‘Come, you’re shaking.’
When presently we came to a brightly lighted public-house or hotel, I saw that he was shaking even worse than I had thought. The shirt-sleeved barman noticed it too, and watched us curiously. I made Rooum sit down, and got him some brandy.
‘What was the matter?’ I asked, as I held the glass to his lips.
But I could get nothing out of him except that it was ‘All right – all right’, with his head twitching over his shoulder almost as if he had a touch of the dance. He began to come round a little. He wasn’t the kind of man you’d press for explanations, and presently we set out again. He walked with me as far as my lodgings, refused to come in, but for all that lingered at the gate as if loath to leave. I watched him turn the corner in the rain.
We came home together again the next evening, but by a different way, quite half a mile longer. He had waited for me a little pertinaciously. It seemed he wanted to talk about molecules again.
Well, when a man of his age – he’d be near fifty – begins to ask questions, he’s rather worse than a child who wants to know where Heaven is or some such thing – for you can’t put him off as you can the child. Somewhere or other he’d picked up the word ‘osmosis’, and seemed to have some glimmering of its meaning. He dropped the molecules, and began to ask me about osmosis.
‘It means, doesn’t it,’ he demanded, ‘that liquids will work their way into one another – through a bladder or something? Say a thick fluid and a thin: you’ll find some of the thick in the thin, and the thin in the thick?’
‘Yes. The thick into the thin is ex-osmosis, and the other end-osmosis. That takes place more quickly. But I don’t know a deal about it.’
‘Does it ever take place with solids?’ he next asked.
What was he driving at? I thought; but replied: ‘I believe that what is commonly called “adhesion” is something of the sort, under another name.’
‘A good deal of this bookwork seems to be finding a dozen names for the same thing,’ he grunted; and continued to ask his questions.
But what it was he really wanted to know I couldn’t for the life of me make out.
Well, he was due any time now to disappear again, having worked quite six weeks in one place; and he disappeared. He disappeared for a good many weeks. I think it would be about February before I saw or heard of him again.
It was February weather, anyway, and in an echoing enough place that I found him – the subway of one of the Metropolitan stations. He’d probably forgotten the echoes when he’d taken the train; but, of course, the railway folk won’t let a man who happens to dislike echoes go wandering across the metals where he likes.
He was twenty yards ahead when I saw him. I recognised him by his patched head and black hand-bag. I ran along the subway after him.
It was very curious. He’d been walking close to the white-tiled wall, and I saw him suddenly stop; but he didn’t turn. He didn’t even turn when I pulled up, close behind him; he put out one hand to the wall, as if to steady himself. But, the moment I touched his shoulder, he just dropped – just dropped, half on his knees against the white tiling. The face he turned round and up to me was transfixed with fright.
There were half a hundred people about – a train was just in – and it isn’t a difficult matter in London to get a crowd for much less than a man crouching terrified against a wall, looking over his shoulder as Rooum looked, at another man almost as terrified. I felt somebody’s hand on my own arm. Evidently somebody thought I’d knocked Rooum down.
The terror went slowly from his face. He stumbled to his feet. I shook myself free of the man who held me and stepped up to Rooum.
‘What the devil’s all this about?’ I demanded, roughly enough.
‘It’s all right . . . it’s all right . . . ’ he stammered.
‘Heavens, man, you shouldn’t play tricks like that!’
‘No . . . no . . . but for the love of God don’t do it again! . . . ’
‘We’ll not explain here,’ I said, still in a good deal of a huff; and the small crowd melted away – disappointed, I dare say, that it wasn’t a fight.
‘Now,’ I said, when we were outside in the crowded street, ‘you might let me know what all this is about, and what it is that for the love of God I’m not to do again.’
He was half apologetic, but at the same time half blustering, as if I had committed some sort of an outrage.
‘A senseless thing like that!’ he mumbled to himself. ‘But there: you didn’t know . . . You don’t know, do you? . . . I tell you, d’you hear, you’re not to run at all when I’m about! You’re a nice fellow and all that, and get your quantities somewhere near right, if you do go a long way round to do it – but I’ll not answer for myself if you run, d’you hear? . . . Putting your hand on a man’s shoulder like that, just when . . . ’
‘Certainly I might have spoken,’ I agreed, a little stiffly.
‘Of course, you ought to have spoken! Just you see you don’t do it again. It’s monstrous!’
I put a curt question.
‘Are you sure you’re quite right in your head, Rooum?’
‘Ah,’ he cried, ‘don’t you think I just fancy it, my lad! Nothing so easy! I thought you guessed that other time, on the new road . . . it’s as plain as a pikestaff . . . no, no, no! I shall be telling you something about molecules one of these days!’
We walked for a time in silence.
Suddenly he asked: ‘What are you doing now?’
‘I myself, do you mean? Oh, the firm. A railway job, past Pinner. But we’ve a big contract coming on in the West End soon they might want you for. They call it “alterations”, but it’s one of these big shop-rebuildings.’
‘I’ll come along.’
‘Oh, it isn’t for a month or two yet.’
‘I don’t mean that. I mean I’ll come along to Pinner with you now, tonight, or whenever you go.’
‘Oh!’ I said.
I don’t know that I specially wanted him. It’s a little wearing, the company of a chap like that. You never know what he’s going to let you in for next. But, as this didn’t seem to occur to him, I didn’t say anything. If he really liked catching the last train down, a three-mile walk, and then sharing a double-bedded room at a poor sort of alehouse (which was my own programme), he was welcome. We walked a little farther; then I told him the time of the train and left him.
He turned up at Euston, a little after twelve. We went down together. It was getting on for one when we left the station at the other end, and then we began the tramp across the Weald to the inn. A little to my surprise (for I had begun to expect unaccountable behaviour from him) we reached the inn without Rooum having dodged about changing places with me, or having fallen cowering under a gorse-bush, or anything of that kind. Our talk, too, was about work, not molecules and osmosis.
The inn was only a roadside beerhouse – I have forgotten its name – and all its sleeping accomodation was the one double-bedded room. Over the head of my own bed the ceiling was cut away, following the roof-line; and the wallpaper was perfectly shocking – faded bouquets that made Vs and As, interlacing everywhere. The other bed was made up, and lay across the room.
I think I only spoke once while we were making ready for bed, and that was when Rooum took from his black hand-bag a brush and a torn nightgown.
‘That’s what you always carry about, is it?’ I remarked; and Rooum grunted something: Yes . . . never knew where you’d be next . . . no harm, was it? We tumbled into bed.
But, for all the lateness of the hour, I wasn’t sleepy; so from my own bag I took a book, set the candle on the end of the mantel, and began to read. Mark you, I don’t say I was much better informed for the reading I did, for I was watching the Vs on the wallpaper mostly – that, and wondering what was wrong with
the man in the other bed who had fallen down at a touch in the subway. He was already asleep.
Now I don’t know whether I can make the next clear to you. I’m quite certain he was sound asleep, so that it wasn’t just the fact that he spoke. Even that is a little unpleasant, I always think, any sort of sleep-talking; but it’s a very queer sort of sensation when a man actually answers a question that’s put to him, knowing nothing whatever about it in the morning. Perhaps I ought not to have put that question; having put it, I did the next best thing afterwards, as you’ll see in a moment . . . but let me tell you.
He’d been asleep perhaps an hour, and I woolgathering about the wallpaper, when suddenly, in a far more clear and loud voice than he ever used when awake, he said: ‘What the devil is it prevents me seeing him, then?’
That startled me, rather, for the second time that evening; and I really think I had spoken before I had fully realised what was happening.
‘From seeing whom?’ I said, sitting up in bed.
‘Whom? . . . You’re not attending. The fellow I’m telling you about, who runs after me,’ he answered – answered perfectly plainly.
I could see his head there on the pillow, black and white, and his eyes were closed. He made a slight movement with his arm, but that did not wake him. Then it came to me, with a sort of start, what was happening. I slipped half out of bed. Would he – would he? – answer another question? . . . I risked it, breathlessly:
‘Have you any idea who he is?’
Well, that too he answered.
‘Who he is? The Runner? . . . Don’t be silly. Who else should it be?’
With every nerve in me tingling, I tried again.
‘What happens, then, when he catches you?’
This time, I really don’t know whether his words were an answer or not; they were these:
‘To hear him catching you up . . . and then padding away ahead again! All right, all right . . . but I guess it’s weakening him a bit, too . . . ’
Without noticing it, I had got out of bed, and had advanced quite to the middle of the floor.
‘What did you say his name was?’ I breathed.
But that was a dead failure. He muttered brokenly for a moment, gave a deep troubled sigh, and then began to snore loudly and regularly.
I made my way back to bed; but I assure you that before I did so I filled my basin with water, dipped my face into it, and then set the candlestick afloat in it, leaving the candle burning. I thought I’d like to have a light . . . It had burned down by morning. Rooum, I remember, remarked on the silly practice of reading in bed.
Well, it was a pretty kind of obsession for a man to have, wasn’t it? Somebody running after him all the time, and then . . . running on ahead? And, of course, on a broad pavement there would be plenty of room for this running gentleman to run round; but on an eight- or nine-inch kerb, such as that of the new road out Lewisham way . . . but perhaps he was a jumping gentleman too, and could jump over a man’s head. You’d think he’d have to get past some way, wouldn’t you? . . . I remember vaguely wondering whether the name of that Runner was not Conscience; but Conscience isn’t a matter of molecules and osmosis . . .
One thing, however, was clear; I’d got to tell Rooum what I’d learned: for you can’t get hold of a fellow’s secrets in ways like that. I lost no time about it. I told him, in fact, soon after we’d left the inn the next morning – told him how he’d answered in his sleep.
And – what do you think of this? – he seemed to think I ought to have guessed it! Guessed a monstrous thing like that!
‘You’re less clever than I thought, with your books and that, if you didn’t,’ he grunted.
‘But . . . Good God, man!’
‘Queer, isn’t it? But you don’t know the queerest . . . ’
He pondered for a moment, and then suddenly put his lips to my ear.
‘I’ll tell you,’ he whispered. ‘It gets harder every time! . . . At first, he just slipped through: a bit of a catch at my heart, like when you nod off to sleep in a chair and jerk up awake again; and away he went. But now it’s getting grinding, sluggish; and the pain . . . You’d notice, that night on the road, the little check it gave me; that’s past long since; and last night, when I’d just braced myself up stiff to meet it, and you tapped me on the shoulder . . . ’ He passed the back of his hand over his brow.
‘I tell you,’ he continued, ‘it’s an agony each time. I could scream at the thought of it. It’s oftener, too, now, and he’s getting stronger. The end-osmosis is getting to be ex-osmosis – is that right? Just let me tell you one more thing –’
But I’d had enough. I’d asked questions the night before, but now – well, I knew quite as much as, and more than, I wanted.
‘Stop, please,’ I said. ‘You’re either off your head, or worse. Let’s call it the first. Don’t tell me any more, please.’
‘Frightened, what? Well, I don’t blame you. But what would you do?’
‘I should see a doctor; I’m only an engineer,’ I replied.
‘Doctors? . . . Bah!’ he said, and spat.
I hope you see how the matter stood with Rooum. What do you make of it? Could you have believed it – do you believe it? . . . He’d made a nearish guess when he’d said that much of our knowledge is giving names to things we know nothing about; only rule-of-thumb Physics thinks everything’s explained in the Manual; and you’ve always got to remember one thing: You can call it Force or what you like, but it’s a certainty that things, solid things of wood and iron and stone, would explode, just go off in a puff into space, if it wasn’t for something just as inexplicable as that that Rooum said he felt in his own person. And if you can swallow that, it’s a relatively small matter whether Rooum’s light-footed Familiar slipped through him unperceived, or had to struggle through obstinately. You see now why I said that ‘a queer thing overtook Rooum’.
More: I saw it. This thing, that outrages reason – I saw it happen. That is to say, I saw its effects, and it was in broad daylight, on an ordinary afternoon, in the middle of Oxford Street, of all places. There wasn’t a shadow of doubt about it. People were pressing and jostling about him, and suddenly I saw him turn his head and listen, as I’d seen him before. I tell you, an icy creeping ran all over my skin. I fancied I felt it approaching too, nearer and nearer . . . The next moment he had made a sort of gathering of himself, as if against a gust. He stumbled and thrust – thrust with his body. He swayed, physically, as a tree sways in a wind; he clutched my arm and gave a loud scream. Then, after seconds – minutes – I don’t know how long – he was free again.
And for the colour of his face when by and by I glanced at it . . . well, I once saw a swarthy Italian fall under a sunstroke, and his face was much the same colour that Rooum’s negro face had gone; a cloudy, whitish green.
‘Well – you’ve seen it – what do you think of it?’ he gasped presently, turning a ghastly grin on me.
But it was night before the full horror of it had soaked into me.
Soon after that he disappeared again. I wasn’t sorry.
* * *
Our big contract in the West End came on. It was a time-contract, with all manner of penalty clauses if we didn’t get through; and I assure you that we were busy. I myself was far too busy to think of Rooum.
It’s a shop now, the place we were working at, or rather one of these huge weldings of fifty shops where you can buy anything; and if you’d seen us there . . . but perhaps you did see us, for people stood up on the tops of omnibuses as they passed, to look over the mud-splashed hoarding into the great excavation we’d made. It was a sight. Staging rose on staging, tier on tier, with interminable ladders all over the steel structure. Three or four squat Otis lifts crouched like iron turtles on top, and a lattice-crane on a towering three-cornered platform rose a hundred and
twenty feet into the air. At one end of the vast quarry was a demolished house, showing flues and fireplaces and a score of thicknesses of old wallpaper; and at night – they might well have stood up on the tops of the buses! A dozen great spluttering violet arc-lights half-blinded you; down below were the watchmen’s fires; overhead, the riveters had their fire-baskets; and in odd corners naphtha-lights guttered and flared. And the steel rang with the riveters’ hammers, and the crane-chains rattled and clashed . . . There’s not much doubt in my mind, it’s the engineers who are the architects nowadays. The chaps who think they’re the architects are only a sort of paperhangers, who hang brick and terra-cotta on our work and clap a pinnacle or two on top – but never mind that. There we were, sweating and clanging and navvying, till the day shift came to relieve us.
And I ought to say that fifty feet above our great gap, and from end to end across it, there ran a travelling crane on a skeleton line, with platform, engine, and wooden cab all compact in one.
It happened that they had pitched in as one of the foremen some fellow or other, a friend of the firm’s, a rank duffer, who pestered me incessantly with his questions. I did half his work and all my own, and it hadn’t improved my temper much. On this night that I’m telling about, he’d been playing the fool with his questions as if a time-contract was a sort of summer holiday; and he’d filled me up to that point that I really can’t say just when it was that Rooum put in an appearance again. I think I had heard somebody mention his name, but I’d paid no attention.
Well, our Johnnie Fresh came up to me for the twentieth time that night, this time wanting to know something about the overhead crane. At that I fairly lost my temper.
‘What ails the crane?’ I cried. ‘It’s doing its work, isn’t it? Isn’t everybody doing their work except you? Why can’t you ask Hopkins? Isn’t Hopkins there?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘Then,’ I snapped, ‘in that particular I’m as ignorant as you, and I hope it’s the only one.’
But he grabbed my arm.
‘Look at it now!’ he cried, pointing; and I looked up.
The Dead of Night Page 12