‘There’s
a hextraordinary gentleman to see you, sir,’ said the new man.
‘Why “extraordinary”?’ asked Dr. Silence, drawing the
tips of his thin fingers through his brown beard. His eyes twinkled
pleasantly. ‘Why “extraordinary,” Barker?’ he repeated
encouragingly, noticing the perplexed expression in the man’s eyes.
‘He’s so—so thin, sir. I could hardly see ’im at all—at
first. He was inside the house before I could ask the name,’ he added,
remembering strict orders.
‘And who brought him here?’
‘He come alone, sir, in a closed cab. He pushed by me before I
could say a word—making no noise not what I could hear. He seemed to
move very soft—’
The man stopped short with obvious embarrassment, as though he
had already said enough to jeopardise his new situation, but trying
hard to show that he remembered the instructions and warnings he had
received with regard to the admission of strangers not properly
accredited.
‘And where is the gentleman now?’ asked Dr. Silence, turning
away to conceal his amusement.
‘I really couldn’t exactly say, sir. I left him standing in
the ’all—’
The doctor looked up sharply. ‘But why in the hall, Barker? Why
not in the waiting-room?’ He fixed his piercing though kindly eyes on
the man’s face. ‘Did he frighten you?’ he asked quickly.
‘I think he did, sir, if I may say so. I seemed to lose sight
of him, as it were—’ The man stammered, evidently convinced by now
that he had earned his dismissal. ‘He come in so funny, just like a
cold wind,’ he added boldly, setting his heels at attention and
looking his master full in the face.
The doctor made an internal note of the man’s halting
description; he was pleased that the slight evidence of intuition which
had induced him to engage Barker had not entirely failed at the first
trial. Dr. Silence sought for this qualification in all his assistants,
from secretary to serving-man, and if it surrounded him with a somewhat
singular crew, the drawbacks were more than compensated for on the whole
by their occasional flashes of insight.
‘So the gentleman made you feel queer, did he?’
‘That was it, I think, sir,’ repeated the man stolidly.
‘And he brings no kind of introduction to me—no letter or
anything?’ asked the doctor, with feigned surprise, as though he knew
what was coming.
The man fumbled, both in mind and pockets, and finally produced
an envelope.
‘I beg pardon, sir,’ he said, greatly flustered; ‘the
gentleman handed me this for you.’
It was a note from a discerning friend, who had never yet sent
him a case that was not vitally interesting from one point or another.
‘Please see the bearer of this note,’ the brief message ran,
‘though I doubt if even you can do much to help him,’
John Silence paused a moment, so as to gather from the mind of
the writer all that lay behind the brief words of the letter. Then he
looked up at his servant with a graver expression than he had yet
worn.
‘Go back and find this gentleman,’ he said, ‘and show him
into the green study. Do not reply to his question, or speak more than
actually necessary; but think kind, helpful, sympathetic thoughts as
strongly as you can, Barker. Your remember what I told you about the
importance of thinking, when I engaged you. Put curiosity out of your
mind, and think gently, sympathetically, affectionately, if you can.’
He smiled, and Barker, who had recovered his composure in the
doctor’s presence, bowed silently and went out.
There were two different reception rooms in Dr. Silence’s
house. One, intended for persons who imagined they needed spiritual
assistance when really they were only candidates for the asylum, had
padded walls, and was well supplied with various concealed contrivances
by means of which sudden violence could be instantly met and overcome.
It was, however, rarely used. The other, intended for the reception of
genuine cases of spiritual distress and out-of-the-way afflictions of a
psychic nature, was entirely draped and furnished in a soothing deep
green, calculated to induce calmness and repose of mind. And this room
was the one in which Dr. Silence interviewed the majority of his
‘queer’ cases, and the one into which he had directed Barker to show
his present caller.
To begin with, the arm-chair in which the patient was always
directed to sit, was nailed to the floor, since its immovability
tended to impart this same excellent characteristic to the occupant.
Patients invariably grew excited when talking about themselves, and
their excitement tended to confuse their thoughts and to exaggerate
their language. The immobility of the chair helped to counteract this.
After repeated endeavours to drag it forward, or push it back, they
ended by resigning themselves to sitting quietly. And with the futility
of fidgeting there followed a calmer state of mind.
Upon the floor, and at intervals in the wall immediately behind,
were certain tiny green buttons, practically unnoticeable, which on
being pressed permitted a soothing and persuasive narcotic to rise
invisibly about the occupant of the chair. The effect upon the excitable
patient was rapid, admirable, and harmless. The green study was further
provided with a secret spy-hole; for John Silence liked when possible to
observe his patient’s face before it had assumed that mask the
features of the human countenance invariably wear in the presence of
another person. A man sitting alone wears a psychic expression; and
this expression is the man himself. It disappears the moment another
person joins him. And Dr. Silence often learned more from a few
moments’ secret observation of a face than from hours of
conversation with its owner afterwards.
A very light, almost a dancing step followed Barker’s heavy
tread towards the green room, and a moment afterwards the man came in
and announced that the gentleman was waiting. He was still pale and his
manner nervous.
‘Never mind, Barker,’ the doctor said kindly; ‘if you were
not intuitive the man would have had no effect upon you at all. You only
need training and development. And when you have learned to interpret
these feelings and sensations better, you will feel no fear, but only a
great sympathy.’
‘Yes, sir; thank you sir!’ And Barker bowed and made his
escape, while Dr. Silence, an amused smile lurking about the corners of
his mouth, made his way noiselessly down the passage and put his eye to
the spy-hole in the door of the green study.
This spy-hole was so placed that it commanded a view of almost
the entire room, and, looking through it, the doctor saw a hat, gloves,
and umbrella lying on a chair by the table, but searched at first in
vain for their owner.
The windows were both closed and a brisk fire burned in the
grate. There were various signs—signs intelligible at least to a
keenly intuitive soul—that the room was occupied, yet so far as human
beings were concerned, it seemed undeniably empty. No one sat in the
chairs; no one stood on the mat before the fire; there was no sign even
that a patient was anywhere close against the wall, examining the Böcklin
reproduction—as patients so often did when they thought they were
alone—and therefore rather difficult to see from the spy-hole.
Ordinarily speaking, there was no one in the room. It was unoccupied.
Yet Dr. Silence was quite well aware that a human being was
in the room. His sensitive system never failed to let him know the
proximity of an incarnate or discarnate being. Even in the dark he could
tall that. And he now knew positively that his patient, the patient who
had alarmed Barker, and had then tripped down the corridor with that
dancing footstep—was somewhere concealed within the four walls commanded
by his spy-hole. He also realised—and this was most unusual—that
this individual whom he desired to watch knew that he was being watched.
And, further, that the stranger himself was also watching in his turn.
In fact, that it was he, the doctor, who was being observed—and by an
observer as keen and trained as himself.
An inkling of the true state of the case began to dawn upon him,
and he was on the verge of entering—indeed, his hand already touched
the door-knob—when his eye, still glued to the spy-hole, detected a
slight movement. Directly opposite, between him and the fireplace,
something stirred. He watched very attentively and made certain that he
was not mistaken. An object on the mantelpiece—it was a blue
vase—disappeared from view. It passed out of sight together with the
portion of the marble mantelpiece on which it rested. Next, that part of
the fire and grate and brass fender immediately below, it vanished
entirely, as though a slice had been taken clean out of them.
Dr. Silence then understood that something between him and these
objects was slowly coming into being, something that concealed them and
obstructed his vision by inserting itself in the line of sight between
them and himself.
He quietly awaited further results before going in.
First he saw a thin perpendicular line tracing itself from just
above the height of the clock and continuing downwards till it reached
the woolly fire-mat. This line grew wider, broadened, grew solid. It was
no shadow; it was something substantial. It defined itself more and
more. Then suddenly, at the top of the line, and about on a level with
the face of the clock, he saw a small luminous disc gazing steadily at
him. It was a human eye, looking straight into his own, pressed there
against the spy-hole. And it was bright with intelligence. Dr. Silence
held his breath for a moment—and stared back at it.
Then, like someone moving out of deep shadow into light, he saw
the figure of a man come sliding sideways into view, a whitish face
following the eye, and the perpendicular line he had first observed
broadening out and developing into the complete figure of a human being.
It was the patient. He had apparently been standing there in front of
the fire all the time. A second eye had followed the first, and both of
them stared steadily at the spy-hole, sharply concentrated, yet with a
sly twinkle of humour and amusement that made it impossible for the
doctor to maintain his position any longer.
He opened the door and went in quickly. As he did so he noticed
for the first time the sound of a German band coming in noisily through
the open ventilators. In some intuitive, unaccountable fashion the music
connected itself with the patient he was about to interview. This sort
of prevision was not unfamiliar to him. It always explained itself
later.
The man, he saw, was of middle age and of very ordinary
appearance; so ordinary, in fact, that he was difficult to
describe—his only peculiarity being his extreme thinness. Pleasant—that
is, good—vibrations issued from his atmosphere and met Dr. Silence as
he advanced to greet him, yet vibrations alive with currents and
discharges betraying the perturbed and disordered condition of his mind
and brain. There was evidently something wholly out of the usual in the
state of his thoughts. Yet, though strange, it was not altogether
distressing; it was not the impression that the broken and violent
atmosphere of the insane produces upon the mind. Dr. Silence realised in
a flash that here was a case of absorbing interest that might require
all his powers to handle properly.
‘I was watching you through my little peep-hole—as you
saw,’ he began, with a pleasant smile, advancing to shake hands. ‘I
find it of the greatest assistance sometimes—’
But the patient interrupted him at once. His voice was hurried
and had odd, shrill changes in it, breaking from high to low in
unexpected fashion. One moment it thundered, the next it almost
squeaked.
‘I understand without explanation,’ he broke in rapidly.
‘You get the true note of a man in that way—when he thinks himself
unobserved. I quite agree. Only, in my case, I fear, you saw very
little. My case, as you of course grasp, Dr. Silence, is extremely
peculiar, uncomfortably peculiar. Indeed, unless Sir William had
positively assured me—’
‘My friend has sent you to me,’ the doctor interrupted gravely,
with a gentle note of authority, ‘and that is quite sufficient. Pray,
be seated, Mr. —’
‘Mudge—Racine Mudge,’ returned the other.
‘Take this comfortable one, Mr. Mudge,’ leading him to the
fixed chair, ‘and tell me your condition in your own way and at your
own pace. My whole day is at your service if you require it.’
Mr. Mudge moved towards the chair in question and then hesitated.
‘You will promise me not to use the narcotic buttons,’ he
said, before sitting down. ‘I do not need them. Also I ought to
mention that anything you think of vividly will reach my mind. That is
apparently part of my peculiar case.’ He sat down with a sigh and
arranged his thin legs and body into a position of comfort. Evidently he
was very sensitive to the thoughts of others, for the picture of the
green buttons had only entered the doctor’s mind for a second, yet the
other had instantly snapped it up. Dr. Silence noticed, too that Mr.
Mudge held on tightly with both hands to the arms of the chair.
‘I’m rather glad the chair is nailed to the floor,’ he
remarked, as he settled himself more comfortably. ‘It suits me
admirably. The fact is—and this is my case in a nutshell—which is
all that a doctor of your marvellous development requires—the fact is,
Dr. Silence, I am a victim of Higher Space. That’s what’s the matter
with me—Higher Space!’
The two looked at each other for a space in silence, the little
patient holding tightly to the arms of the chair which ‘suited him
admirably’, and looking up with staring eyes, his atmosphere
positively trembling with the waves of some unknown activity; while the
doctor smiled kindly and sympathetically, and put his whole person as
far as possible into the mental condition of the other.
‘Higher Space,’ repeated Mr. Mudge, ‘that’s what it is.
Now, do you think you can help me with that?’
There was a pause during which the men’s eyes steadily searched
down below the surface of their respective personalities. Then Dr.
Silence spoke.
‘I am quite sure I can help,’ he answered quietly;
‘sympathy must always help, and suffering always claims my sympathy. I
see you have suffered cruelly. You must tell me all about your case, and
when I hear the gradual steps by which you reached this strange
condition, I have no doubt I can be of assistance to you.’
He drew a chair up beside his interlocutor and laid a hand on his
shoulder for a moment. His whole being radiated kindness, intelligence,
desire to help.
‘For instance,’ he went on, ‘I feel sure it was the result
of no mere chance that you became familiar with the terrors of what you
term Higher Space; for higher space is no mere external measurement. It
is, of course, a spiritual state, a spiritual condition, an inner
development, and one that we must recognise as abnormal, since it is
beyond the reach of the senses at the present stage of evolution. Higher
Space is a mystical state.’
‘Oh!’ cried the other, rubbing his birdlike hands with
pleasure, ‘the relief it is to me to talk to someone who can
understand! Of course what you say is the utter truth. And you are right
that no mere chance led me to my present condition, but, on the other
hand, prolonged and deliberate study. Yet chance in a sense now governs
it. I mean, my entering the condition of higher space seems to depend
upon the chance of this and that circumstance.’ He sighed and paused a
moment. ‘For instance,’ he continued, starting, ‘the mere sound of
that German band sent me off. Not that all music will do so, but
certain sounds, certain vibrations, at once key me up to the requisite
pitch, and off I go. Wagner’s music always does it, and that band must
have been playing a stray bit of Wagner. But I’ll come to all that
later. Only, first’—he smiled deprecatingly— ‘I must ask you to
send away your man from the spy-hole.’
John Silence looked up with a start, for Mr. Mudge’s back was
to the door, and there was no mirror. He saw the brown eye of Barker
glued to the little circle of glass, and he crossed the room without a
word and snapped down the black shutter provided for the purpose, and
then heard Barker shuffle away along the passage.
‘Now,’ continued the little man in the chair, ‘I can go on.
You have managed to put me completely at my ease, and I feel I may tell
you my whole case without shame or reserve. You will understand. But you
must be patient with me if I go into details that are already familiar
to you—details of higher space, I mean—and if I seem stupid when I
have to describe things that transcend the power of language and are
really therefore indescribable.’
‘My dear friend,’ put in the other calmly, ‘that goes
without saying. To know higher space is an experience that defies
description, and one is obliged to make use of more or less intelligible
symbols. But, pray, proceed. Your vivid thoughts will tell me more than
your halting words.’
An immense sigh of relief proceeded from the little figure half
lost in the depths of the chair. Such intelligent sympathy meeting him
half-way was a new experience, and it touched his heart at once. He
leaned back, relaxing his tight hold of the arms, and began in his thin,
scale-like voice.
‘My mother was a Frenchwoman, and my father an Essex
bargeman,’ he said abruptly. ‘Hence my name—Racine and Mudge. My
father died before I ever saw him. My mother inherited money from her
Bordeaux relations, and when she died soon after, I was left alone with
wealth and a strange freedom. I had no guardian, trustees, sisters,
brothers, or any connection in the world to look after me. I grew up,
therefore, utterly without education. This much was to my advantage; I
learned none of that deceitful rubbish taught in schools, and so had
nothing to unlearn when I awakened to my true love—mathematics, higher
mathematics and higher geometry. These, however, I seemed to know
instinctively. It was like the memory of what I had deeply studied
before; the principles were in my blood, and I simply raced through the
ordinary stages, and beyond, and then did the same with geometry.
Afterwards, when I read the books on these subjects, I understood how
swift and undeviating the knowledge had come back to me. It was simply
memory. It was simply re-collecting the memories of what I had known
before in a previous existence and required no books to teach me.’
In his growing excitement, Mr. Mudge attempted to drag the chair
forward a little nearer to his listener, and then smiled faintly as he
resigned himself instantly again to its immobility, and plunged anew
into the recital of his singular ‘disease’.
‘The audacious speculations of Bolyai, the amazing theories of
Gauss—that through a point more than one line could be drawn parallel to a given line; the possibility
that the angles of a triangle are together greater
than two right angles, if drawn upon immense curvatures—the
breathless intuitions of Beltrami and Lobatchewsky—all these I hurried
through, and emerged, panting but unsatisfied, upon the verge of my—my
world, my higher space possibilities—in a word, my disease!
‘How I got there,’ he resumed after a brief pause, during
which he appeared to be listening nervously for an approaching sound,
‘is more than I can put intelligibly into words. I can only hope to
leave your mind with an intuitive comprehension of the possibility of
what I say.
‘Here, however, came a change. At this point I was no longer
absorbing the fruits of studies I had made before; it was the beginning
of new efforts to learn for the first time, and I had to go slowly and
laboriously through terrible work. Here I sought for the theories and
speculations of others. But books were few and far between, and with the
exception of one man—a “dreamer,” the world called him—whose
audacity and piercing intuition amazed and delighted me beyond description,
I found no one to guide or help.
‘You, of course, Dr. Silence, understand something of what I am
driving at with these stammering words, though you cannot perhaps yet
guess what depths of pain my new knowledge brought me to, nor why an
acquaintance with a new dimension of space should prove a source of
misery and terror.’
Mr. Racine Mudge, remembering that the chair would not move, did
the next best thing he could in his desire to draw nearer to the
attentive man facing him, and sat forward upon the very edge of the
cushions, crossing his legs and gesticulating with both hands as though
he saw into this region of new space he was attempting to describe, and
might any moment tumble into it bodily from the edge of the chair and
disappear from view. John Silence, separated from him by three paces,
sat with his eyes fixed upon the thin white face opposite, noting every
word and every gesture with deep attention.
‘This room we now sit in, Dr. Silence, has one side open to
space—to higher space. A closed box only seems closed. There is a way in and out of a soap bubble without
breaking the skin.’
‘You tell me no new thing,’ the doctor interposed gently.
‘Hence, if higher space exists and our world borders upon it and lies
partially in it, if follows necessarily that we see only portions of all
objects. We never see their true and complete shape. We see three
measurements, but not their fourth. The new direction is concealed from
us, and when I hold this book and move my hand all round it I have not
really made a complete circuit. We only perceive those portions of any
object which exist in our three dimensions, the rest escapes us. But,
once learn to see in higher space, and objects will appear as they
actually are. Only they will thus be hardly recognisable!
‘Now you may begin to grasp something of what I am coming
to.’
‘I am beginning to understand something of what you must have
suffered,’ observed the doctor soothingly, ‘for I have made similar
experiments myself, and only stopped just in time—’
‘You are the one man in all the world who can understand, and
sympathise,’ exclaimed Mr. Mudge, grasping his hand and holding it
tightly while he spoke. The nailed chair prevented further
excitability.
‘Well,’ he resumed, after a moments’ pause, ‘I procured
the implements and the coloured blocks for practical experiment, and I
followed the instructions carefully till I had arrived at an imaginative
conception of four dimensional space. The tessaract, the figure whose
boundaries are cubes, I knew by heart. That is to say, I knew it and saw
it mentally, for my eye, of course, could never take in a new
measurement, nor my hands and feet handle it.
‘So, at least, I thought,’ he added, making a wry face. ‘I
had reached the stage, you see, when I could imagine
in a new dimension. I was able to conceive the shape of that new
figure which is instrinsically different to all we know—the shape of
the tessaract. I could perceive in four dimensions. When, therefore, I
looked at a cube I could see all its sides at once. Its top was not
foreshortened, nor its farther side and base invisible. I saw the whole
thing out flat, so to speak. Moreover, I also saw its content—its
in-sides.’
‘You were not yourself able to enter this new world?’
interrupted Dr. Silence.
‘Not then. I was only able to conceive intuitively what it was
like and how exactly it must look. Later, when I slipped in there and
saw objects in their entirety, unlimited by the paucity of our poor
three measurements, I very nearly lost my life. For, you see, space does
not stop at a single new dimension, a fourth. It extends in all
possible new ones, and we must conceive it as containing any number of
new dimensions. In other words, there is no space at all, but only a
condition. But, meanwhile, I had come to grasp the strange fact that the
objects in our normal world appear to us only partially.’
Mr. Mudge moved farther forward till he was balanced dangerously
on the very edge of the chair. ‘From this starting point,’ he
resumed, ‘I began my studies and experiments, and continued them for
years. I had money, and I was without friends. I lived in solitude and
experimented. My intellect, of course, had little part in the work, for
intellectually it was all unthinkable. Never was the limitation of mere
reason more plainly demonstrated. It was mystically, intuitively,
spiritually that I began to advance. And what I learnt, and knew, and
did is all impossible to put into language, since it describes
experiences transcending the experiences of men. It is only some of the
results—what you would call the symptoms of my disease—that I can
give you, and even these must often appear absurd contradictions and
impossible paradoxes.
‘I can only tell you, Dr. Silence’—his manner became grave
suddenly—‘that I reached sometimes a point of view whence all the
great puzzles of the world became plain to me, and I understood what
they call in the Yoga books “The Great Heresy of Separateness”; why
all great teachers have urged the necessity of man loving his neighbour
as himself; how men are all really one;
and why the utter loss of self is necessary to salvation and the
discovery of the true life of the soul.’
He paused a moment and drew breath.
‘Your speculations have been my own long ago,’ the doctor
said quietly. ‘I fully realise the force of your words. Men are
doubtless not separate at all—in the sense they imagine.’
‘All this about the very much higher space I only dimly, very
dimly conceived, of course,’ the other went on, raising his voice
again by jerks; ‘but what did happen to me was the humbler accident
of—the simpler disaster—oh dear, how shall I put it—?’
He stammered and showed visible signs of distress.
‘It was simply this,’ he resumed with a sudden rush of words,
‘that, accidentally, as the result of my years of experiment, I one
day slipped bodily into the next world, the world of four dimensions,
yet without knowing precisely how I got there, or how I could get back
again. I discovered, that is, that my ordinary three-dimensional body
was but an expression— a partial projection—of my higher
four-dimensional body!
‘Now you understand what I meant much earlier in our talk when
I spoke of chance. I cannot control my entrance or exit. Certain people,
certain human atmospheres, certain wandering forces, thoughts, desires
even—the radiations of certain combinations of colour, and above all,
the vibrations of certain kinds of music, will suddenly throw me into a
state of what I can only describe as an intense and terrific inner
vibration—and behold I am off! Off in the direction at right angles to
all our known directions! Off in the direction the cube takes when it
begins to trace the outlines of the new figure, the tessaract! Off into
my breathless and semi-divine higher space! Off, inside
myself, into the world of four dimensions!’
He gasped and dropped back into the depths of the immovable
chair.
‘And there,’ he whispered, his voice issuing from among the
cushions, ‘there I have to stay until these vibrations subside, or
until they do something which I cannot find words to describe properly
or intelligibly to you—and then, behold, I am back again. First, that
is, I disappear. Then I reappear. Only,’— he sighed — ‘I cannot
control my entrance nor my exit.’
‘Just so,’ exclaimed Dr. Silence, ‘and that is why a
few—’
‘Why a few moments ago,’ interrupted Mr. Mudge, taking the
words out of his mouth, ‘you found me gone, and then saw me return.
The music of that wretched German band sent me off. Your intense thinking about me brought me back—when the
band had stopped its Wagner. I saw you approach the peep-hole and I saw
Barker’s intention of doing so later. For me no interiors are hidden.
I see inside. When in that state the content of your mind, as of your
body, is open to me as the day. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!’
Mr. Mudge stopped and mopped his brow. A light trembling ran over
the surface of his small body like wind over grass. He still held
tightly to the arms of the chair.
‘At first,’ he presently resumed, ‘my new experiences were
so vividly interesting that I felt no alarm. There was no room for it.
The alarm came a little later.’
‘Then you actually penetrated far enough into that state to
experience yourself as a normal portion of it?’ asked the doctor,
leaning forward, deeply interested.
Mr. Mudge nodded a perspiring face in reply.
‘I did,’ he whispered, ‘undoubtedly I did. I am coming to
all that. It began first at night, when I realised that sleep brought no
loss of consciousness—’
‘The spirit, of course, can never sleep. Only the body becomes
unconscious,’ interposed John Silence.
‘Yes, we know that—theoretically. At night, of course, the
spirit is active elsewhere, and we have no memory of where and how,
simply because the brain stays behind and receives no record. But I
found the, while remaining conscious, I also retained memory. I had
attained to the state of continuous consciousness, for at night
regularly, with the first approaches of drowsiness, I entered nolens
volens the four dimensional world.
‘For a time this happened frequently, and I could not control
it; though later I found a way to regulate it better. Apparently sleep
is unnecessary in the higher—the four dimensional-body. Yes,
perhaps. But I should infinitely have preferred dull sleep to the
knowledge. For, unable to control my movements, I wandered to and fro,
attracted owing to my partial development and premature arrival, to
parts of this new world that alarmed me more and more. It was the awful
waste and drift of a monstrous world, so utterly different to all we
know and see that I cannot even hint at the nature of the sights and
objects and beings in it. More than that, I cannot even remember them. I
cannot now picture them to myself even, but can recall only the memory
of the impression they made upon me, the horror and devastating
terror of it all. To be in several places at once, for instance—’
‘Perfectly,’ interrupted John Silence, noticing the increase
of the other’s excitement, ‘I understand exactly. But now, please,
tell me a little more of this alarm you experienced, and how it affected
you.’
‘It’s not the disappearing and reappearing per
se that I mind,’ continued Mr. Mudge, ‘so much as certain other
things. It’s seeing people and objects in their weird entirety, in
their true and complete shapes, that is so distressing. It introduced me
to a world of monsters. Horses, dogs, cats, all of which I loved;
people, trees, children; all that I have considered beautiful in
life—everything, from a human face to a cathedral—appear to me in
a different shape and aspect to all I have known before. Instead of
seeing their partial expression in three dimensions, I saw them
complete—in four. I cannot perhaps convince you why this should be
terrible, but I assure you that it is so. To hear the human voice
proceeding from this novel appearance which I scarcely recognise as a
human body is ghastly, simply ghastly. To see inside everything and
everybody is a form of insight peculiarly distressing. To be so confused
in geography as to find myself one moment at the North Pole, and the
next at Clapham junction—or possibly at both places
simultaneously—is absurdly terrifying. Your imagination will readily
furnish other details without my multiplying my experiences now. But you
have no ideawhat it all means, and how I suffer.’
Mr. Mudge paused in his panting account and lay back in his
chair. He still held tightly to the arms as though they could keep him
in the world of sanity and three measurements, and only now and again
released his left hand in order to mop his face. He looked very thin and
white and oddly unsubstantial, and he stared about him as though he saw
into this other space he had
been talking about.
John Silence, too, felt warm. He had listened to every word and
had made many notes. The presence of this man had an exhilarating effect
upon him. It seemed as if Mr. Racine Mudge still carried about with him
something of that breathless higher-space condition he had been
describing. At any rate, Dr. Silence had himself advanced sufficiently
far to realise that the visions of this extraordinary little person had
a basis of truth for their origin.
After a pause that prolonged itself into minutes, he crossed the
room and unlocked a drawer in a bookcase, taking out a small book with a
red cover. It had a lock to it, and he produced a key out of his
pocket and proceeded to open the covers. The bright eyes of Mr. Mudge
never left him for a single second.
‘It almost seems a pity,’ he said at length, ‘to cure you,
Mr. Mudge. You are on the way to discovery of great things. Though you
may lose your life in the process—that is, your life here in the world
of three dimensions—you would lose thereby nothing of great
value—you will pardon my apparent rudeness, I know—and you might
gain what is infinitely greater. Your suffering, of course, lies in the
fact that you alternate between the two worlds and are never wholly in
one or the other. Also, I rather imagine, though I cannot be certain of
this from any personal experiments, that you have here and there
penetrated even into space of more than four dimensions, and have hence
experienced the terror you speak of.’
The perspiring son of the Essex bargeman and the woman of
Normandy bent his head several times in assent, but uttered no word in
reply.
‘Some strange psychic predisposition, dating no doubt from one
of your former lives, has favoured the development of your
“disease”; and the fact that you had no normal training at school or
college, no leading by the poor intellect into the culs-de-sac falsely
called knowledge, has further caused your exceedingly rapid movement
along the lines of direct inner experience. None of the knowledge you
have foreshadowed has come to you through the senses, of course.’
Mr. Mudge, sitting in his immovable chair, began to tremble
slightly. A wind again seemed to pass over his surface and again to set
it curiously in motion like a field of grass.
‘You are merely talking to gain time,’ he said hurriedly, in
a shaking voice. ‘This thinking aloud delays us. I see ahead what you
are coming to, only please be quick, for something is going to happen.
A band is again coming down the street, and if it plays—if it plays
Wagner—I shall be off in a twinkling.’
‘Precisely. I will be quick. I was leading up to the point of
how to effect your cure. The way is this: You must simply learn to block
the entrances—prevent the centres
acting.’
‘True, true utterly true!’ exclaimed the little man, dodging
about nervously in the depths of the chair. ‘But how, in the name of
space, can that be done?’
‘By concentration. They are all within you, these centres,
although outer causes such as colour, music and other things lead you
towards them. These external things you cannot hope to destroy, but once
the entrances are blocked, they will lead you only to bricked walls and
closed channels. You will no longer be able to find the way.’
‘Quick, quick!’ cried the bobbing figure in the chair. ‘How
is this concentration to be effected?’
‘This little book,’ continued Dr. Silence calmly, ‘will
explain to you the way.’ He tapped the cover. ‘Let me now read out
to you certain simple instructions, composed, as I see you divine,
entirely from my own personal experiences in the same direction. Follow
these instructions and you will no longer enter the state of higher
space. The entrences will be blocked effectively.’
Mr. Mudge sat bolt upright in his chair to listen, and John
Silence cleared his throat and began to read slowly in a very distinct
voice.
But before he had uttered a dozen words, something happened. A
sound of street music entered the room through the open ventilators, for
a band had begun to play in the stable mews at the back of the
house—the March from Tannbäuser.
Odd as it may seem that a German band should twice within the space
of an hour enter the same mews and play Wagner, it was nevertheless the
fact.
Mr. Racine Mudge heard it. He uttered a sharp, squeaking cry and
twisted his arms with nervous energy round the chair. A piteous look
that was not far from tears spread over his white face. Grey shadows
followed it—the grey of fear. He began to struggle convulsively.
‘Hold me fast! Catch me! For God’s sake, keep me here! I’m
on the rush already. Oh, it’s frightful!’ he cried in tones of
anguish, his voice as thin as a reed.
Dr. Silence made a plunge forward to seize him, but in a flash,
before he could cover the space between them, Mr. Racine Mudge,
screaming and struggling, seemed to shoot past him into invisibility. He
disappeared like an arrow from a bow propelled at infinite speed, and
his voice no longer sounded in the external air, but seemed in some
curious way to make itself heard somewhere within the depths of the
doctor’s own being. It was almost like a faint singing cry in his
head, like a voice of dream, a voice of vision and unreality.
‘Alcohol, alcohol!’ it cried faintly, with distance in it,
‘give me alcohol! It’s the quickest way. Alcohol, before I’m out
of reach!’
The doctor, accustomed to rapid decisions and even more rapid
action, remembered that a brandy flask stood upon the mantelpiece, and
in less than a second he had seized it and was holding it out towards
the space above the chair recently occupied by the visible Mudge. But,
before his very eyes, and long ere he could unscrew the metal stopper,
he saw the contents of the closed glass phial sink and lessen as though
someone were drinking violently and greedily of the liquor within.
‘Thanks! Enough! It deadens the vibrations!’ cried the faint
voice in his interior, as he withdrew the flask and set it back upon the
mantelpiece. He understood that in Mudge’s present condition one side
of the flask was open to space and he could drink without removing the
stopper. He could hardly have had a more interesting proof of what he
had been hearing described at such length.
But the next moment—the very same moment it almost
seemed—the German band stopped midway in its tune—and there was Mr.
Mudge back in his chair again, gasping and panting!
‘Quick!’ he shrieked, ‘stop that band! Send it away! Catch
hold of me! Block the entrances! Block the entrances! Give me the red
book! Oh, oh, oh-h-h-h!!!’
The music had begun again. It was merely a temporary
interruption. The Tannbäuser March
started again, this time at a tremendous pace that made it sound like a
rapid two-step, as though the instruments played against time.
But the brief interruption gave Dr. Silence a moment in which to
collect his scattering thoughts, and before the band had got through
half a bar, he had flung forward upon the chair and held Mr. Racine
Mudge, the struggling little victim of Higher Space, in a grip of iron.
His arms went all round his diminutive person, taking in a good part of
the chair at the same time. He was not a big man, yet he seemed to
smother Mudge completely.
Yet, even as he did so, and felt the wriggling form underneath
him, it began to melt and slip away like air or water. The wood of the
armchair somehow disentangled itself from between his own arms and those
of Mudge. The phenomenon known as the passage of matter through matter
took place. The little man seemed actually to be interfused with the
other’s being. Dr. Silence could just see his face beneath him. It
puckered and grew dark as though from some great internal effort. He
heard the thin, reedy voice crying in his ear to ‘Block the entrances,
block the entrances!’ and then—but how in the world describe what is
indescribable?
John Silence half rose up to watch. Racine Mudge, his face
distorted beyond all recognition, was making a marvelous inward
movement, as though doubling back upon himself. He turned funnel-wise
like water in a whirling vortex, and then appeared to break up somewhat
as a reflection breaks up and divides in a distorting convex mirror. He
went neither forward nor backward, neither to the right nor the left,
neither up nor down. But he went. He went utterly. He simply flashed
away out of sight like a vanishing projectile.
All but one leg! Dr. Silence just had the time and the presence
of mind to seize upon the left ankle and boot as it disappeared, and to
this he held on for several seconds like grim death. Yet all the time he
knew it was a foolish and useless thing to do.
The foot was in his grasp one moment, and the next it seemed—
this was the only way he could describe it—inside his own skin and
bones, and at the same time outside his hand and all round it. It seemed
mingled in some amazing way with his own flesh and blood. Then it was
gone, and he was tightly grasping a mere draught of heated air.
‘Gone! gone! gone!’ cried a faint, whispering voice somewhere
deep within his own consciousness. ‘Lost! lost! lost!’ it repeated,
growing fainter and fainter till at length it vanished into nothing and
the last signs of Mr. Racine Mudge vanished with it.
John Silence locked his red book and replaced it in the cabinet
which he fastened with a click, and when Barker answered the bell he
inquired if Mr. Mudge had left a card upon the table. It appeared that
he had, and when the servant returned with it, Dr. Silence read the
address and made a note of it. It was in North London.
‘Mr. Mudge has gone,’ he said quietly to Barker, noticing his
expression of alarm.
‘He’s not taken his ’at with him, sir.’
‘Mr. Mudge requires no hat where he is now,’ continued the
doctor, stooping to poke the fire. ‘But he may return for it—’
‘And the humbrella, sir.’
‘And the umbrella.’
‘He didn’t go out my way, sir, if you please,’
stuttered the amazed servant, his curiosity overcoming his nervousness.
‘Mr. Mudge has his own way of coming and going, and prefers it.
If he returns by the door at any time remember to bring him instantly to
me, and be kind and gentle with him and ask no questions. Also,
remember, Barker, to think pleasantly, sympathetically, affectionately
of him while he is away. Mr. Mudge is a very suffering gentleman.’
Barker bowed and went out of the room backwards, gasping and
feeling round the inside of his collar with three very hot fingers of
one hand.
It was two days later when he brought in a telegram to the study.
Dr. Silence opened it, and read as follows:
‘Bombay. Just slipped out again. All safe. Have blocked
entrances. Thousand thanks. Address Cooks, London.— MUDGE.’
Dr. Silence looked up and saw Barker staring at him bewilderingly.
It occurred to him that somehow he knew the contents of the telegram.
‘Make a parcel of Mr. Mudge’s things,’ he said briefly,
‘and address them Thomas Cook & Sons, Ludgate Circus. And send
them there exactly a month from to-day, marked “To be called
for.”’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Barker, leaving the room with a deep sigh
and a hurried glance at the waste-paper basket where his master had
dropped the pink paper.
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From your dark side
