One thing only troubled him seriously. He was making no progress at all with his work: so far he hadn’t been able to project himself a single inch. He did want to succeed at that. It was partly because of the work itself, partly because he would be ashamed to go home as a failure, partly too because he didn’t want to disappoint Mr. Burnaby. Not that Mr. Burnaby showed any signs of being disappointed. Marcus thought he was very kind about it, and very patient. Time and again he told Marcus not to worry, that they might have to wait six months, or even longer before they got any positive results. He was quite sure that Marcus would get results eventually. He knew Marcus had the power to do what he wanted: it was just a question of learning how to utilize that power.
Marcus on the other hand would occasionally lose faith altogether. He would wonder if the whole thing were not a fraud, if even Mr. Burnaby himself could do what he said he could do. He would have to remind himself of what he knew Mr. Burnaby had done—particularly of his two appearances as Caldwell.
Towards the beginning of August it got very hot. The Spoils of Poynton was finished and Mr. Burnaby was reading aloud The Return of the Native. Hardy was not a conscious artist like Henry James, he had explained to Marcus, but there was a lyrical quality in his work unlike anything which could be found in the work of other prose writers. He had also something in common with the ancient Greeks—a sense of inevitable tragedy. When Mr. Burnaby’s voice was tired Marcus would be made to read a chapter or two: but he was bad at reading aloud: it made him yawn, and that always annoyed Mr. Burnaby.
One morning, at about eleven o’clock, they were in the tower room as usual. Mr. Burnaby had already put up two pictures without Marcus having been able to report any success. Marcus was in a dull, lethargic mood. To keep cool he had taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirt-sleeves, but his bare arms were inclined to stick to the table. He had heard Mr. Burnaby say that the picture before them was by some French artist, though the artist’s name had gone out of his head. Already, too, he had forgotten if Mr. Burnaby had described the picture as an example of the impressionist or the post-impressionist school. He had seen so many pictures now, and nearly all of them seemed to be examples of some school or other. As soon as the picture was removed the general impression of it became blurred in Marcus’s mind. There were a lot of faces in it: it was a painting of a cafe or a bar, or perhaps it was a scene in a park.
And then, just as Mr. Burnaby was about to hang up the next picture, Marcus suddenly saw the former one again. “That was a funny picture, that last one,” he remarked inconsequently.
Mr. Burnaby paused and looked round. “Yes,” he said quietly. “Why do you think so?”
“Well, you see,” Marcus responded, “it’s all right when you look at it from here, but when you go up close it sort of disappears: it’s just a lot of blobs of paint, put on rather thick. . . .”
“Did you go up close?” Mr. Burnaby asked in the same even tone of voice.
“Oh yes,” Marcus replied without hesitation.
“That’s strange. I never saw you leave your chair.” There was a pleased gleam in his eyes, and Marcus suddenly realized that he had at last succeeded in doing what Mr. Burnaby wanted.
“But I’ve been looking at them close all along,” he exclaimed as the light suddenly flooded into his mind. “Why even the first day I did it—only I didn’t understand. . . .”
“I knew you would,” Mr. Burnaby told him. “Now we’ll have to get on with the next step.”
CHAPTER XXI
MR. Burnaby was very pleased indeed at Marcus’s success. He explained that nearly all the pictures he had used had been chosen because their appearance altered when looked at from close range. He had been careful not to let Marcus handle the pictures himself or come close to them physically. He had wanted to make sure that his proof, when he got it, was quite definite.
“Of course,” he pointed out, “if you had been noting everything—as you should have been—in a proper scientific manner, we’d have realized long ago; but scientific note-taking needs training just like everything else.”
Now that his patience had been rewarded he was delighted, and several times during the rest of the morning, and during lunch, Marcus found himself being gazed at with beaming approval. He too was very happy. He felt that he had no more need to worry about failure. He knew that Mr. Burnaby had a fresh confidence in him. Till today he had been a pupil: henceforth he would be a disciple: in time he would become a collaborator.
That afternoon they strolled along the shore to the point. They had brought tea with them in thermos flasks, and small packets of sandwiches. Marcus bathed, and they sat on the rocks in the sunshine, talking. It was hot and at intervals Marcus would dive into the sea and swim about for a little to get cool. When he came out he would pull on his shirt and trousers, but until it got late he didn’t find it worth while to dress completely. As for Mr. Burnaby he couldn’t have too much heat. All through the summer his colour had been getting gradually darker till he had become as brown as an Indian.
He talked of the experiments they would be able to do together when Marcus was capable of projecting himself at will, of the discoveries Marcus might make on his own, surpassing eventually the work of his master. Marcus listened lazily, and with a certain amount of self-satisfaction. Occasionally he threw pieces of seaweed into the water to find out if there were any currents, and to try and decide whether the tide was still going out or just beginning to come in.
“You know you’re very lucky,” Mr. Burnaby remarked, as Marcus pulled on his clothes finally, preparatory to starting for home. “When I was your age I was working in an office all day and swotting at Latin and Greek in the evenings—that is if I didn’t have to work late in the office.”
After the discovery that he could project himself to the pictures Marcus thought that most of his difficulties were over. Very soon he found out that there were further and greater difficulties ahead of him: to overcome them would require all the patience he possessed. He hated being patient: it went on for such a long time. He sometimes wondered at Mr. Burnaby who must have faced every difficulty alone without any encouragement but his own enthusiasm.
The first set-back to his optimism was the discovery that he was actually projecting much less of himself than he had imagined. All he was doing in fact was to stretch out a sort of invisible, exploring tentacle: the rest of him remained firmly embedded in his body.
Looking back at it much later, however, it seemed to him that he had gone forward in a series of definite steps. The first has already been described: the second was when he was able to send out his tentacle, as it were, at will, instead of merely putting himself into the necessary trance-like state and waiting for something to happen.
He had from the very beginning been able to see Mr. Burnaby’s body if he looked back from the picture—and he saw his own body in the same way—two people, an old man and a youth, sitting very still in their chairs, staring in front of them with a peculiar intentness. But he hadn’t been able to do this—see himself and Mr. Burnaby—voluntarily. For months, he found that the moment he became conscious of having projected himself the projection ceased—as if the tentacle he put forth had touched something hot and curled back into itself again. He had good days and bad days: there were days when he could get no further than the pictures; but by the end of November he was always able to go to them, or at least to most of them.
By the beginning of the second summer, after he had been living for a full year with Mr. Burnaby, his control over his spirit had become much stronger. His spirit, when outside his body, could move about freely within a limited area: he no longer had to project himself to a fixed point and remain there throughout the period of his trance. One day, when he was looking at Mr. Burnaby from a point somewhere above the mantelpiece, he realized that what he was looking at was not Mr. Burna
by at all, but only his body. At the same time he was conscious that Mr. Burnaby was still in the room. He didn’t know where precisely, but he knew that he was close to him and that he was helping him.
This was what Marcus afterwards considered to be his third step, and both he and Mr. Burnaby felt it to be a very important one. It meant that he was now able to perceive Mr. Burnaby, the spirit of Mr. Burnaby, without Mr. Burnaby having to produce any visual image on his mind. It was almost another year before this perception became exact. Gradually Marcus became able to know where exactly in the room Mr. Burnaby was, the real Mr. Burnaby—not just his body. At first it was like seeing an object through a white mist—in one place the mist is darkened a little: then gradually a shape emerges. But at first Marcus didn’t know there was a mist: if one had lived in a mist all one’s life, one wouldn’t know that that mist was hiding anything—and of course Marcus wasn’t actually seeing Mr. Burnaby’s spirit—not with his eyes.
While he was learning to perceive in this way Marcus was becoming able to get more and more of himself out of his body, and to move about the room more and more freely. At first his movements were affected to a considerable extent not only by the position of his body, but by the point on which his eyes were fixed. Eventually both these circumstances ceased to matter. In fact he made a habit of shutting his eyes before trying to project himself.
When Mr. Burnaby had first talked to Marcus about projecting himself out of his body Marcus had thought it sounded interesting and exciting work. Instead it proved to be slow, boring, and on the whole very disappointing. Day after day he would go on trying to repeat his last small success, till what had seemed to happen almost by chance, came completely under the power of his will. Only then could he attempt something further. The whole business was like learning to work a set of muscles which he had never used, like learning to move the skin on his scalp, or to lift his eyebrows independently.
I have passed over the work of two years here suddenly in a few paragraphs. I realize that perhaps I should make more effort to convey to the reader the passage of time. But I do not quite see how to do this without being wearisome. In my first draft I summarized the work of these two years in four chapters. When I came to re-read my manuscript I found them dull—accounts of the same experiments repeated over and over, with only the slightest variations. I reduced the four chapters to two, but they were still tedious. So I cut them out altogether. I am willing to let any reader who has the patience examine the notes for himself. I can safely say, however, that most readers will find them heavy going. Marcus’s private diary which tells of his relations with Mr. Burnaby, and describes his own private feelings, is to me much more interesting. From it I have taken most of the material for the following chapters.
CHAPTER XXII
THE first Summer and Autumn Marcus spent at Mr. Burnaby’s had been exceptionally fine, but at the beginning of November the weather broke, and from then on they were both much less out of doors. As a rule they went for a short walk after lunch and until the end of the month Marcus bathed nearly every day before tea. When tea was over there was nothing in particular to do and he was usually able to occupy himself as he pleased till dinner time. Generally he contrived to be by himself during this period. If he knew Mr. Burnaby was going to the study, he went to the library. If he didn’t know where Mr. Burnaby would be he went to his own room and lay on his bed with a book. Occasionally he slipped out quietly and went to sit in some sheltered place on the rocks, where he knew Mr. Burnaby would not find him. It was not that Mr. Burnaby bored him—though he did bore him sometimes when he talked about Greek ideas of love, or morality, or the identity of beauty and goodness: but Marcus was seeing too much of Mr. Burnaby. He felt often as if Mr. Burnaby were devouring him mentally, trying to destroy his individuality, and convert him into a reflection of himself. In many ways he had already succeeded: Marcus was determined not to let him succeed altogether.
Alone on the rocks, on grey winter afternoons, he would bring out his own battered individuality, like some cherished relic from a cupboard. Then he was very conscious of being himself, conscious that here he was free to think his own thoughts, to criticise Mr. Burnaby if he wished, sometimes even to hate him.
Mr. Burnaby was jealous of all of Marcus’s solitude. He would suggest that instead of Marcus reading alone, they should sit together and read aloud whatever book Marcus had chosen to read to himself. On this point, however, Marcus would never give in. If he were very hard pressed he would declare that he had letters to write, and on those afternoons he would write letters—to his father or mother or Margaret, or to anyone else he could think of.
His period of solitude was the happiest part of his day. He dreaded the evenings in the library, when Mr. Burnaby read from his favourite authors. Mr. Burnaby enjoyed these readings very much, and Marcus, while he might object to particular books, never expressed a dislike for the readings as a whole.
The Spoils of Poynton and The Return of the Native were followed by Imaginary Portraits and Heart of Darkness. Marcus found them all almost equally dull. Why couldn’t they get on with it he wondered.
Not long afterwards he read Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Lord Jim to himself, and immediately he developed a tremendous enthusiasm for Hardy and Conrad. Buchan and Ian Hay were quite banished from favour, and though Ian Hay eventually regained a small place in his affections, he never again had much feeling for Buchan. In spite of this he could not like Heart of Darkness, which Mr. Burnaby declared to be the essence of Conrad, and he always retained a prejudice against The Return of the Native. It was very long, too, before he came to appreciate the work of Henry James, and of Pater.
Mr. Burnaby’s way of reading may have been to blame. In his fondness for accenting a good prose rhythm he was inclined to turn a book almost into a piece of music. Marcus wasn’t musical, but the sound of Mr. Burnaby’s voice affected him as a lullaby affects a baby. It was always only with the greatest difficulty that he was able to remain awake.
Mr. Burnaby was in despair. He loved reading aloud, but he intended his readings to be an entertainment for both of them: he wanted Marcus to enjoy himself. He was driven to try lighter literature—school stories, thrillers, and above all P. G. Wodehouse. These, partly because they had plenty of action, partly, perhaps, because they had no noticeable prose rhythm, Marcus enjoyed well enough. Nevertheless, privately, he was quite convinced that he would have liked them even better if he had read them to himself in the ordinary way.
Actually Mr. Burnaby didn’t do all the reading. Every night he made Marcus read for a little, while he himself smoked a pipe and criticised. “Don’t go so fast,” he would say. “Don’t gobble your words. Pay attention to the punctuation. Here! Give the book to me”—and he would read a passage over again, showing Marcus how it should have been done, after which Marcus would have to have another try. He would begin again more slowly, and for a little all would go well: but very soon he would start to yawn: every other sentence would be interrupted by a yawn. He could never decide whether he yawned through boredom or self-consciousness, or because of some fault in his method of voice production. Finally he would get hoarse and complain of a sore throat. Then Mr. Burnaby would knock out his pipe and take the book back.
During the second half of November and the first week of December they got through the whole of the Jeeves series. Marcus wanted to go on to the Mulliner stories, but Mr. Burnaby insisted that they should try something more serious.
“P. G.’s all very well,” he declared, “but you want to form your taste, not ruin it. If you form a good taste early in life it will stand to you in the long run, while if you go on reading this sort of stuff you’ll end by being able to read nothing else.”
He proposed Plato again in Jowett’s translation, but Marcus thought he would rather have a novel. Mr. Burnaby considered this for a little. They were in the library, and
he wandered round the shelves, gazing up at the titles. “You should try some of the Russians,” he remarked, stopping, and pulling down a volume from one of the higher shelves. “What about Anna Karenina? The rest of my Tolstoys are in French. You’ll find it quite different from anything else you’ve ever read.”
But Marcus still hankered after P. G. Wodehouse. “I don’t care for foreign books,” he objected. “They never seem real to me somehow.”
Mr. Burnaby returned the book to its place. For a few minutes there was silence. Marcus realized that Mr. Burnaby wasn’t altogether pleased. Suddenly he turned round, and without a word, left the room.
Marcus waited uneasily for him to come back. Had he gone off in a rage, he wondered. However when Mr. Burnaby returned at the end of five minutes or so he looked quite unperturbed. He was carrying a slim octavo volume bound in dark green leather. “We’ll try this,” he said. “It deals with our own subject and it ought to interest you.”
“What’s it called?” Marcus asked.
Mr. Burnaby opened the book, as if he had forgotten, and read out the title slowly—“Some Suggestions Regarding Extra-Sensory Experience.”
“And who’s it by?”
The Burnaby Experiments Page 16