We glared at one another. "It is only an analogy, of course," he reminded me, "and it has the fallacy that all analogies must hold."
I got an inkling of what he meant, but when he talked in similar fashion about time, I could not follow him. It gave me a sick headache merely.
From the books I read and the thoughts I thought, I gathered anyhow that brains, tongues and pens have speculated freely enough about these very rare "total disappearances." I gathered likewise that such speculations were somewhat negligible, and that only a mere handful who had made practical experiments—among them undoubtedly Vronski and my cousin—could offer anything of tangible value. Among the sparse elect, none the less, I caught strange whispers. A notion grew in the deepest part of me that another dimension in space could explain this wiping out of a physical body, and that such a one, dropping away into a direction at right angles to the three we know so Well, drops obviously and naturally clean out of sight. He passes into a region no sense of ours can ever plumb. Out of our known, familiar space he has dropped elsewhere—and otherwise as well, since a new direction in space involves necessarily a new dimension in time.
Time, as we know it, runs forward only in a line; but in two dimensions it would run backwards, or parallel as well. Not only could he be in two places at once, but he could be also in two times at once. He could do two things—two things otherwise mutually self-exclusive—at once.
"At any given moment," said my fellow-prisoner, "you have a choice of doing several things. Of these you choose one. Actually, you might choose any of the others. You select one, however, and do it. That one thing actualises."
I nodded, as much as my approaching headache allowed.
"Now,.listen: In time of more than one dimension you could choose more than one thing. You could do several things at once— and they all would actualise. . . ."
At which point my sick headache usually developed suddenly, so that my friend continued to talk without my understanding.
I acquired, at any rate, a sort of smattering of comprehension.
"Anyone escaping into other time and space," he finished later, "would come back, you see, at the point he left, even if years of our time had passed meanwhile—years or a few minutes only. . . ."
Such explanations, I found, supported themselves, loosely enough, with the jargon of Relativity. Einstein, the magician thinker, was called in to help. To me it remained a "line of speculation," than which the sober mind would say no more.
Mantravers, at any rate, disappeared . . . and since he vanished when war was declared, and reappeared shortly after the Armistice, there were those who sneered that he had been in hiding. This was untrue, absurd as well. No more patriotic Englishman ever lived. Nor was his courage questionable. The date of his going and returning had nothing to do with the War. The Great War, indeed, was almost a trivial item in his strange experience, and his disappearance, I incline to think, was enforced, and singularly enforced.
It was January 1919 when I found myself in London again. My intention, backed by a deep instinct, was to go back to the house where Sydney Mantravers had left me standing on the steps: to enter the building, if still unoccupied; to walk through all its rooms and passages again. I wished to do this alone, and to do it before I had spoken with Dr. Vronski, or even seen him. Vronski's talk and information could come later. I kept my return secret from him.
If I never quite explained or justified this deep instinct even to myself, I recognised that no mere morbid curiosity lay in it anywhere. Clearest in my mind was the desire to make this visit and inspection before I became immersed again in the world of ordinary everyday affairs, that is, before some inner mood or attitude acquired in my years of solitude had dissipated. During those prison years of introspection, thought, speculation, even of experiment as well, something had come to life in me that contact with the bustling outer world, I knew, must smash to pieces. It was as though I had dreamed of another order of existence, had even fringed the perception of entirely new categories. Two sets of values, at any rate, appeared in some depth of my being that was only accessible to me with the greatest difficulty and effort. I was aware of them, no more than that; the slightest mistake, of clumsiness or stupidity, on my part would send them plunging for ever beyond my reach. This extremely delicate balance I perceived. The disappearance of Mantravers was concerned with the set of values I had dreamed of, possibly just begun to understand, to acquire even, in my bitter years of prison life. My instinct was to visit the house while this still remained and before its fading, already in progress, resulted in complete forgetfulness.
Did I expect to see him too, actually to see some figure or outline of the man who had disappeared over four years ago and was now legally dead? I cannot truthfully say, although I believe some uncanny, rather awful hope lurked deep down in me. ... I reached London at noon, my return to England, my presence in town, a well-kept secret; not wasting a minute, I was walking up the Bayswater side-street by the afternoon, the January daylight already fading, and it must have been close on four o'clock when the house came into view, plastered, I noticed, still with agents' boards, and therefore unlet, unoccupied. The stained and dirty window-panes had no blinds, the patchy walls showed no signs of recent paint, the air of neglect and disuse were the same as before, only more marked. The key, in case of need, the very key my cousin had handed to me himself, was in my pocket, kept carefully all these years. In the pocket of my mackintosh my fingers gripped it tightly, even a trifle feverishly, as though it might somehow melt away and defeat my purpose. I kept feeling it over, indeed, as a man might finger bank-notes to make quite sure he still had them safely.
A definite realisation, moreover, came to me as I walked up the steps—that I was both exhilarated and frightened, and that while the exhilaration contained an immense, a biting curiosity, the fear was partly due to a sudden wave of depression that had come upon me. Was this depression, this lowering of vitality, I remember asking myself, similar to what the two ladies experienced just as they passed the threshold into their unique otherworldly Adventure in Versailles? The vivid detail rose up from my reading in my prison camp. It was certainly not a physical fear, it was perhaps a mental, a spiritual hint of terror, as best I could diagnose it, for the idea appeared that my ordinary equipment of mind and body contained no weapon to help me in what might be coming. Yet a touch of horror I had known before "going over the top" seemed in it too. My hand, at any rate, was trembling as I took the big key and began to fit it into the lock of the front door—at which very moment a noise of tapping on glass somewhere above me made me pause. It sounded like fingers drumming or tapping faintly on a window-pane. Startled, I looked up quickly, and there, at a window on the second floor, two storeys above, I saw a face peering down at me through the dusty pane, a face I recognised, the' face of my cousin, Sydney Mantravers. Looking over his shoulder, and also staring down at me, was the outline of a second face, but a face that was wholly strange to me. I had just time to note that it wore a small moustache, when both the faces withdrew sharply backwards from the window so that they were no longer visible, and it was in this same instant that my fingers, fumbling with the key automatically, discovered that the door was not locked at all but was indeed already open into the hall.
It is astonishing what thoughts, and how trivial ones at that, start up in the mind as it meets an unusual shock or crisis, for at this moment, when an unearthly acceptance and a vehement incredulity clashed together, the one definite impression I could recognise was— that youthful appearance. This flashed over me even as the faces of both withdrew, and it was not the visage of a possible de Frasne, dead these thirty years and more, that made my flesh creep, but the unquestionable assurance that Mantravers, whom I knew to be over sixty, looked hardly forty. The amazing fact that he had "disappeared" foi an interval of four years seemed left out of account at this instant; it was the uncanny air of having missed decay for a generation that leaped back into my mind with horror. Then, before I knew what m
y shaking legs were doing, they had taken me automatically into the hall, and the front door closed behind me with a bang. Standing there in the semi-darkness, it was all I could do to hold myself together, and I mean my "self" precisely, for at first everything I was accustomed to hold on to in a time of stress seemed wavering like a jelly that must any instant dissolve. To hold myself steady, to keep control, was what occupied my mind in that first moment of entering the hall; there was no room in me for anything but this tremendous effort; and in making it, a cold perspiration burst out all over my skin. I only recall that the exhilaration had left me entirely, while the depression had greatly intensified. The curiosity, if of rather an icy kind, remained, but it was fed by a lowering vitality.
The house, as I went in, was very still, no sound audible. It was also dark, all outlines heavily draped, no edges visible. I stood stock-still, shivering and afraid, even unable, to move. I could not stir a foot. There was a queer sense that everything had stopped moving the instant I came in, that a crowd had rushed into hiding, that my arrival was anticipated by a fraction of a second; but this, I knew, was due to imagination only. Actually, nothing but emptiness and vacancy surrounded me. The gloom concealed no living thing.
An unoccupied, unfurnished house at the best of times is a ghostly, even a hostile, place, but this particular one, wrapped in the wintry dusk, turned the perspiration cold against my skin. The conviction that upstairs, perhaps even now watching me, was a man who had been "dead" four years, a companion with him who had left the world by suicide long before him, that this awful pair, hidden among the untenanted rooms above, stood waiting to look me in the eyes, perchance to touch me, ask me questions, reveal their knowledge and their presence—this all gave me a sensation of dread and horror that paralysed my muscles. I stood there as though turned into stone, while the echoes from the banging door rolled on through the series of unoccupied halls and chambers, then died away into a silence that was even worse. Had I seen Mantravers at that moment, heard his desccnding step, or caught the sound of his voice calling me by name, I believe my heart must have stopped dead. Already it was beating like a troubled engine, my breathing difficult as well. Afraid to go forward, afraid to turn back and go out, my shaking body, leaning for support against the wall, stood where it was, my powers of self-control gone all to pieces.
What on earth was I to do next? The answer came unexpectedly. A light flashed suddenly across the ceiling, darting its bright beam swiftly from point to point, and with it came the sound of footsteps. Someone was moving cautiously along the landing above, and the flash came obviously from a shifting electric torch. I slipped back into the comer, every nerve taut with horrified anticipation.
"Who's there?" called a man's voice loudly. "Who is it?"
I made an attempt to answer, but no sound left my throat. The same second the steps quickened, left the upper landing, and began to come down the carpetless stairs. I saw the dark outline of a man shading his eyes with one hand from the glare of a torch he shifted to and fro in front of him. He came down slowly, cautiously, treading each board with care. A dozen steps from the bottom he stopped and turned the full light of the brilliant torch upon me where I crouched in the angle against the wall. I stood helpless in this dazzling blaze, the stream showing me up mercilessly from head to foot, the man who held it of course invisible.
"Oh, it's you!" came a voice of startled surprise. "So you're back in England! That explains it . . ." as the speaker turned the light upon himself, so that I recognised, with a surprise equal to his own, but with a relief he could hardly have guessed, the face and figure of Dr. Vronski.
I could think of nothing to say or do except what I did say and do:
I pointed overhead. "Hush! Hush!" I cried in a stifled whisper.
"He's up there. I've just seen him. He tapped on the window—
beckoned. He's come back, by God--- "
"Who?" he asked, his voice, it seemed to me, strangely calm, his manner quiet and matter of fact, the odd composure of the man adding to my horror.
"Mantravers," I whispered. "I saw him at the window. He tapped. Somebody was with him. Up there on the next floor close behind you."
He did not even turn. He had reached my side by now. His face was close to mine, so that I saw the fierce light shining in his eyes, but there was no excitement in him. Cold and collected as a fish he seemed.
"He is expecting you," he said, as quietly as you please. "The other will not stay—stay here, I mean. He has led him to the point where you are needed. The point you left him at four years ago." His eyes ran over me like a moving flame. "To him—remember if you can— it's not even a minute."
I felt my body slipping down against the wall as though my legs were gone. The whole house, it seemed, was listening to our whispered words. I heard the staircase creak. The rumble of street traffic was audible outside. I caught myself thinking that I would have given my very soul to see an omnibus, a good, everyday red omnibus, a taxi cab, a policeman. What was to come next I dared not even think about. Vronski stood close beside me, our shoulders touching. His unescap-able eyes ran over me in liquid fire. What would he say next? What would he ask of me?
And then a crackling voice rang out upstairs, a voice I knew and recognised. Though a curious distance was in it, yet a distance that could not muffle, it was sharp and distinct. It called my name.
"Come," said Vronski calmly. "You must come up and help him. He is expecting you."
It came over me suddenly that the entire experience was a dream. Things in a dream happened just like this. The sense of surprise, the power of criticism, are absent. Mantravers, Vronski, myself were all figures in a dream. Tire whole business belonged to a dream. I, the dreamer, should presently wake up. Yet while this thought flashed, its opposite, appearing concurrently, flashed with it: that my consciousness, namely, had changed, and that I was beyond the emotions that pertain to normal consciousness. As consciousness changes, grows, the universe it perceives grows and changes with it. . . .
"In a sense that's exactly true," I heard Vronski murmur as we crossed the silent hall, and it did not occur to me as in the least odd that he should know what I was thinking. "We are in a dream-world here and now, a dream condition, a dream civilisation. We are, that is, so little conscious that what we think real is actually hardly more than a dream-state . . ." and his voice died away among the shadows.
I heard this without an atom of surprise, without a tremor of disbelief. Philosophical talk at such a moment! And yet somehow occasioning no astonishment! Obviously, the experience was all a dream.
"He woke up," the voice ran on as we reached the staircase, "and consequently he disappeared. That is, he left our dream-conditions."
I could not quite follow that. I was suddenly stiff with terror too, thinking of the man waiting for us up that dark flight of stairs. It seemed absurd and horrible, comic and tragic, that we should be exchanging philosophical comments at such a moment.
"He became aware of other conditions, though these are about us
always, and only a change in our perceptive apparatus is needed "
I gave a little sharp cry unwittingly, as though the terror had crawled
into my throat, and his voice fell away while he took my arm firmly,
for I had stumbled over the first step as we began to mount the stair
case. "Don't be frightened, don't feel fear, or anything negative," he
concluded, his arm preventing me falling. "Feel sympathy, curiosity,
interest, even scepticism if you like. But don't feel fear," he repeated.
"I have come to this house four times a week ever since he left us. I
have sat here waiting, hoping for hours on end, without result, though
once—once only—I saw de Frasne—rushing—rushing with the speed
of light and through every room and passage simultaneously—rushing,
I tell you, with etheric speed, etheric omnipresence—but of him, no
sign, and I knew at last that only you could get him back, because
you were with him when he went. You are a sign-post, if you like,
the point of departure and so the point of return—of simultaneous
return. Above all, therefore, feel no fear, for fear repels and blocks "
A cry interrupted this amazing flow. It sounded overhead again, in the dark space of the landing. It called my name, but it was fainter than before and held a curious touch of fading distance. We were halfway up the stairs. I stopped dead.
"Answer him, answer," urged Vronski quickly, almost passionately. "Say you're here." And making a great effort, I obeyed.
"I'm here, Sydney, I'm coming to you," my voice rose out of some kind of automatism. "Hold on!" And Vronski, hastening his step, dragged me with him. "Remember," he whispered in my ear, "remember all he says, for he can tell marvellous things, though probably to you only."
We reached the landing, and Vronski flashed his torch along the corridor, flooding it with light, illuminating several doors, a whole series of doors belonging, apparently, to bedrooms, and one of these doors stood open. It was standing ajar. These details showed up with vivid clearness instantly, but it was something else I saw simultaneously that my attention fastened on with immediate horror, although horror is not the accurate word, since the amazement in me—I can only call it an explosion of amazement—was of too vast, too strange a kind to include a negative emotion such as horror. For I saw several figures, a series of them, all moving with great rapidity, moving in the three directions known to us, up, down, across, yet all moving in some incredible manner simultaneously—a figure I recognised, the figure of de Frasne. It is of course impossible to describe, it lies entirely beyond words, beyond our three-dimensional experience, which is all we have. For, in addition to this multiplication of one figure into numerous duplicates, it, or they, were moving in other places than this stretch of illuminated corridor. They moved along other passages, through other rooms on floors upstairs and downstairs, moved up and down between floors and ceilings elsewhere in the house. They were, in fact, all over the building, and in the same instant, while yet the whole series of figures, as I have said, was always one and the same, the figure of de Frasne.
Philip Van Doren Stern (ed) Page 14