by Lord Dunsany
“Well, he impressed on me this sign, which he said would prove transmigration to be of the utmost value to science; though I think that what may have interested him more was that I should see to what heights he had deservedly risen. And, mind you, he had got me to believe him. I thought over it a lot, and often I pictured myself in my later years attending a levee or other great function at the Court of some foreign country, and suddenly receiving from the sovereign, I alone of all that assembly, that signal of recognition that would mean nothing to all the rest.
“He died at a good age, and I was still under thirty; and I decided to do what he had advised me, and to watch in my own old age the careers of men holding high places in Europe (for he didn’t think much of Asia), born after his death and showing certain abilities which might be expected from himself in another life, with all the advantages of his experience in this one. For I said to myself ‘if he’s right about transmigration, he’ll be right about what it can do for him.’ And, do you know, he was right about transmigration. I was walking in that very garden the year after he died, thinking of the Greek letter ϕ; as he had told me always to think of it, the distinct circle and the upright bar through the midst of it. Often I would make the sign with my fingers, as he used to do, to keep it in my mind; I made it that day on the old red garden-wall. I watched a snail on the wall making its slow journey, and remembered his contempt for them, and was somehow glad to think that he had not despised the poor things more than he seemed to despise men. The glittering track it was making up the wall, and which gathered the sunlight to it, was to him not worth noticing, but then much of the work of men was to him equally foolish. I looked still at the bright track of the snail’s progress, until I realized that he would have said that only a fool or a poet would waste his time with such trifles, and then I turned away. As I turned away I saw by one of those glances that stray from the corners of our eyes that the snail was making a very distinct curve. I looked again, and set little store by what I had seen, for chance could have done that much, but the snail had made a very distinct quarter of a circle on his way up the wall. It was so neat a bit of a circle that I went on watching, till it was as good a semicircle as it had been a quarter of a circle. It was not till it began to turn downwards that I grew excited. And then I did grow very excited indeed; for the snail had been obviously climbing the wall. What did it want to turn downwards for? The diameter of the circle was about four inches. On and on went the snail. With my mind so full of the sign I could not possibly ignore that, if the snail went on and completed the circle, it would be half the sign. And it was just the size, too, of the sign that Horcher used to make in that regal way with his forefinger. And the snail went on. When only half an inch remained to complete the circle, it may sound silly, but I made the sign myself, in the air with my finger. I knew the snail couldn’t see it: if it really was Horcher, I knew it could only be the habit, self-hypnotized into the very ego, that was making that sign, and nothing to do with any intellect. Then I put the absurd idea clean out of my mind. Yet the snail went on. And then it completed the circle. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘the snail has moved in a circle: lots of animals do: dogs do often: I expect birds do too: why shouldn’t they? And I must keep steady.’
“Do you know that snail, as soon as it finished its round, went straight on up the wall, dividing that circle into two halves as neatly as you ever saw anything divided. I stood and stared with my mouth and my eyes wide open. Below ran the perfectly vertical track by which the snail climbed the wall, then the circle, and now the continuation of the vertical line dividing the circle in two. It came to the top of the circle. What now? The snail went straight on upwards. It came to a point a couple of inches above the top of the circle and there it stopped, having made a perfect ϕ, having proved the dream of the Brahmin to be a reality. ‘Poor old Horcher,’ I said.”
“Did you do anything for the snail?” asked Terbut.
“I thought for a moment of killing it,” said Jorkens, “to give Horcher a better chance with his third life. And then I realized that there was something about his outlook that it might take hundreds of lives to purify. You can’t go on and on killing snails, you know.”
The Neapolitan Ice
I HAVE had on other occasions to mention topics carefully chosen by members of the Billiards Club with the sole intent of steering conversation where Jorkens might be unable to follow. I do not refer again to this unsporting device with any intention of deprecating it, but only because it was the beginning of a story by Jorkens of an experience that may be of interest to such as care to study his somewhat unusual character. The topic at lunch-time on the day in question was Polar exploration. I will not record the conversation in any detail, because it was scarcely original; after all, there is no need to be original when you are discussing something at a club; for instance one of our members said: “It must be pretty hard to keep warm.”
“Yes, it’s damned hard,” said Jorkens.
It was clearly on the tip of Terbut’s tongue to say, “How do you know?” One could see that. But rather than risk letting Jorkens in with a story, he closed his lips again with the remark unsaid.
“You’d keep warm with whiskey, wouldn’t you?” said one of us.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jorkens. “Whiskey’s a rather overrated drink.”
One of the things I like about Jorkens is the immensely surprising remarks that he sometimes makes.
“Whiskey overrated!” we said.
“Well, yes, compared to some drinks,” said Jorkens.
“What, for instance?” said Terbut, who really wanted to know.
“For keeping you warm in ice and snow,” said Jorkens, “and probably keeping off frostbite, I know nothing like a liqueur a man gave me once at a dinner in a little restaurant that there used to be in Punt Street: it’s closed down long ago: there’s a hair-cutter’s shop there now. It was a wonderful drink, a drink like honey and roses and a very gentle fire, a cosy, quiet fire mildly flickering. I never knew anything like it. Unfortunately I don’t know its name. He was a bit of a traveller, this man. I don’t know where the bottle came from; the waiter brought it in, but I was never able to get another like it in that restaurant, or elsewhere; my host was very secretive about it. He did not have it brought in till the end of dinner. It came in with the Neapolitan ice. I should like to have had a glass of it beside me all through dinner; so would any of you if once you had tasted it, as none of you have; but it only came in with the ices.” And Jorkens uttered a small sigh.
“Did you never find out the name of it?” asked Terbut a little greedily.
“Well, no,” said Jorkens. “It was all a matter of business. There was a business deal that this man was rather keen on; and he wanted to get my attitude just right, so he brought out this liqueur. There are a good many secrets in business, and this liqueur was one of them. As a matter of fact the fellow overdid it, and the deal never came off, but I had one wonderful drink. I should have liked a lot more of it; but they only brought it with the ices. It was a good dinner he gave me. Well, naturally; because he was pretty keen on this deal. We had turtle soup; fresh turtle, you know; red mullet; good enough in its way, only too many bones; and then we had hare; just the common hare, but they could cook it at that restaurant that there used to be in Punt Street. And really I think that was about all; and then the Neapolitan ice. Quite a small dinner; but good, you know.” And he saw Terbut about to interrupt, and turned to him and forestalled him with the remark: “Perhaps you don’t know a Neapolitan ice, Terbut.”
And Terbut took this to be an aspersion on his ignorance of the world that Jorkens had travelled so much, and blurted out, “Of course I do. It’s green and white and pink. The white is supposed to be vanilla, and of course the pink is strawberry; as for the green, I don’t quite know what that is, but. . .”
“We are not meant to,” said Jorkens.
“We are a long way from the Arctic,” Terbut retorted.
“I
was about to tell you,” said Jorkens. “The liqueur came in with the ices. And the moment I put it down, it woke the imagination as I’ve known nothing else able to. It liberated the very spirit. I may have had two glasses; that I don’t remember. But that restaurant, Punt Street, all London, fell behind me almost immediately, and my imagination or spirit or whatever carries one’s ego, swept northward through England.”
“How did you know you were going northward?” asked Terbut.
“How did I know?” asked Jorkens. “I could see. I was liberated; my spirit was free. I was far far up above England. I could see the shape of it, a long green belt going northwards, and Scotland too; green all the way until we came to the snow. I must have passed over that strip of six hundred miles of green in a few seconds: that is how spirits travel. Of course the fellow had let me have too much: there was no more business in me now, I was above all that sort of thing, and far above earth. And I was sweeping northwards. The seas froze almost at once; and instead of white foam there was ice, and snow on the ice for miles, and hundreds of miles; and still I went northwards. And there was the Arctic with the sun on the snow, a beautiful thing to see, the most wonderful journey that I have ever made. But liberations like this are never for long. Scarcely had I seen the beauty of that enormous vista of Arctic, when I felt that my spirit was falling. And fall it did, rapidly. And soon I was lying in the snow. I had not been conscious of my body when I was up at that glorious height travelling faster than birds migrating; but I was conscious of it now in the snow. The glittering whiteness of it began to weary my eyes; and my lips were freezing, for I was lying face downwards. I, who some seconds before had been superior to gravity, was now unable even to lift my face, and I knew that my lips were freezing. After the pain came numbness, the first symptom of frostbite.”
“How could your lips be frostbitten,” said Terbut, “if they were still indoors in London?”
“Well, they may not have been quite,” said Jorkens; “but I went to a doctor next day, and he said that another three minutes would have been sure to have done it.”
“I can’t see how,” said Terbut.
“I’m only telling you what happened,” said Jorkens quite calmly. “The ice was shining on the surface of the snow, and that beautiful scene, as it had been a while before, was now an intense weariness. The glare of the ice in my eyes was wearying my brain, and I could not lift up my face from it. That’s the trouble with any drink; the more it lifts you up, the more it lets you down. But I had never been let down quite like that before: I could barely lift my eyes. But I lifted them, and I saw the Abendgluth, quite close and the snow all flushed with it. The white snow ended just by a ridge where my weary face was lying, and I saw the tremendous sight that they call the Abendgluth, on miles and miles of snow. It was worth while lying there with frozen lips only to see that everlasting wonder; miles and miles of rose-pink snow shining like dawn on earth; cold snow like a world-wide jewel, and a scent of strawberries.”
“Strawberries!” said Terbut. “You must have a powerful imagination if you can imagine strawberries in the Arctic.”
“Not at all,” said Jorkens. “It was just sheer fact. It wasn’t imagination at all. I was lying over the table with my face in the Neapolitan ice; I had slid over the green part, and my lips were on the vanilla, and just in front of my eyes was the strawberry end of it. The amount of strawberry of course in a strawberry ice varies according to the conscience of the man who makes it, and there was a distinct trace of strawberry in this one; but no vanilla.”
Jorkens Consults a Prophet
IT was the usual thing at the Billiards Club, a thing that happens too often: Jorkens was known to be coming up the stairs, and one or two members, simply with the deliberate intention of getting the conversation where he was unlikely to join in, that is to say away from Africa or any of the wilder lands, had chosen philosophy for their discussion. Free will or destiny was the general trend of their argument. I found it merely dull. But the moment Jorkens heard them, his eye brightened up.
“There is a lot to be said for destiny,” said Jorkens, “but you can’t ignore free will.”
“What do you mean?” said one of the philosophers.
And then Terbut joined in.
“Do you know anything about either of them?” he said.
“Yes,” said Jorkens. “As it happens I do. I thought I knew about one of them, and it turned out I didn’t, but I had quite a considerable experience of the other. I’ll tell you about it. It was like this. I was a good deal interested in destiny, not so much from the point of view from which you are looking at it, but as a practical proposition. I said to myself, things are bound to happen, and there’s no stopping them; and if one could find out someone who knew what those things were, there’d be a great deal of money in it. And, mind you, it was not I that was having wild fancies about it: plenty of people claimed to know the future, and do so still. Well, I investigated the claims of one of them. I went to him and I said, ‘You foretell the future?’
“ ‘I do,’ he said.
“ ‘Can you tell what is going to win the Derby?’ I asked.
“ ‘I can,’ he said.
“Well, it wasn’t the Derby that I wanted to know about, it was a race-meeting a long way from here, but it served my purpose just as well, and I asked him if he could tell me what was going to win that. So he brought out a lot of silks and began unwrapping them, all of them different colours; and when he had taken off about nine of them, there was a crystal, not quite smooth, but lightly carved on the surface with things like leaves; rather like an artichoke. Then he lit a powder in a little agate saucer, which made a smoke with a queer smell and made everything dim all round, but not the crystal. The crystal remained as bright as ever. When he moved it slightly in his hand things moved in the crystal: you could see them quite clearly. And then he told me the name of the horse that would win that race, and the name of the second and the third. He did more than that, he showed me the actual race in the crystal with the three horses leading it past the post and their colours clear and distinct. Now, that was a queer thing to do. The horses were unmistakable: I recognized all three of them afterwards; but, to make sure, I jotted down the colours that the jockeys were wearing. He let me see that race again and again. It was clear and bright, in spite of the smoke all round me; in fact the grass was greener than it ever is naturally, and the colours the jockeys wore were more like enamel than silk. But you simply couldn’t mistake them. Of course I paid him; I paid him a good deal; in fact the blackguard demanded £5, and wouldn’t take less. But, after all, the information was worth it. Then I got out of the room as fast as I could, away from the scented smoke, to breathe the fresh air, and because I didn’t like the fellow at all. I had the name of the winning horse from the conjurer’s lips, and I had seen the race with my own eyes. Did I tell you that he let me see the race over and over again, so that I got the colours quite clear? I bought some coloured chalks and jotted down sketches of them. I very soon found what the horses were, and who their owners were and what their colours; and the colours I had seen in the crystal were perfectly right. Well, do you know, I didn’t have a penny on that race. I just went and watched it. And there were the horses, every single one of them, just as I had seen them in the crystal. And the man was perfectly right about the name of the winner, and of the second and third. It was an odd and surprising experience to see that race in the crystal repeated before my eyes, all the horses I had seen, all the colours and even the exact distances between each, which I had noticed in the crystal and made rough notes of. I was a good deal surprised, but I didn’t waste any time wondering: I saw that I was on a good thing, and I went straight back to that rather sinister fellow that burned the scented smoke. I said, ‘I want to see another race, and I will give you £10 this time.’ I did that so as not to have any argument as to whether or not he would show me another, for I knew now that it was an excessively good thing. Well, he burned the smoke again in th
e agate saucer while he held the crystal in his hand; and the room grew dim once more and the crystal shone brighter and I saw another race. Again he told me the names of the three winners, and again I jotted them down and made little sketches of all the colours with the coloured pencils, which I had in my pocket this time. It was a big race, a very big one, and it was coming on in about three weeks’ time. Well, I concentrated on the winner. Of course I could have got fabulous odds, if I had backed all those three horses to come in in the right order, but I didn’t want to give too much away: I didn’t want people to suspect that I had had dealings with a clairvoyant, and so to find out that my bet was a bet on a certainty. I had a good deal of money in those days, and I concentrated on the winner. I put all the money I had on him, spreading it over various bookies, and I borrowed a good deal more; and the odds were six to one. What with the cash I had borrowed and what with the stuff I owned, I stood to be ten times richer on the afternoon of that race than I had been on the same morning. I am not going to tell you what race it was; because, if what I tell you gets out, I don’t want some fellow to get up and say that that’s not the way races are run there. They are run in that way of course, only I don’t want to say so.
“The day before I made my final arrangements with the bookies I went back to the damned fellow with the crystal and scented smoke, to ask him if he was sure of what he had been talking about, that is to say that Pullover would win that race, with a jockey wearing blue and yellow hoops. He said he knew well what he was talking about, and that that horse would win. And he asked me if the other race had not gone exactly as he had predicted, which of course made me look rather silly and quite unreasonably anxious. But it was then that he touched on a topic that I think you were just talking about. He said that free will was some sort of force that was almost equal, I think he said, to destiny; and that if I were to take a gun and shoot the horse as he came by, or injure it severely before the race, then of course it would not win, but that according to the will and the actions of everybody else in the world, and every horse, that horse would win the race. Only two men, he and I, knew anything of the future, as far as that horse was concerned: he certainly would do nothing whatever, and took an oath accordingly, and, provided that I exerted no free will against what was planned for the horse, it was destined that it must win. He also repeated the names of the second and third, with which I had nothing to do, for the reason that I have told you. The whole thing seemed very reasonable and, indeed, obvious. Of course if I took violent measures against whatever was ordained, the thing could not happen; just as, if you divert a river, it won’t go its old way to the sea; but leave it alone, and it will.