Presently the door opened and some one came in softly half-way across the room, and then stopped. The Professor turned wearily and saw that the maid stood there and was trying to speak.
She seemed flustered, he noticed, and her face was rather white.
“What’s the matter now, Emily?” he asked feebly, yet irritably.
“Please, Professor—there’s a gentleman—” and there she stuck.
“Some one to see me? The doctor again already?” queried the patient, wondering in a vague, absent way why the girl should seem so startled.
As he spoke there was a sound of footsteps on the landing outside—heavy footsteps.
“But please, Professor, sir, it’s not the doctor,” the maid faltered, “only I couldn’t get his name, and I couldn’t stop him, an’ he said you expected him—and I think he looks like—” The approaching footsteps frightened the girl so much that she could not find words to complete her description. They were just outside the door now.
“—like a perliceman!” she finished with a rush, backing towards the door as though she feared the Professor would leap from his bed to demolish her.
“A policeman!” gasped Mr. Parnacute, unable to believe his ears. “A policeman, Emily! In my apartment?”
And before the sick man could find words to express his particular annoyance that any stranger (above all a constable) should intrude at such a time, the door was pushed wide open, the girl had vanished with a flutter of skirts, and the tall figure of a man stood in full view upon the threshold, and stared steadily across the room at the occupant of the bed on the other side.
It was indeed a policeman, and a very large policeman. Moreover, it was the policeman.
The instant the Professor recognized the familiar form of the man from the park his anger, for some quite unaccountable reason, vanished almost entirely; the sharp vexation he had felt a moment before died away; and, sinking back exhausted among the pillows, he only found breath to ask him to close the door and come in. The fact was, astonishment had used up the small store of energy at his disposal, and for the moment he could think of nothing else to do.
The policeman closed the door quietly and moved forward towards the centre of the room, so that the circle of light from the shaded lamp at the head of the bed reached his figure but fell just short of his face.
The invalid sat up in bed again and stared. As nothing seemed to happen he recovered his scattered wits a little.
“You are the policeman from the park, unless I mistake?” he asked feebly, with mingled pomposity and resentment.
The big man bowed in acknowledgment and removed his helmet, holding it before him in his hand. His face was peculiarly bright, almost as though it reflected the glow of a bull’s-eye lantern concealed somewhere about his huge person.
“I thought I recognized you,” went on the Professor, exasperated a little by the other’s self-possession.
“Are you perhaps aware that I am ill—too ill to see strangers, and that to force your way up in this fashion —!” He left the sentence unfinished for lack of suitable expletives.
“You are certainly ill,” replied the constable, speaking for the first time; “but then—I am not a stranger.” His voice was wonderfully pitched and modulated for a policeman.
“Then, by what right, pray, do you dare to intrude upon me at such a time?” snapped the other, ignoring the latter statement.
“My duty, sir,” the man replied, with a rather wonderful dignity, “knows nothing of time or place.”
Professor Parnacute looked at him a little more closely as he stood there helmet in hand. He was something more, he gathered, than an ordinary constable; an inspector perhaps. He examined him carefully; but he understood nothing about differences in uniform, of bands or stars upon sleeve and collar.
“If you are here in the prosecution of your duty, then,” exclaimed the man of careful mind, searching feverishly for some possible delinquency on the part of his small staff of servants, “pray be seated and state your business; but as briefly as possible. My throat pains me, and my strength is low.” He spoke with less acerbity. The dignity of the visitor began to impress him in some vague fashion he did not understand.
The big figure in blue bowed again, but made no sign of advance.
“You come from X— Station, I presume?” Parnacute added, mentioning the police station round the corner. He sank deeper into his pillows, conscious that his strength was becoming exhausted.
“From Headquarters—I come,” replied the colossus in a deep voice.
The Professor had only the vaguest idea what Headquarters meant, yet the phrase conveyed an importance that somehow was not lost upon him. Meanwhile his impatience grew with his exhaustion.
“I must request you, officer, to state your business with dispatch,” he said tartly, “or to come again when I am better able to attend to you. Next week, no doubt —”
“There is no time but the present,” returned the other, with an odd choice of words that escaped the notice of his perplexed hearer, as he produced from a capacious pocket in the tail of his overcoat a notebook bound with some shining metal like gold.
“Your name is Parnacute?” he asked, consulting the book.
“Yes,” answered the other, with the resignation of exhaustion.
“Simon Parnacute?”
“Of course, yes.”
“And on the third of April last,” he went on, looking keenly over the top of the note-book at the sick man, “you, Simon Parnacute, entered the shop of Theodore Spinks in the Lower P— Road, and purchased from him a certain living creature?”
“Yes,” answered the Professor, beginning to feel hot at the discovery of his folly.
“A bird?”
“A bird.”
“A thrush?”
“A thrush.”
“A singing thrush?”
“Oh yes, it was a singing thrush, if you must know.”
“In money you paid for this thrush the sum of one shilling and six pennies?” He emphasized the “and” just as the bird-fancier had done.
“One and six, yes.”
“But in true value,” said the policeman, speaking with grave emphasis, “it cost you a great deal more?”
“Perhaps.” He winced internally at the memory.
He was so astonished, too, that the visit had to do with himself and not with some of his servants.
“You paid for it with your heart?” insisted the other.
The Professor made no reply. He started. He almost writhed under the sheets.
“Am I right?” asked the policeman.
“That is the fact, I suppose,” he said in a low voice, sorely puzzled by the catechism.
“You carried this bird away in a cardboard box to E— Gardens by the river, and there you gave it freedom and watched it fly away?”
“Your statement is correct, I think, in every particular. But really—this absurd cross examination, my good man!”
“And your motive in so doing,” continued the policeman, his voice quite drowning the invalid’s feeble tones, “was the unselfish one of releasing an imprisoned and tortured creature?”
Simon Parnacute looked up with the greatest possible surprise.
“I think—well, well!—perhaps it was,” he murmured apologetically. “The extraordinary singing—it was extraordinary, you know, and the sight of the little thing beating its wings pained me.”
The big policeman put away his note-book suddenly, and moved closer to the bed so that his face entered the circle of lamplight.
“In that case,” he cried, “you are my man!”
“I am your man!” exclaimed the Professor, with an uncontrollable start.
“The man I want,” repeated the other, smiling. His voice had suddenly grown soft and wonderful, like the ringing of a silver gong, and into his face had come an expression of wistful tenderness that made it positively beautiful. It shone. Never before, out of a picture, had he seen such a look upo
n a human countenance, or heard such tones issue from the lips of a human being. He thought, swiftly and confusedly, of a woman, of the woman he had never found—of a dream, an enchantment as of music or vision upon the senses.
“Wants me!” he thought with alarm. “What have I done now? What new eccentricity have I been guilty of?”
Strange, bewildering ideas crowded into his mind, blurred in outline, preposterous in character.
A sensation of cold caught at his fever and overmastered it, bathing him in perspiration, making him tremble, yet not with fear. A new and curious delight had begun to pluck at his heart-strings.
Then an extravagant suspicion crossed his brain, yet a suspicion not wholly unwarranted.
“Who are you?” he asked sharply, looking up. “Are you really only a policeman?” The man drew himself up so that he appeared, if possible, even huger than before.
“I am a World-Policeman,” he answered, “a guardian, perhaps, rather than a detective.”
“Heavens above!” cried the Professor, thinking of madness and the crimes committed in madness.
“Yes,” he went on in those calm, musical tones that before long began to have a reassuring effect upon his listener, “and it is my duty, among many others, to keep an eye upon eccentric people; to lock them up when necessary, and when their sentences have expired, to release them. Also,” he added impressively, “as in your case, to let them out of their cages without pain—when they’ve earned it.”
“Gracious goodness me!” exclaimed Parnacute, unaccustomed to the use of expletives, but unable to think of anything else to say.
“And sometimes to see that their cages do not destroy them—and that they do not beat themselves to death against the bars,” he went on, smiling quite wonderfully. “Our duties are varied and numerous. I am one of a large force.”
The man learned in political economy felt as though his head were spinning. He thought of calling for help. Indeed, he had already made a motion with his hand towards the bell when a gesture on the part of his strange visitor restrained him.
“Then why do you want me, if I may ask?” he faltered instead.
“To mark you down; and when the time comes to let you out of your cage easily, comfortably, without pain. That’s one reward for your kindness to the bird.” The Professor’s fears had now quite disappeared. The policeman seemed perfectly harmless after all.
“It’s very kind of you,” he said feebly, drawing his arm back beneath the bed-clothes. “Only—er—I was not aware, exactly, that I lived in a cage.”
He looked up resignedly into the man’s face.
“You only realize that when you get out,” he replied. “They’re all like that. The bird didn’t quite understand what was wrong; it only knew that it felt miserable. Same with you. You feel unhappy in that body of yours, and in that little careful mind you regulate so nicely; but, for the life of you, you don’t quite know what it is that’s wrong. You want space, freedom, a taste of liberty. You want to fly, that’s what you want!” he cried, raising his voice.
“I—want—to—fly?” gasped the invalid.
“Oh,” smiling again, “we World-Policemen have thousands of cases just like yours. Our field is a large one, a very large one indeed.”
He stepped into the light more fully and turned sideways.
“Here’s my badge, if you care to see it,” he said proudly.
He stooped a little so that the Professor’s beady eyes could easily focus themselves upon the collar of his overcoat. There, just like the lettering upon the collar of an ordinary London policeman, only in bright gold instead of silver, shone the constellation of the Pleiades. Then he turned and showed the other side, and Parnacute saw the constellation of Orion slanting upwards, as he had often seen it tilting across the sky at night.
“Those are my badges,” he repeated proudly, straightening himself up again and moving back into the shadow.
“And very fine they are, too,” said the Professor, his increasing exhaustion suggesting no better observation. But with the sight of those starry figures had come to him a strange whiff of the open skies, space, and wind—the winds of the world.
“So that when the time comes,” the World-Policeman resumed, “you may have confidence. I will let you out without pain or fear just as you let out the bird. And, meanwhile, you may as well realize that you live in a cage just as cramped and shut away from light and freedom as the thrush did.”
“Thank you; I will certainly try,” whispered Parnacute, almost fainting with fatigue.
There followed a pause, during which the policeman put on his helmet, tightened his belt, and then began to search vigorously for something in his coattail pockets.
“And now,” ventured the sick man, feeling half fearful, half happy, though without knowing exactly why, “is there anything more I can do for you, Mr. World-Policeman?” He was conscious that his words were peculiar yet he could not help it. They seemed to slip out of their own accord.
“There’s nothing more you can do for me, sir, thank you,” answered the man in his most silvery tones. “But there’s something more I can do for you! And that is to give you a preliminary taste of freedom, so that you may realize you do live in a cage, and be less confused and puzzled when you come to make the final Escape.”
Parnacute caught his breath sharply—staring open-mouthed.
With a single stride the policeman covered the space between himself and the bed. Before the withered, fever-stricken little Professor could utter a word or a cry, he had caught up the wasted body out of the bed, shaken the bed-clothes off him like paper from a parcel, and slung him without ceremony across his gigantic shoulders. Then he crossed the room, and producing the key from his coat-tail pocket, he put it straight into the solid wall of the room. He turned it, and the entire side of the house opened like a door.
For one second Simon Parnacute looked back and saw the lamp, and the fire, and the bed. And in the bed he saw his own body lying motionless in profound slumber.
Then, as the policeman balanced, hovering upon the giddy edge, he looked outward and saw the network of street-lamps far below, and heard the deep roar of the city smite upon his ears like the thunder of a sea.
The next moment the man stepped out into space, and he saw that they were rising up swiftly towards the dark vault of sky, where stars twinkled down upon them between streaks of thin flying clouds.
III
Once outside, floating in the night, the policeman gave his shoulder a mighty jerk and tossed his small burden into free space.
“Jump away!” he cried. “You’re quite safe!”
The Professor dropped like a bullet towards the pavement; then suddenly began to rise again, like a balloon. All traces of fever or bodily discomfort had left him utterly. He felt light as air, and strong as lightning.
“Now, where shall we go to?” The voice sounded above him.
Simon Parnacute was no flyer. He had never indulged in those strange flying-dreams that form a weird pleasure in the sleep-lives of many people. He was terrified beyond belief until he found that he did not crash against the earth, and that he had within him the power to regulate his movements, to rise or sink at will. Then, of course, the wildest fury of delight and freedom he had ever known flashed all over him and burned in his brain like an intoxication.
“The big cities, or the stars?” asked the World-Policeman.
“No, no,” he cried, “the country—the open country! And other lands!” For Simon Parnacute had never travelled. Incredible as it may seem, the Professor had never in his life been farther out of England than in a sailing-boat at Southend. His body had travelled even less than his imagination. With this suddenly increased capacity for motion, the desire to race about and see became a passion.
“Woods! Mountains! Seas! Deserts! Anything but houses and people!” he shouted, rising upwards to his companion without the smallest effort.
An intense longing to see the desolate, unfrequented
regions of the earth seized him and tore its way out into words strangely unlike his normal and measured mode of speech. All his life he had paced to and fro in a formal little garden with the most precise paths imaginable. Now he wanted a trackless world. The reaction was terrific. The desire of the Arab for the desert, of the gipsy for the open heaths, the “desire of the snipe for the wilderness”—the longing of the eternal wanderer—possessed his soul and found vent in words.
It was just as though the passion of the released thrush were reproducing itself in him and becoming articulate.
“I am haunted by the faces of the world’s forgotten places,” he cried aloud impetuously. “Beaches lying in the moonlight, all forsaken in the moonlight—” His utterance, like the bird’s, had become lyrical.
“Can this be what the thrush felt?” he wondered.
“Let’s be off then,” the policeman called back. “There’s no time but the present, remember.” He rushed through space like a huge projectile. He made a faint whistling noise as he went.
Parnacute followed suit. The lightest desire, he found, gave him instantly the ease and speed of thought.
The policeman had taken off his helmet, overcoat and belt, and dropped them down somewhere into a London street. He now appeared as a mere blue outline of a man, scarcely discernible against the dark sky—an outline filled with air. The Professor glanced down at himself and saw that he, too, was a mere outline of a man—a pallid outline filled with the purple air of night.
“Now then,” sang out this “Bobby-of-the-World.”
Side by side they shot up with a wild rush, and the lights of London, town and suburbs, flashed away beneath them in streaming lines and patches. In a second darkness filled the huge gap, pouring behind them like a mighty wave. Other streams and patches of light succeeded quickly, blurred and faint, like lamps of railway stations from a night express, as other towns dropped past them in a series and were swallowed up in the gulf behind.
The Second Algernon Blackwood Megapack Page 21