Seldon drew in his breath sharply. "Canals! That's interesting. Go on."
"But these things didn't matter - they didn't count any longer. The real things were the things I couldn't see yet - but I heard them... It was a sound like the rushing of wings... Somehow, I can't explain why, it was glorious! There's nothing like it here. And then came another glory - I saw them - the Wings! Oh, Seldon, the Wings!"
"But what were they? Men - angels - birds?"
"I don't know. I couldn't see - not yet. But the colour of them! Wing colour - we haven't got it here - it's a wonderful colour."
"Wing colour?" repeated Seldon. "What's it like?"
Hamer flung up his hand impatiently. "How can I tell you? Explain the colour blue to a blind person! It's a colour you've never seen - Wing colour!"
"Well?"
"Well? That's all. That's as far as I've got. But each time the coming back has been worse - more painful. I can't understand that. I'm convinced my body never leaves the bed. In this place I get to I'm convinced I've got no physical presence. Why should it hurt so confoundedly then?"
Seldon shook his head in silence.
"It's something awful - the coming back. The pull of it - then the pain, pain in every limb and every nerve, and my ears feel as though they were bursting. Then everything presses so, the weight of it all, the dreadful sense of imprisonment. I want light, air, space - above all space to breathe in! And I want freedom."
"And what," asked Seldon, "of all the other things that used to mean so much to you?"
"That's the worst of it. I care for them still as much as, if not more than, ever. And these things, comfort, luxury, pleasure, seem to pull opposite ways to the Wings. It's a perpetual struggle between them - and I can't see how it's going to end."
Seldon sat silent. The strange tale he had been listening to was fantastic enough in all truth. Was it all a delusion, a wild hallucination - or could it by any possibility be true? And if so, why Hamer, of all men...? Surely the materialist, the man who loved the flesh and denied the spirit, was the last man to see the sights of another world.
Across the table Hamer watched him anxiously.
"I suppose," said Seldon slowly, "that you can only wait. Wait and see what happens."
"I can't! I tell you I can't! Your saying that shows you don't understand. It's tearing me in two, this awful struggle - this killing, long-drawn-out fight between - between -" He hesitated.
"The flesh and the spirit?" suggested Seldon.
Hamer stared heavily in front of him. "I suppose one might call it that. Anyway, it's unbearable... I can't get free..."
Again Bernard Seldon shook his head. He was caught up in the grip of the inexplicable. He made one more suggestion.
"If I were you," he advised, "I would get hold of that cripple."
But as he went home, he muttered to himself: "Canals - I wonder."
III
Silas Hamer went out of the house the following morning with a new determination in his step. He had decided to take Seldon's advice and find the legless man. Yet inwardly he was convinced that his search would be in vain and that the man would have vanished as completely as though the earth had swallowed him up.
The dark buildings on either side of the passageway shut out the sunlight and left it dark and mysterious. Only in one place, halfway up it, there was a break in the wall, and through it there fell a shaft of golden light that illuminated with radiance a figure sitting on the ground. A figure - yes, it was the man!
The instrument of pipes leaned against the wall beside his crutches, and he was covering the paving stones with designs in coloured chalk. Two were completed, sylvan scenes of marvellous beauty and delicacy, swaying trees and a leaping brook that seemed alive.
And again Hamer doubted. Was this man a mere street musician, a pavement artist? Or was he something more...?
Suddenly the millionaire's self-control broke down, and he cried fiercely and angrily: "Who are you? For God's sake, who are you?"
The man's eyes met his, smiling.
"Why don't you answer? Speak, man, speak!"
Then he noticed that the man was drawing with incredible rapidity on a bare slab of stone. Hamer followed the movement with his eyes... A few bold strokes, and giant trees took form. Then, seated on a boulder... a man... playing an instrument of pipes. A man with a strangely beautiful face - and goat's legs...
The cripple's hand made a swift movement. The man still sat on the rock, but the goat's legs were gone. Again his eyes met Hamer's.
"They were evil," he said.
Hamer stared, fascinated. For the face before him was the face of the picture, but strangely and incredibly beautified... Purified from all but an intense and exquisite joy of living.
Hamer turned and almost fled down the passageway into the bright sunlight, repeating to himself incessantly:
"It's impossible. Impossible... I'm mad - dreaming!" But the face haunted him - the face of Pan...
He went into the park and sat on a bench. It was a deserted hour. A few nursemaids with their charges sat in the shade of the trees, and dotted here and there in the stretches of green, like islands in a sea, lay the recumbent forms of men...
The words "a wretched tramp" were to Hamer an epitome of misery. But suddenly, today, he envied them...
They seemed to him of all created beings the only free ones. The earth beneath them, the sky above them, the world to wander in... they were not hemmed in or chained.
Like a flash it came to him that that which bound him so remorselessly was the thing he had worshipped and prized above all others - wealth! He had thought it the strongest thing on earth, and now, wrapped round by its golden strength, he saw the truth of his words. It was his money that held him in bondage...
But was it? Was that really it? Was there a deeper and more pointed truth that he had not seen? Was it the money or was it his own love of the money? He was bound in fetters of his own making; not wealth itself, but love of wealth was the chain.
He knew now clearly the two forces that were tearing at him, the warm composite strength of materialism that enclosed and surrounded him, and, opposed to it, the clear imperative call - he named it to himself the Call of the Wings.
And while the one fought and clung, the other scorned war and would not stoop to struggle. It only called - called unceasingly... He heard it so clearly that it almost spoke in words.
"You cannot make terms with Me," it seemed to say. "For I am above all other things. If you follow my call, you must give up all else and cut away the forces that hold you. For only the Free shall follow where I lead..."
"I can't," cried Hamer. "I can't..."
A few people turned to look at the big man who sat talking to himself.
So sacrifice was being asked of him, the sacrifice of that which was most dear to him, that which was part of himself.
Part of himself - he remembered the man without legs...
IV
"What in the name of Fortune brings you here?" asked Borrow.
Indeed the east-end mission was an unfamiliar back- ground to Hamer.
"I've listened to a good many sermons," said the millionaire, "all saying what could be done if you people had funds. I've just come to tell you this: you can have the funds."
"Very good of you," answered Borrow, with some surprise. "A big subscription, eh?"
Hamer smiled dryly. "I should say so. Just every penny I've got."
"What?"
Hamer rapped out details in a brisk, businesslike manner. Borrow's head was whirling.
"You - you mean to say that you're making over your entire fortune to be devoted to the relief of the poor in the East End, with myself appointed as trustee?"
"That's it."
"But why - why?"
"I can't explain," said Hamer slowly. "Remember our talk about visions last February? Well, a vision has got hold of me."
"It's splendid!" Borrow leaned forward, his eyes gleaming.
"There's nothing particularly splendid about it," said Hamer grimly. "I don't care a button about poverty in the East End. All they want is grit! I was poor enough - and I got out of it. But I've got to get rid of the money, and these tom-fool societies shan't get hold of it. You're a man I can trust. Feed bodies or souls with it - preferably the former. I've been hungry, but you can do as you like."
"There's never been such a thing known," stammered Borrow.
"The whole thing's done and finished with," continued Hamer. "The lawyers have fixed it up at last, and I've signed everything. I can tell you I've been busy this last fortnight. It's almost as difficult getting rid of a fortune as making one."
"But you - you've kept something?"
"Not a penny," said Hamer cheerfully. "At least - that's not quite true. I've just twopence in my pocket."
He laughed.
He said good-bye to his bewildered friend and walked out of the mission into the narrow evil-smelling streets. The words he had said so gaily just now came back to him with an aching sense of loss. "Not a penny!" Of all his vast wealth he had kept nothing. He was afraid now - afraid of poverty and hunger and cold. Sacrifice had no sweetness for him.
Yet behind it all he was conscious that the weight and menace of things had lifted; he was no longer oppressed and bound down. The severing of the chain had seared and torn him, but the vision of freedom was there to strengthen him. His material needs might dim the Call, but they could not deaden it, for he knew it to be a thing of immortality that could not die.
There was a touch of autumn in the air, and the wind blew chill. He felt the cold and shivered, and then, too, he was hungry - he had forgotten to have any lunch. It brought the future very near to him. It was incredible that he should have given it all up; the ease, the comfort, the warmth! His body cried out impotently... And then once again there came to him a glad and uplifting sense of freedom.
Hamer hesitated. He was near a tube station. He had twopence in his pocket. The idea came to him to journey by it to the park where he had watched the recumbent idlers a fortnight ago. Beyond this whim he did not plan for the future. He believed honestly enough now that he was mad - sane people did not act as he had done. Yet, if so, madness was a wonderful and amazing thing.
Yes, he would go now to the open country of the park, and there was a special significance to him in reaching it by tube. For the tube represented to him all the horrors of buried, shut-in life... He would ascend from its imprisonment free to the wide green and the trees that concealed the menace of the pressing houses.
The lift bore him swiftly and relentlessly downward. The air was heavy and lifeless. He stood at the extreme end of the platform, away from the mass of people. On his left was the opening of the tunnel from which the train, snakelike, would presently emerge. He felt the whole place to be subtly evil. There was no one near him but a hunched-up lad sitting on a seat, sunk, it seemed, in a drunken stupor.
In the distance came the faint menacing roar of the train. The lad rose from his seat and shuffled unsteadily to Hamer's side, where he stood on the edge of the platform peering into the tunnel.
Then - it happened so quickly as to be almost incredible - he lost his balance and fell...
A hundred thoughts rushed simultaneously to Hamer's brain. He saw a huddled heap run over by a motor 'bus, and heard a hoarse voice saying: "Dahn't yer blime yerself, guv'nor. Yer couldn't 'a done nothin'." And with that came the knowledge that this life could only be saved, if it were saved, by himself. There was no one else near, and the train was close... It all passed through his mind with lightning rapidity. He experienced a curious calm lucidity of thought.
He had one short second in which to decide, and he knew in that moment that his fear of Death was unabated. He was horribly afraid. And then - was it not a forlorn hope? A useless throwing away of two lives?
To the terrified spectators at the other end of the platform there seemed no gap between the boy's fall and the man's jump after him - and then the train, rushing round the curve of the tunnel, powerless to pull up in time.
Swiftly Hamer caught up the lad in his arms. No natural gallant impulse swayed him, his shivering flesh was but obeying the command of the alien spirit that called for sacrifice. With a last effort he flung the lad forward onto the platform, falling himself...
Then suddenly his fear died. The material world held him down no longer. He was free of his shackles. He fancied for a moment that he heard the joyous piping of Pan. Then - nearer and louder - swallowing up all else - came the glad rushing of innumerable Wings... enveloping and encircling him...
THE GIPSY
Macfarlane had often noticed that his friend, Dickie Carpenter, had a strange aversion to gipsies. He had never known the reason for it. But when Dickie's engagement to Esther Lawes was broken off, there was a momentary tearing down of reserves between the two men.
Macfarlane had been engaged to the younger sister, Rachel, for about a year. He had known both the Lawes girls since they were children. Slow and cautious in all things, he had been unwilling to admit to himself the growing attraction that Rachel's childlike face and honest brown eyes had for him. Not a beauty like Esther, no! But unutterably truer and sweeter. With Dickie's engagement to the elder sister, the bond between the two men seemed to be drawn closer.
And now, after a few brief weeks, the engagement was off again, and Dickie, simple Dickie, hard-hit. So far in his young life all had gone so smoothly. His career in the navy had been well chosen. His craving for the sea was inborn. There was something of the Viking about him, primitive and direct, a nature on which subtleties of thought were wasted. He belonged to that inarticulate order of young Englishmen who dislike any form of emotion, and who find it peculiarly hard to explain their mental processes in words...
Macfarlane, that dour Scot, with a Celtic imagination hidden away somewhere, listened and smoked while his friend floundered along in a sea of words. He had known an unburdening was coming. But he had expected the subject matter to be different. To begin with, anyway, there was no mention of Esther Lawes. Only, it seemed, the story of a childish terror.
"It all started with a dream I had when I was a kid. Not a nightmare exactly. She - the gipsy, you know - would just come into any old dream - even a good dream (or a kid's idea of what's good - a party and crackers and things). I'd be enjoying myself no end, and then I'd feel, I'd know, that if I looked up, she'd be there, standing as she always stood, watching me... With sad eyes, you know, as though she understood something that I didn't... Can't explain why it rattled me so - but it did! Every time! I used to wake up howling with terror, and my old nurse used to say: 'There! Master Dickie's had one of his gipsy dreams again!'"
"Ever been frightened by real gipsies?"
"Never saw one till later. That was queer, too. I was chasing a pup of mine. He'd run away. I got out through the garden door, and along one of the forest paths. We lived in the New Forest then, you know. I came to a sort of clearing at the end, with a wooden bridge over a stream. And just beside it a gipsy was standing - with a red handkerchief over her head - just the same as in my dream. And at once I was frightened! She looked at me, you know... Just the same look - as though she knew something I didn't, and was sorry about it... And then she said quite quietly, nodding her head at me: 'I shouldn't go that way, if I were you.' I can't tell you why, but it frightened me to death. I dashed past her onto the bridge. I suppose it was rotten. Anyway, it gave way, and I was chucked into the stream. It was running pretty fast, and I was nearly drowned. Beastly to be nearly drowned. I've never forgotten it. And I felt it had all to do with the gipsy..."
"Actually, though, she warned you against it?"
"I suppose you could put it like that." Dickie paused, then went on: "I've told you about this dream of mine, not because it has anything to do with what happened after (at least, I suppose it hasn't), but because it's the jumping-off point, as it were. You'll understand now what I mean by the 'gipsy feeling.' So I'll go
on to that first night at the Lawes'. I'd just come back from the west coast then. It was awfully rum to be in England again. The Lawes were old friends of my people's. I hadn't seen the girls since I was about seven, but young Arthur was a great pal of mine, and after he died, Esther used to write to me, and send me out papers. Awfully jolly letters, she wrote! Cheered me up no end. I always wished I was a better hand at writing back. I was awfully keen to see her. It seemed odd to know a girl quite well from her letters, and not otherwise. Well, I went down to the Lawes' place first thing. Esther was away when I arrived, but was expected back that evening. I sat next to Rachel at dinner, and as I looked up and down the long table, a queer feeling came over me. I felt someone was watching me, and it made me uncomfortable. Then I saw her -"
"Saw who?"
"Mrs Haworth - what I'm telling you about."
It was on the tip of Macfarlane's tongue to say: "I thought you were telling me about Esther Lawes." But he remained silent, and Dickie went on.
"There was something about her quite different from all the rest. She was sitting next to old Lawes - listening to him very gravely with her head bent down. She had some of that red tulle stuff round her neck. It had got torn, I think; anyway, it stood up behind her head like little tongues of flame... I said to Rachel: 'Who's that woman over there? Dark - with a red scarf!'"
The Hound of Death and Other Stories Page 9