Mayot had a vision of the leader page, and read two sentences of
comment on a speech by the Prime Minister.  In one sentence the
Prime Minister was named, and the name was not that of him who then
held the office.

Tavanger, on the first City page, had a glimpse of a note on the
formation of a great combine, by the Anatilla Corporation, of the
michelite-producing interests of the world.

Reggie Daker, on the Court page, saw an account of the departure of
an archaeological expedition to Yucatan, and his name appeared as
one of the members.

Goodeve and Charles Ottery--the one on the page opposite the
leaders and the other on the first page of the paper--read the
announcement of their own deaths.




II

MR ARNOLD TAVANGER


"For mee (if there be such a thing as I)
Fortune (if there be such a thing as shee)
Spies that I beare so well her tyranny,
That she thinks nothing else so fit for mee."

JOHN DONNE.


I


Tavanger's life was a little beyond my beat.  Your busy city
magnate does not dine out a great deal, and as a rule he fights shy
of political circles.  Before that Flambard Whitsuntide I had met
him occasionally at public dinners, and once I had had to cross-
examine him in a case in the Commercial Court, and a very tough
proposition I found him.  I was attracted by something solid and
dignified in his air, and I thought his taciturnity agreeable; your
loquacious financier is the dullest of God's creatures.  During the
early autumn I found myself occasionally wondering whether Tavanger
had seen anything under Moe's spell, for he had had the look of a
convinced disciple.  I was certain that he would play up to
whatever vision he had been vouchsafed, for your financier is as
superstitious as a punter and will act boldly on hints which he
never attempts to rationalise.  Then, in the beginning of the
Michaelmas term, fortune brought us together.

I was invited to arbitrate in a case sent me by a firm of city
solicitors who often briefed me.  It concerned the ownership of a
parcel of shares in a Rhodesian company.  Tavanger had bought and
paid for them, but there was some question about the title, and
another party, representing a trust estate, had put forward a
claim.  It was a friendly affair, for the trustees only wished to
protect themselves, and instead of making a case in court of it
they had agreed, to save expense, to submit it to me as arbitrator--
a growing practice in those days when there was little money to
spend on litigation.  The case, which turned on the interpretation
of certain letters and involved a fairly obvious point of law,
presented no great difficulty.  I sat for four hours on a Saturday
afternoon, and, after a most amicable presentation of both sides, I
found for Tavanger.

This happened at the end of October, and interfered with a Saturday
to Monday which I had meant to spend at Wirlesdon.  It upset
Tavanger's plans also, and, as we were leaving my chambers, he
suggested that, since we were both left at a loose end, we should
dine together.  I agreed willingly, for I had taken a strong liking
to Tavanger.  He had given his evidence that afternoon with a
downright reasonableness which impressed me, and I had enjoyed
watching his strong, rather sullen face, enlivened by his bright
humorous eyes.  His father, I had been told, had come originally
from Geneva, but the name had been anglicised to rhyme with
"scavenger," and the man himself was as typical a Briton as you
could picture.  He had made a great reputation, and, incidentally,
a great fortune, by buying wreckage and working it up into sound
business.  In whatever direction he moved he had a crowd of
followers who trusted his judgement, but they trusted him blindly,
for he was not communicative.  He had done bold things, too, and
more than once had defied City opinion and won.  His name stood
high for integrity as well as for acumen and courage, but he was
not regarded as companionable.  He was a bachelor, living alone in
a big house in Kensington, and his hobbies were a hospital, which
he ran brilliantly, and his collection of Dutch pictures.  Nobody
claimed to know him well, and I own to having been a little
flattered when he showed a taste for my company.  I had a notion
that he might want to talk about Moe.

He didn't, for Flambard was never mentioned.  But he had a good
deal to tell me about the Rhodesian company, the Daphne
Concessions, which had been the subject of the arbitration.  I had
observed with some curiosity that he had taken special pains to
acquire the seventeen thousand ordinary shares, and had paid a
stiffish price for them, and I had wondered what purpose was at the
back of his head.  For when the papers had first come to me I had
happened to meet the stockbroker who looked after my investments,
and had asked him casually about the Daphne company.  He had shaken
his head over it.  The shares were not quoted, he told me, and were
presumably strongly held, but the mine had been going for five
years without paying a dividend.  Personally he did not believe in
the future of michelite, but if I wanted a gamble there were plenty
of shares of the chief producing company, the American Anatilla, to
be had at round about sixteen shillings.

I am ashamed to say that I had only a very hazy idea what michelite
was, and from Tavanger I sought information.  I learned that it was
a metal used chiefly in the manufacture of certain kinds of steel,
and that it could also be applied to copper and iron.  It gave
immense hardness and impenetrability, and complete freedom from
corrosion, and could therefore be used, like ferrochrome, for the
construction of aeroplanes, projectiles, and armour-plates; but the
product was less costly than chrome steel and easier to work.
Tavanger thought that its use must soon be greatly extended,
especially in the automobile industry.  The difficulty lay in
smelting the ore, a process which required very special fluxes and
was still an expensive one; nevertheless, in spite of the cost,
many industries would find it indispensable.  It was found in
large, but still undefined, quantities in a very few areas.  In the
Urals, of course, the home of all minerals, but there the deposits
were little worked.  In two places in the Balkans and one in
Transylvania, where the owners were a German company, the Rosas-
Sprenger, which had been the pioneer in the whole business.  In
Central America--Nicaragua, I think--under the Anatilla
Corporation.  These two companies, the Anatilla and the Rosas-
Sprenger, virtually controlled the product now on the market.

"Prosperous?" he said in reply to my question.  "No, not yet.  They
live in hope.  The Anatilla has Glaubsteins behind it, and can
afford to wait.  The Rosas-Sprenger, I fancy, has a bit of a
struggle, but they have Sprenger with them, who first discovered
how to smelt the stuff--I'm told he is one of the greatest living
metallurgical chemists.  Sooner or later their chance is bound to
come, unless the engineering trade goes bust altogether."

"How about our friends of the afternoon?" I asked.

"Oh, the Daphne is not yet a serious producer.  It has always been
a bit short of working capital.  But we have assets the others
don't possess.  They have to mine their ore, and have pretty high
working costs, whereas we quarry ours--quarry it out of a range of
hills which seems to be made of it.  Also our stuff is found in a
purer form, and the smelting is simpler--not easy or cheap, but
easier and cheaper than theirs.  When a boom comes we shall be in a
favourable position . . .  Would you like some shares?  I daresay
it could be managed."

"No, thank you," I said.  "I have no time to watch speculations, so
I stick to gilt-edged . . .  You have a solid lump of the ordinary
stock.  Are you looking for more?"

He laughed.  "For all I can get.  I have taken a sudden fancy to
michelite, and I usually back my fancies.  The mischief is to know
where to find the shares.  Daphnes seem to be held by a legion of
small folk up and down the world, none of whom want to sell.  I
have to stalk them like wild deer.  You're not in this business and
won't queer my pitch, so I don't mind telling you that I mean to
have a controlling interest in Daphnes before I'm many months
older."

After that we talked about Hobbema.  As I walked back to my rooms I
had two clear impressions in my mind.  One was that I should not
like to be up against Tavanger in any business on which his heart
was set.  There was that in the set of his jaw and the dancing
light in his eyes which made him look immensely formidable.  The
second was that he knew something about the Daphne Concession which
others did not know, and knew it with absolute certainty.  As I
went to bed it suddenly occurred to me that he might have got this
knowledge at Flambard, but as to its nature I could make no guess.


II


I did not meet Tavanger again till the week after Christmas.  An
unexpected piece of business had brought me up from Devonshire, and
it lasted so long that I was forced to spend the night in Town.  It
was that dead patch at the end of December when London seems more
deserted than in August, and, since I felt disinclined to face the
howling desert of a club, I dined at the Savoy.  There I found
Tavanger marooned for the same cause.  He had been shooting in
Norfolk, and had been dragged up to an urgent conference.

He looked a different man from my last recollection of him--leaner
in body, thinner in the face, deeply weathered, with the light
patches round the eyes which you get from long blinking in a strong
sun.  I asked him what he had been doing with himself, and he
laughed.

"Wait till I have ordered my dinner and I'll tell you.  I'm short
of good food and trying to make up for it.  I want to get my teeth
into decent beef again . . .  What about wine?  It's cold enough
for Burgundy."

When he had arranged a menu to his satisfaction he began an account
of his recent doings.  It lasted through the meal and long
afterwards over a pipe in my rooms.  Tavanger was a good narrator
in his dry way, and instead of an evening of sleepy boredom I had
excellent entertainment, for I heard a tale of activities which few
middle-aged men would have ventured upon . . .



Having got a list of the chief shareholders in Daphne Concessions,
he set out to bargain for their holdings in the speediest way, by
personal visitation.  I gathered that time was of the essence of
the business.

First of all he flew to Berlin.  There he had an interview with the
president of one of the big air services, and, having a good deal
of purchase, obtained certain privileges not usually granted to the
travelling public.  The said president gave a dinner for him at the
Adlon, at which he met two people with whom he had long
conversations.  One was Dilling, the airman, one of the few German
aces who had survived the War, who was now busy blazing the trails
in commercial aviation.  He was specialising at the moment in
trans-African flights, and hoped to lower the record from Europe to
Cape Town.  Tavanger made friends with Dilling, who was a simple
soul wholly engrossed in his profession.

The other guest was Sprenger, the metallurgical chemist who had
first discovered the industrial uses of michelite.  Sprenger was an
untidy little man of about sixty, the kind of genius who has never
reaped the fruit of his labours and is inclined to be peevish.  But
he went on doggedly with these labours under considerable
difficulties, living on certain small fees for patent rights and on
a modest salary paid him by the not very flourishing Rosas-Sprenger
company.  Tavanger had a remarkable gift of winning people's
confidence, and he made Sprenger talk freely, since the latter had
no notion that his companion had any michelite interests, though he
showed an intelligent appreciation of the metal's possibilities.
Three things Tavanger discovered.  The first was that Sprenger was
ill-informed about the Daphne Concessions, from which it might be
deduced that his company was equally in the dark.  Therefore no
immediate competition for the Daphne shares need be looked for from
that quarter.  The second was that he was desperately loyal to his
own company, and would never be seduced into a rival concern.  This
solved one problem for Tavanger, who had been ready to pay a
considerable price for Sprenger's services.  The third was that the
little chemist was toiling away at michelite problems, especially
the major difficulty of the smelting costs, and was inclined to
hope that he was on the brink of a great discovery.  Any such
discovery would of course belong to his company, but Tavanger
ascertained that the Rosas-Sprenger had an agreement with the
Anatilla to pool any devices for lessening costs.  The Anatilla no
doubt provided some of the working capital which enabled the German
company to experiment.

The dinner convinced Tavanger that there was no time to be lost.
He flew to Salonika by the ordinary Middle East service, and then
changed into a seaplane which took him to Crete.  The famous
antiquary, Dr Heilbron, was busy there with his Minoan excavations.
Heilbron had some years before been engaged in investigating the
Zimbabwe remains, and had spent a considerable time in Rhodesia.
For some reason or other he had been induced to put money into
Daphne Concessions at the start, and owned a block of five thousand
shares which he had almost forgotten about.

I could guess at the masterly way in which Tavanger handled
Heilbron and got what he wanted.  He appeared to be the ordinary
traveller, who had dropped in on his way to Egypt to get a glimpse
of the antiquary's marvellous work.  Being well read, he no doubt
talked intelligently on the Minoan civilisation.  He let drop that
he was a businessman with South African interests, and drew from
Heilbron the story of his Daphne investment.  The antiquary was
comfortably off, but excavation consumes a good deal of money, and
he seems to have jumped at Tavanger's offer to buy his shares,
which he had long ago written off as worthless when he thought of
them at all.  Tavanger offered a good price for them, but insisted
on Heilbron consulting his stockbroker.  The answer was favourable,
and the transfer was arranged by cable.

While in Crete Tavanger received another cable which perturbed him.
The big block of Daphne shares which he had acquired was not all in
his own name; the registered holders of a third were his nominees
and quite obscure people.  This had been done with a purpose.  He
wanted to know if the Anatilla people were coming into the market;
if they did, they were not likely to approach him in the first
instance, but to go for the humbler holders.  The cable told him
that an offer had been made to one of his nominees--a handsome
offer--and that this had been traced by his intelligence department
as coming through two firms who were known to handle a good deal of
Glaubsteins' European business.

Tavanger had had a long experience of Glaubsteins' methods, and he
was aware that they did not enter any market for fun.  If they were
buyers of Daphnes at all they were out for complete control, and,
being people of his own stamp, would not let the grass grow under
their feet.  They had obviously started on the road which was to
lead to a great combine.  The bulk of the shareholders were in
South Africa, and he was morally certain that at this moment
representatives of Glaubsteins' were on steamers bound for the
Cape.  Well, it behoved him to get there before them, and that
could not be done by returning to England and embarking in a South
African boat.  No more could it be done by the Messageries line and
the East African route.  A bolder course was required, and, faced
with apparently insurmountable difficulties, Tavanger began to
enjoy himself.

He cabled to the Aero president in Berlin and to Dilling, and then
set his face for Egypt.  Here he struck a snag.  There was no
direct air line from Crete to Cairo, and if he went back to
Salonika the journey would take him six days.  But he managed to
pick up a coasting steamer from the Piraeus, and by bribing the
captain induced it to start at once.  The weather grew vile, and
the wretched boat took five days to wallow through the Eastern
Mediterranean, while Tavanger, a bad sailor, lay deathly sick in a
smelly cabin.  He reached Cairo, pretty much of a physical wreck,
only one day earlier than by the comfortable Salonika route.

But, as it happened, that one day made all the difference, for it
enabled him to catch Dilling before he started on his southward
journey.  With Dilling he had all sorts of trouble, for the airman,
in spite of the recommendation of the Aero president, showed
himself most unwilling to take a passenger.  He was flying a new
type of light machine, and he wanted as his companion a skilled
mechanic.  I don't know how Tavanger managed to overcome his
reluctance; he called in some of his airmen friends at the Cairo
station, and he got the British authorities to make an international
favour of the thing, but I fancy the chief weapons were his uncommon
persuasive power and his personal magnetism.  Anyhow, after a hectic
afternoon of argument, Dilling consented.

Then began a wild adventure.  Tavanger had never flown much, only
pottered between Croydon and the continent, and now he found
himself embarked on a flight across the wildest country on earth,
with a pilot who was one-fourth scientist and three-fourths
adventurer, and who did not value his own or anybody else's life at
two pins.  Tavanger admitted to me that at first his feet were
cold.  Also, Dilling on a big flight was a poor companion.  His
eagerness affected his temper, and his manners were those of a
slave-driver and his conversation mostly insults.

As long as they were in the Nile Valley things went well enough.
But in the basin of the Great Lakes they ran into a chain of
thunderstorms, and after that into head-winds and massive sheets of
rain.  The bucketing they got played the deuce with the light
machine, and engine trouble developed.  They had to make a forced
landing in very bad forest ground on the skirts of Ruwenzori, where
they found that something had gone wrong with the petrol pump and
that some of the propeller and cylinder bolts had worked loose.
For forty hours they toiled in a tropical jungle cloaked in a hot
wet mist, Dilling cursing steadily.  Tavanger said that before they
had got the machine right he had learned a good deal about air
mechanics.  When they started again they found that they had two
lizards and a snake in their fuselage!

After that they had many minor troubles, and Dilling's temper had
become so vile, owing to his disappointment at the rate of speed,
that Tavanger had much ado to keep the peace.  He himself had
contracted a chill, and for the last ten hours of the journey had a
high temperature and a blinding headache.  When they reached
Bulawayo and he crawled out of his seat he could scarcely stand.
Dilling, having made port, became a new man.  He kissed Tavanger on
both cheeks, and wept when he said goodbye.

Tavanger went to an hotel, sent for a doctor, and cured himself in
two days.  He could not afford to waste time in bed.  Also he
permitted himself to be interviewed by the local press, for his
journey with Dilling, in spite of the delays, had been something of
a feat.  He told the reporters that he had come to South Africa for
a holiday, but that he hoped, while in the country, to have a look
round.  This of course meant business, for Tavanger's was a famous
name in the circles of high finance.  He mentioned no particular
line, but hinted at the need for the establishment in South Africa
of a certain type of steel-making plant to meet local requirements,
with a possible export trade to India.  He had considerable steel
interests in Britain, and all this sounded quite natural.  He knew
that it would be cabled home, and would be read by the Anatilla
people, and it seemed to him the best camouflage.  If rumours got
about that he was enquiring about Daphnes, they would be connected
with this steel scheme and not taken too seriously.

He now controlled twenty-two thousand odd of the hundred thousand
ordinary shares.  There were five people in South Africa--about a
dozen possibles, but five in particular--from whom he hoped to
acquire the balance which would give him a controlling interest.
The first was a retired railway engineer, who lived at Wynberg,
near Cape Town.  The second was a lawyer who had a seat in the
Union Parliament, and the third was a Johannesburg stockbroker.
The other two were a mining engineer employed at a Rhodesian copper
mine, and a fruit farmer in the Salisbury district.  Tavanger
decided that he had better begin at Cape Town, for that was the
point which the Anatilla emissaries would reach first, and he must
not be forestalled.  The Anatilla people were of course in
possession of all the information about the shareholders that he
had himself.

So, reflecting that he was playing a game which seemed to belong to
some crude romance of boyhood, Tavanger flew to Cape Town, and put
up at the Mount Nelson.  He had various friends in the city, but
his first business was to study a passenger list of the incoming
steamers.  The tourist traffic to South Africa does not begin till
after Christmas, so he found the lists small, and most of the
people, with the help of the shipping clerks, he was able to
identify.  None of the passengers gave an American address, but he
decided that the Anatilla representative was one or other of two
men, Robson and Steinacker.  Then he gave a luncheon to some of his
friends, and proceeded to sound them cautiously about the retired
railway man at Wynberg, whose name was Barrowman.

It turned out that he was a well-known figure, a vigorous youth of
sixty whose hobbies were botany and mountaineering.  Now, Tavanger
in his youth had been an active member of the Alpine Club--he had
begun climbing as a boy with his Swiss relations--and he was
delighted to find a ready-made link.

It was arranged that he should meet Barrowman at dinner at the
house of one of his friends at Muizenberg, and presently, on a
superb moonlit night, with the long tides breaking beneath them on
the white sands, he sat on the Muizenberg stoep next a trim little
man who overflowed with pent-up enthusiasms.  Barrowman had made a
comfortable small fortune by his profession, and was now bent on
sampling all the enjoyments which had been crowded out of a busy
life.  He was a bachelor, and had settled at Wynberg in order that
he might be near Table Mountain, on whose chimneys and traverses he
was the chief authority.  Tavanger conjured up his early ardour,
asked eagerly concerning the different routes and the quality of
the rock, and gladly accepted Barrowman's offer to take him next
day to the summit of the mountain.

They spent some very hot and fatiguing hours in kloofs which were
too full of vegetable matter for comfort, and reached the summit by
a difficult and not over-safe chimney.  Tavanger was badly out of
practice and training, and at one point was in serious danger.
However, the top was won at last, and Barrowman was in the best of
tempers, for it pleased him to find one, who was some years his
junior and who had done most of the legendary courses in the Alps,
so manifestly his inferior in skill and endurance.  So as they ate
their luncheon on the dusty tableland he expanded happily.

It appeared that he thought of retiring for good to England.  He
had climbed everything in South Africa worth climbing, including
the buttresses of Mont Aux Sources, and he wanted to be nearer the
classic ground of his hobby.  Also he dreamed of an English garden
where he could acclimatise much of the Cape flora . . .  He would
like, however, to realise some of his South African holdings.  All
his eggs were in the one basket, and, if he was going to settle at
home, he ought to distribute them better.  In England one could not
watch South African stocks with the requisite closeness.  "The
trouble," he said, "is that it's a rotten time to change
investments.  Good enough for the buyer, but the devil for the
seller . . .  Do you know anything about these things?"

"A little," Tavanger answered.  "You see, they're more or less my
profession.  I should be delighted to help you.  If your things are
sound,