"O follow, followThrough the caverns hollowAs the song floats, thou pursueWhere the wild bee never flew...."
"O follow, followThrough the caverns hollowAs the song floats, thou pursueWhere the wild bee never flew...."
"O follow, followThrough the caverns hollowAs the song floats, thou pursueWhere the wild bee never flew...."
"O follow, follow
Through the caverns hollow
As the song floats, thou pursue
Where the wild bee never flew...."
The curtained door swung to again; the face and figure were no longer there; Nayan had withdrawn quickly, noticed by none but himself. She had gone up to make herself ready for her father's guests; in a few minutes she would come down again to play hostess as her custom was.... It was so ordinary. It was so dislocating.... For at that moment it seemed as if all the feminine forces of the universe, whatever these may be, focused in her, and poured against him their concentrated stream to allure, enchant, subdue. He trembled. He remembered Devonham's admission of the panic sense.
"It's the air," said a voice beside him, "all this tobacco smoke and scent, and no ventilation."
Father Collins was speaking, only he had completely forgotten that Father Collins was in the world. The steadying hand upon his arm made him realize that he had swayed a moment.
"The perfume chiefly," the voice continued. "All this cheap nasty stuff these women use. It's enough to sicken any healthy man. Nobody knows his own smell, they say." He laughed a little.
Collins was tactful. He talked on easily of nothing in particular, so that his companion might let the occasion slip, or comment on it, as he wished.
"Worse than incense." Fillery gave him the clue perhaps intentionally, certainly with gratitude. He made an effort. He found control. "It intoxicates the imagination, doesn't it?" That note of sweet farewell still hung with enchanting sadness in his brain. He still saw those yearning eyes. He heard that cry. And yet the conflict in his nature bewildered him—as though he found two persons in him, one weeping while the other sang.
Father Collins smiled, and Fillery then knew that he, too, had seen the girl framed in the doorway, intercepted the glance as well. No shadow of resentment crossed his heart as he heard him add: "She, too, perhaps belongs elsewhere." The phrase, however, brought to his own personal dream the conviction of another understanding mind. "As you yourself do, too," was added in a thrilling whisper suddenly.
Fillery turned with a start to meet his eye. "Butwhere?"
"That isyourproblem," said Father Collins promptly. "You are the expert—even though you think—mistakenly—that your heart is robbed." His voice held the sympathy and tenderness of a woman taught by suffering. The nobility was in his face again, untarnished now. His words, his tone, his manner caught Fillery in amazement. It did not surprise him that Father Collins had been quick enough to understand, but it did surprise him that a man so entangled in one formal creed after another, so netted by the conventional thought of various religious Systems, and therefore stuffed with old, rigid, commonplace ideas—itdid, indeed surprise him to feel this sudden atmosphere of vision and prophecy that abruptly shone about him. The extravagant, fantastic side of the man he had forgotten.
"Where?" he repeated, gazing at him. "Where, indeed?"
"Where the wild bee never flew ... perhaps!"
Father Collins's eyebrows shot up as though worked by artificial springs. His eyes, changing extraordinarily, turned very keen. He seemed several persons at once. He looked like—contradictory description—a spiritual Jesuit. The ugly mouth—thank Heaven, thought Fillery—showed lines of hidden humour. His sanity, at any rate, was unquestioned. Father Collins watched the planet with his soul, not with his brain alone. But which of his many personalities was now in the ascendancy, no man, least of all himself, could tell. His companion, the expert in him automatically aware of the simultaneous irruption and disruption, waited almost professionally for any outburst that might follow. "Arcades ambo," he reflected, making a stern attempt to keep his balance.
"The subconscious, remember, doesn't explain everything," came the words. "Not everything," he added with emphasis. "As with heredity"—he looked keenly half humorously, half sympathetically at the doctor—"there are gaps and lapses. The recent upheaval has been more than an inter-tribal war. It was a planetary event. It has shaken our nature fundamentally, radically. The human mind has been shocked, broken, dislocated. The prevalent hysteria is not an ordinary hysteria, nor are the new powers—perhaps—quite ordinary either."
"Mental history repeats itself," Fillery put in, now more master of himself again. "Unbalance has always followed upheaval. The removal of known, familiar foundations always lets in extravagance of wildest dissatisfaction, search and question."
"Upheaval of this kind," rejoined the other gravely, "there has never been since human beings walked the earth.Our fabulous old world trembles in the balance." And, as he said it, the dreamer shone in the light below the big, black eyebrows, noticed quickly by his companion. "Old ideals have been smashed beyond recovery. The gods men knew have been killed, like Tommy, in the trenches. The past is likewise dead, its dreams of progress buried with it by a Black Maria. The human mind and heart stand everywhere empty and bereft, while their hungry and unanswered questions search the stars for something new."
"Well, well," said Fillery gently, half stirred, half amused by the odd language. "You may be right. But mental history has always shown a desire for something new after each separate collapse. Signs and wonders are a recurrent hunger, remember. In the days of Abraham, of Paul, of Moses it was the same."
"Questions to-day," replied the other, "are based on an immense accumulated knowledge unknown to Moses or to Abraham's time. The phenomenon, I grant you, is the same, but—the shock, the dislocation, the shattering upheaval comes in the twentieth century upon minds grounded in deep scientific wisdom. It was formerly a shock to the superstitious ignorance of intuitive feeling merely. To-day it is organized scientific knowledge that meets the earthquake."
"You mentioned gaps and lapses," said Fillery, deeply interested, but still half professionally, perhaps, in spite of his preoccupations. "You think, perhaps, those gaps——?" One eye watched the inner studio. The unstable in him gained more and more the upper hand.
"I mean," replied Father Collins, now fairly launched upon his secret hobby, evidently his qualification for membership in the Society, "I mean, Edward Fillery, that the time is ripe, if ever, for a new revelation. If Man is the only type of being in the universe, well and good. We see his finish plainly, for the war has shown that progress is a myth. Man remains, in spite of all conceivable scientificknowledge, a savage, of low degree, irredeemable, and intellect, as a reconstructive force, but of small account."
"It seems so, I admit."
"But if"—Father Collins said it as calmly as though he spoke of some new food or hygienic treatment merely—"if mankind is not the only life in the universe, if, for instance, there exist—and why not?—other evolutionary systems besides our own somewhat trumpery type—other schemes and other beings—perhaps parallel, perhaps quite different—perhaps in more direct contact with the sources of life—a purer emanation, so to say——"
He hesitated, realizing perhaps that in speaking to a man of Edward Fillery's standing he must choose his words, or at least present his case convincingly, while aware that his inability to do so made him only more extravagant and incoherent.
"Yes, quite so," Fillery helped him, noting all the time the suppressed intensity, the half-concealed conviction of anidée fixebehind the calmness, while the balance of his own attention remained concentrated on the group about LeVallon. "If, as you suggest, thereareother types of life——" He spoke encouragingly. He had noticed the slovenly streak spread and widen, breaking down, as it were, the structure of the face. He was aware also of the increasing insecurity in himself.
"Now is the moment," cried the other; "now is the time for their appearance."
He turned as though he had hit a target unexpectedly.
"Now," he repeated, "is the opportunity for their manifestation. The human mind lies open everywhere. It is blank, receptive, ready. On all sides it waits ready and inviting. The gaps are provided. If there is any other life, it should break through and come among us—now!"
Fillery, startled, withdrew for the first time his attention from that inner room. With keen eyes he gazed at his companion. With an abrupt, unpleasant shock it occurredto him that all he heard was borrowed, filched, stolen out of his own mind. Before words came to him, the other spoke:
"Your friend," he mentioned quietly, but with intentional significance, "and patient."
"LeVallon!"
But it was at this moment that Nayan Khilkoff, entering again without her hat and furs, had moved straight to the piano, seated herself, and began to sing.
TO retail the following scene as Dr. Fillery saw it in detail is not necessary, the sequence of acts, of physical events being already known. The reactions of his heart and mind, however, have importance. What he felt, thought, hoped and feared, what he believed as well, his point of view in a word, remain essential.
Edward Fillery, being what he was, witnessed it from his own individual angle; his mind, with his heredity, his soul, with its mysterious background, these held the glasses to his eyes, adjusting, as with a Zeiss instrument, each eye separately. In his case the analyst and thinker checked the unstable dreamer with acute exactitude. This was his special gift. He studied himself best while studying others. His sight, moreover, was exceptionally keen, his glasses of consummate workmanship. He saw, it seems, considerably beyond the normal range. He believed, at least, that he did so.
He saw, for instance, that the girl, while her fingers ran over the keys before she sang, searched the room and found LeVallon in a second. Following her rapid glance, he took in the picture that she also saw—LeVallon, coffee cup in hand, before Lady Gleeson languishing on the divan, and Devonham just beside them. LeVallon was obviously unaware of Lady Gleeson's presence; he had forgotten her existence. Devonham, a floor-walker with nothing particular to do at the moment, looked uncomfortable and ill at ease, scared a little, fearing a scene, a possible outbreak even. The meaning of the group was easily read. The girl herself, undoubtedly, read it clearly too.
This flashed upon the cinema screen, and Fillery divined it without the help of tedious letterpress.
The same instant he was aware that the girl and LeVallon looked for the first time straight into each other's faces, and that both seemed simultaneously caught into the air as though a star had lifted them. Not even a question lay in their clear eyes. It was an instantaneous understanding, so complete and perfect that the expression of happy surprise was tooconvincingto be missed even by the slow-witted Lady Gleeson. Vanity usually delays intelligence, and her vanity was abnormal. But she saw the expression on the two faces, and interpreted it aright. Fillery noticed that she squirmed; she would presently, he felt positive, disappear. Before the singing ended he had seen her slink away.
The song began. He had heard it before, "The Vagrant's Epitaph," sung by the same clear, sweet voice, had felt his heart stirred by the true simple feeling she put into it. He knew every word and every bar; the music was her own. He loved it. Both words and music awoke in him invariably a picture of his own lost valley, a physical desire to be over the hills and far away with the homeless liberty of winds and stars and waters, and at the same time, its spiritual equivalent—a yearning that the Race should discover the immense fair region of its greater hidden self and enjoy its new powers without restraint. All this was familiar to him. But now, as she sang, there came another, deeper meaning that sublimated the essential spirit of it, lifting it out of the known ditch of space and time. Never yet had he heard such yearning passion, such untold desire in her voice. The physical vagrancy changed subtly, exquisitely, to a symbol of a vaster meaning—a spiritual vagrancy that suddenly captured him in bitter pain. "Love could not hold him, Duty forged no chain"—as he listened to the sweetness, struck him between the joints of armour he had not realized before was so insecurely bound abouthim. The anguish of lonely souls, alien among their kind, hungry for companionship they might not find, unclothed, uncared for, desired of none and understanding none—this rose tumultuously in his blood. "The wide seas and the mountains called him ..." the words and music pierced him like a flame. "Revel might hold him for a little space ..."—her voice made it sound like a description of man's brief moment on the whirling planet, tasting adventure with men and women, playing a moment with love and hope and fear, till, "turning past the laughter and the lamps," he heard that "other summons at the door."
This bigger version, this deeper meaning, caught at him with power as he heard the song in the sweet, familiar voice, and realized in a flash that what he felt faintly LeVallon felt terrifically. His own detachment was a pose, a shadow, at best a bodiless yearning; in LeVallon it was a reality of consuming fire. Also it was an explanation of the girl's own singular aloofness from the world of admiring men. Both belonged, as Father Collins put it, "elsewhere."
He watched them. LeVallon's eyes, he saw, remained fixed and motionless on the singer; her own did not leave the notes for a single moment; the words and music poured into the room like a shower of dancing silver. The personality of the girl flowed out with them to meet the newly-found companion they addressed. An extraordinary thing then happened: to Fillery it almost seemed that there formed then and there between them a new vehicle—as it were, a body—that gave expression to their own great secret. Something in each of them, unable to manifest through their minds, their brains, their earthly bodies, formed for itself an elastic subtle vehicle, using the sound, the words, the feeling for this purpose—and as literally as a human spirit uses the familiar physical body for its manifestation.
The experience was amazing, but it was real. He watched it carefully. In the room about him, formed on the waves of this sweet singing, shaped by feeling that found normallyno other expression, inspired by emotions, yearnings, desires alien to their normal kind, these two created between them a new vehicle or body that could and did express all this.
They heard that "other summons at the door...." And they were off.
Yet he, too, heard the summons, and in the depths of his being he answered to it. His essential weakness, wearing the guise of strength, rose naked....
These thoughts and feelings lay unexpressed, perhaps—too deep actually, too remote from any experience he had yet known, to find actual words, even in his mind. What did find expression, in thought at any rate, was that, before his very eyes, he witnessed the transfiguring change come over Nayan. Like some flower that has been growing in the shade, then meets the flood of sunshine for the first time, she knew a fresh tide of life sweep over her entire being. She seemed to blossom, breaking almost into flower and fruit before his very eyes, as though sun and wind brought her into a sudden bloom of exquisite maturity. He was aware of rich, deep purple, the faint gold of fruits and flowers, the creamy softness of a rose, the amber of wild grapes bathed in sparkling dew. The luscious promise of the Spring matured about her whole presentment into full summer glory. And it was the sun and wind of LeVallon's enigmatic, stimulating presence close to her that caused the miracle. The essential flower of her life poured forth to meet his own, as he had always felt it must. LeVallon's was the mighty wind that lifted her, was the sun in whose heat she basked, expanded, soared. She experienced a strange increase of her natural vitality and being. Her consciousness knew an abrupt intensification.
The signs, in that brief moment, were as clear to Fillery's divining heart as though he read them in black printed letters on a page of whitest paper. He knew the cipher and the code. He watched the signals flash. They had not even spoken, yet the relationship was established beyond doubt.He witnessed the first exchange; the wireless message of joy and sympathy that flashed he intercepted.
Through his extremely rapid mind, as he watched, poured memories, reflections, judgments in concentrated form, yet calmly, steadily, though against a background of deep and troubled emotion. There seemed actually a disruption of his personality. Father Collins, standing beside him, divined nothing, he believed, of his agitation, standing, mere figure of a man, listening to the music with attentive pleasure; at least, he gave no outward sign....
The song drew to its close. Once Nayan raised her eyes, instantly finding those of LeVallon across the room, then shifting again for a fleeting second with a rapidly changing focus to his own. He met them without a quiver; he caught again her tender, searching question; he sent no answer back.
In his own heart burned, however, a score of questions that beat against his soul for answers. What was it that each had found thus intuitively within the other? Was it her maternal instinct only that was reached as with all other men hitherto, was it at last the woman in her that leaped towards its own divine, creative sun, or was it that hidden, nameless aspect of her which had never yet found a vehicle for manifestation among her own kind and had therefore remained hitherto unexpressed—bodiless?
The answer to this he found easily enough. No jealousy stirred; pain for himself had been long ago uprooted. Yet pain of a kind he felt. Would LeVallon injure, drag her down, bring suffering, perhaps of an atrocious sort, into her hitherto so innocent life? Was she yet qualified to withstand the fierce fire, the rushing wind, that the full force of his strange nature must bring to bear upon her?
His questions went prophesying, flying like swift birds to such great distances that no audible answers could return. His pain, at any rate, chiefly was for her. He divined that she was frightened, yet exhilarated, before the unexpectedapparition of an unusual presence. Accustomed to smaller jets of admiration from smaller men, this deep flood overwhelmed her. This motionless figure watching her among the shadows, listening to her singing, devouring her beauty with an innocence, power, worship she had never yet encountered—could she, Fillery asked himself, withstand its elemental flood and not be broken by its waves?
For at the back of all his questions, haunting his prophecies, filling his hopes and fears with substance, stood one outstanding certainty:
The motionless figure in the shadows was not LeVallon. It was "N. H."
The thing he had expected had now happened. Instinctively he turned to find his colleague.
For what followed, Fillery, of course, was as unprepared as anyone. In some way, difficult to describe, the whole thing had a strangely natural, almost an inevitable touch. The exaggeration that others felt he was not conscious of. He never, for a single moment, lost his head. The wonder of the elemental violence appealed and stimulated without once touching the sense of fear, much less of panic, in him.
Searching for Devonham's familiar figure, he found it in the seat that Lady Gleeson had vacated shortly before, but the face turned away towards the inner room, so that it was not possible to catch his eye. It was an attentive, critical, almost anxious expression his chief surprised, and while a faint smile perhaps flitted across his own mouth, he became aware that Father Collins—he had again completely forgotten his proximity—was staring with a curious intentness at him. The same instant the song came to an end. Into the brief pause of a second before the applause burst forth, Father Collins's voice was suddenly audible in his ear:
"LeVallon's gone," Fillery was saying to himself, "'N. H.' is in control," when his neighbour's words broke in. The two sentences were simultaneously in his mind:
"A man inhis own placeis the Ruler of his Fate!"
And Fillery's astonishment was only equalled by the fact that the grim face was soft with sympathy, and that in the eyes shone moisture that was close to tears. Before he could reply, however, the applause burst forth, making an uproar against which no voice could possibly contend. The subsequent events, following so swiftly, made rejoinder equally out of the question, nor did he see Father Collins again that evening.
These Fillery witnessed much as already described through Devonham's eyes. The storm, the panic took place as told. Yet a detail here and there belong to Fillery's version, for they were a part of his own being. He had, for instance, a warning that something was about to happen, although warning seems not quite the faithful word. He saw the Valley for one fleeting second, the three familiar figures, Nayan, "N. H.," himself, flying through the bright sunshine before a wind that stirred a million flowers. In the farthest possible background of his mind it shone an instant. The shutter dropped again, it vanished.
Yet enough to set him on the alert. Into the air about him, into his heart as well, fell an exhilarating and immense refreshment. It rose, as it were, from the most deeply submerged portion of his own hidden being, now stirred, even actually summoned, into activity.
The shutter meanwhile rose and fell and rose again; the Valley reappeared and vanished, then reappeared again.
For the truth came smashing against him—smashing his being open, and bursting the doors of his carefully instructed, carefully guarded nature. The doors flung from their hinges and a blinding light poured in and flooded the strangest possible hidden corners.
He saw what followed with an accuracy of observation impossible to anyone else, with an intimate sympathy the others could not feel—because he himself took part in the entire scene. But the scene, for him, was not the Chelsea studio with its tobacco smoke and perfume, it was the Caucasian valley whence his own blood derived. Clean,fragrant winds swept past him across mighty space. The walls melted into distances of forest and mountain peaks, the ceiling was a dome of stainless blue, the floor ran deep in flowers. A drenching sunshine of crystal purity bathed the world. It was across bright emerald turf that he saw "N. H." dance forward like a wind of power, cry with a joyful resonant voice to the radiant girl who stood laughing, half hiding, yet at the same time beckoning, that she should fly with him. He caught and lifted her, her hair, the whiteness of her skin flashing in the sun like some marvellous bird in the act of taking wing, for before he had touched her she leapt through the air to meet his outstretched arms. Yet one hand, one silvery arm, waved towards himself, towards Fillery; their fingers met and clasped; the three of them, three dancing, free and joyful figures, fled like the wind across the enormous mountains, but fled, he knew beyond all question—home.
He saw this in the space of those few seconds in which Nayan was swung over the youth's shoulders beside the piano. The two scenes ran parallel, as it were, before his eyes, outer and inner sight keeping equal pace together. His balance and judgment here were never once disturbed. In the studio: he had just introduced LeVallon to the girl and the latter had caught her up. In the valley: she had leapt into his arms and the three of them were off.
It was this inner interpretation, keeping always level pace with what was happening outwardly, that furnished Fillery with the hint of an astounding explanation. The figure in the valley, it flashed to him, was, of course, "N. H." in all his natural splendour, but a figure unknown surely to all records of humanity as such. Here danced and sang a happy radiant being, by whom the limitations of the human species were not experienced, even if the species were familiar to him at all. A being from another system, another evolution, an elemental being, whose ideal, development, mode of existence, were not those of men and women. "N. H." was not a human being, a human soul, a humanspirit. He belonged elsewhere and otherwise. Under the guise of LeVallon he had drifted in. He inhabited LeVallon's frame.
In the Studio, at this instant, Fillery heard him using the singular words already noted, and in the Studio they sounded, indeed, senseless, foolish, even mad. It was, he realized, an attempt to stammer in human language some meaning that lay beyond, outside it. In the Valley, however, and at the same moment, they sounded natural and true. The evolutionary system to which "N. H." belonged, from which he had in some as yet unknown manner passed into humanity, but to which, though almost entirely forgotten, he yearned with his whole being to return—this other system had, it seemed, its own conditions, its own methods of advance, its ideals and its duties. Were, then, its inhabitants—this flashed upon him in the delicious wind and sunshine—the workers in what men call the natural kingdoms, the builders of form and structure, the directing powers that expressed themselves through the elemental energies everywhere behind the laws of Nature? Was this their tireless and wondrous service in the planet, in the universe itself?
"N. H." called the girl to service, not to personal love. Alone, cut off from his own kind, alien and derelict amid the conditions of a humanity strange, perhaps unknown to him, he sought companionship where he could. Drawn instinctively to the more impersonal types, such as Fillery and the girl, he felt there the nearest approach to what he recognized as his own kind; their ideal of selfless service was a beacon that he understood; he would return to his own kingdom, carrying them both with him. From somewhere, at any rate, this all flashed into his too willing mind....
At which second precisely in Fillery's valley-vision, Khilkoff entered, and—yet before he could take action—the lightning struck and the sudden explosion of the ferocious storm blackened out both the outer and the inner scene.
The shock of elemental violence, the astounding revelationas well that an entirely new type had possibly come within his ken, this, combined with the emotional disturbance caused by the change produced in Nayan, seemed enough to upset the equilibrium of even the most balanced mind. The darkness added its touch of helplessness besides. Yet Fillery never for a moment lost his head. Two natures in him, cause of his radical instability, merged for a moment in amazing harmony. The panic now dominating all about him seemed so small a thing compared to the shattering discovery life had just offered to him. Across it, finding his way past kneeling women and shrieking girls, drenched to the skin by the flood of entering rain, moving over splintered glass, he found the figure he sought, as though by some instinctive sympathy. They came together in the darkness. Their hands met easily. A moment later they were in the street, and "N. H.'s" instinctive terror amid the sheets of falling water, an element hostile to his own natural fire, made it a simple matter to get him home—in Lady Gleeson's motor car.
WHEN relative order had been restored, Devonham realized, of course, that his colleague had cleverly spirited away their "patient"; also that the sculptor had carried off his daughter. Relieved to escape from the atmosphere of what he considered collective hysteria, he had borrowed mackintosh and umbrella, and declining several offers of a lift, had walked the four miles to his house in the rain and wind. The exercise helped to work off the emotion in him; his mind cleared healthily; personal bias gave way to honest and unprejudiced reflection; there was much that interested him deeply, at the same time puzzled and bewildered him beyond anything he had yet experienced. He reached the house with a mind steady if unsatisfied; but the emotions caused by prejudice had gone. His main anxiety centred about his chief.
He was glad to notice a light in an upper window, for it meant, he hoped, that LeVallon was now safely home. While his latchkey sought its hole, however, this light was extinguished, and when the door opened, it was Fillery himself who greeted him, a finger on his lips.
"Quietly!" he whispered. "I've just got him to bed and put his light out. He's asleep already." Paul noticed his manner instantly—its happiness. There was a glow of mysterious joy and wonder in his atmosphere that made the other hostile at once.
They went together towards that inner room where so often together they had already talked both moon and sun to bed. Cold food lay on the table, and while they satisfied their hunger, the rain outside poured down with a steady drenching sound. The wind had dropped. The suburb lay silent and deserted. It was long past midnight. Thehouse was very still, only the occasional step of a night-nurse audible in the passages and rooms upstairs. They would not be disturbed.
"You got him home all right, then?" Paul asked presently, keeping his voice low.
He had been observing his friend closely; the evident pleasure and satisfaction in the face annoyed him; the light in the eyes at the same time profoundly troubled him. Not only did he love his chief for himself, he set high value on his work as well. It would be deplorable, a tragedy, if judgment were destroyed by personal bias and desire. He felt uneasy and distressed.
Fillery nodded, then gave an account of what had happened, but obviously an account of outward events merely; he did not wish, evidently, to argue or explain. The strong, rugged face was lit up, the eyes were shining; some inner enthusiasm pervaded his whole being. Evidently he felt very sure of something—something that both pleased and stimulated him.
His account of what had happened was brief enough, little more than a statement of the facts.
Finding himself close to LeVallon when the darkness came, he had kept hold of him and hurried him out of the house at once. The sudden blackness, it seemed, had made LeVallon quiet again, though he kept asking excitedly for the girl. When assured that he would soon see her, he became obedient as a lamb. The absence of light apparently had a calming influence. They found, of course, no taxis, but commandeered the first available private car, Fillery using the authoritative influence of his name. And it was Lady Gleeson's car, Lady Gleeson herself inside it. She had thought things over, put two and two together, and had come back. Her car might be of use. It was. For the rain was falling in sheets and bucketfuls, the road had become a river of water, and Fillery's automobile, ordered for an hour later, had not put in an appearance. It was the rain that saved the situation....
An exasperated expression crossed Devonham's face as he heard this detail emphasized. He had meant to listen without interruption. The enigmatical reference to the rain proved too much for him.
"Why 'the rain'? What d'you mean exactly, Edward?"
"Water," was the reply, made in a significant tone that further annoyed his listener's sense of judgment. "You remember the Channel, surely! Water and fire mutually destroy each other. They are hostile elements."
There was a look almost of amusement on his face as he said it. Devonham kept a tight hold upon his tongue. It was not impatience or surprise he felt, though both were strong; it was perhaps sorrow.
"And so Lady Gleeson drove you home?"
He waited with devouring interest for further details. The throng of questions, criticisms and emotions surging in him he repressed with admirable restraint.
Lady Gleeson, yes, had driven the party home. Fillery made her sit on the back seat alone, while he occupied the front one, LeVallon beside him, but as far back among the deep cushions as possible. The doctor held his hand. At any other time, Devonham could have laughed; but he saw no comedy now. Lady Gleeson, it seemed, was awed by the seriousness of the "Chief," whom, even at the best of times, she feared a little. Her vanity, however, persuaded her evidently that she was somehow the centre of interest.
Yet Devonham, as he listened, had difficulty in persuading himself that he was in the twentieth century, and that the man who spoke was his colleague and a man of the day as well.
"LeVallon talked little, and that little to himself or to me. He seemed unaware that a third person was present at all. Though quiet enough, there was suppressed vehemence still about him. He said various things: that 'shebelonged to us,' for instance; that he 'knew his own'; thatshewas 'filled with fire in exile'; and that he would 'take her back.' Also that I, too, must go with them both. Heoften mentioned the sun, saying more than once that the sun had 'sent its messengers.' Obviously, it was not the ordinary sun he referred to, but some source of central heat and fire he seems aware of——"
"You, I suppose, Edward," put in his listener quickly, "said nothing to encourage all this? Nothing that could suggest or stimulate?"
Fillery ignored, even if he noticed, the tone of the question. "I kept silence rather. I said very little. I let him talk. I had to keep an eye on the woman, too."
"You certainly had your hands full—a dual personality and a nymphomaniac."
"She helped me, without knowing it. All he said about the girl, she evidently took to herself. When he begged me to keep the water out, she drew the window up the last half-inch.... The water frightened him; she was sympathetic, and her sympathy seemed to reach him, though I doubt if he was aware of her presence at all until the last minute almost——"
"And 'at the last minute'?"
"She leaned forward suddenly and took both his hands. I had let go of the one I held and was just about to open the door, when I heard her say excitedly that I must let her come and see him, or that he must call on her; she was sure she could help him; he must tell her everything.... I turned to look.... LeVallon, startled into what I believe was his first consciousness of her presence, stared into her eyes, and leaned forward among his cushions a little, so that their faces were close together. Before I could interfere, she had flung her bare arms about his neck and kissed him. She then sat back again, turning to me, and repeating again and again that he needed a woman's care and that she must help and mother him. She was excited, but she knew what she was saying. She showed neither shame nor the least confusion. She tasted—of course with her it cannot last—a bigger world. She was most determined."
"Hisreaction?" inquired Devonham, amused in spite of his graver emotions of uneasiness and exasperation.
"None whatever. I scarcely think he realized he had been kissed. His interest was so entirely elsewhere. I saw his face a moment among the white ermine, the bare arms and jewels that enveloped him." Fillery frowned faintly. "The car had almost stopped. Lady Gleeson was leaning back again. He looked at me, and his voice was intense and eager: 'Dear Fillery,' he said, 'we have found each other, I have found her. She knows, she remembers the way back. Here we can do so little.'
"Lady Gleeson, however, had interpreted the words in another way.
"'I'll come to-morrow to see you,' she said at once intensely. 'Youmustlet me come,'—the last words addressed to me, of course."
The two men looked at one another a moment in silence, and for the first time during the conversation they exchanged a smile....
"I got him to bed," Fillery concluded. "In ten minutes he was sound asleep." And his eyes indicated the room overhead.
He leaned back, and quietly began to fill his pipe. The account was over.
As though a great spring suddenly released him, Paul Devonham stood up. His untidy hair hung wild, his glasses were crooked on his big nose, his tie askew. His whole manner bristled with accumulated challenge and disagreement.
"Who?" he cried. "Who?Edward, I ask you?"
His colleague, yet knowing exactly what he meant, looked up questioningly. He looked him full in the face.
"Hush!" he said quietly. "You'll wake him."
He gazed with happy penetrating eyes at his companion. "Paul," he added gently, "do you really mean it? Have you still the faintest doubt?"
The moment had drama in it of unusual kind. The conflictbetween these two honest and unselfish minds was vital. The moment, too, was chosen, the place as well—this small, quiet room in a commonplace suburb of the greatest city on the planet, drenched by earthly rain and battered by earthly wind from the heart of an equinoctial storm; the mighty universe outside, breaking with wondrous, incredible impossibilities upon a mind that listened and a mind that could not hear; and upstairs, separated from them by a few carpenter's boards, an assortment of "souls," either derelict and ruined, or gifted supernormally, masters of space and time perhaps, yet all waiting to be healed by the best knowledge known to the race—and one among them, about whom the conflict raged ... sound asleep ... while wind and water stormed, while lightning fires lit the distant horizons, while the great sun lay hidden, and darkness crept soundlessly to and fro....
"Have you still the slightest doubt, Paul?" repeated Fillery. "You know the evidence. You have an open mind."
Then Devonham, still standing over his Chief, let out the storm that had accumulated in him over-long. He talked like a book. He talked like several books. It seemed almost that he distrusted his own personal judgment.
"Edward," he began solemnly—not knowing that he quoted—"you, above all men, understand the lower recesses of the human heart, that gloomy, gigantic oubliette in which our million ancestors writhe together inextricably, and each man's planetary past is buried alive——"
Fillery nodded quietly his acquiescence.
"You, of all men, know our packed, limitless subterranean life," Devonham went on, "and its impenetrable depths. You understand telepathy, 'extended telepathy' as well, and how a given mind may tap not only forgotten individual memories, but memories of his family, his race, even planetary memories into the bargain, the memory, in fact, of every being that ever lived, right down to Adam, if you will——"
"Agreed," murmured the other, listening patiently, while he puffed his pipe and heard the rain and wind. "I know all that. I know it, at any rate, as a possible theory."
"You also know," continued Devonham in a slightly less strident tone, "your own—forgive me, Edward—your own idiosyncrasies, your weaknesses, your dynamic accumulated repressions, your strange physical heritage and spiritual—I repeat the phrase—your spiritual vagrancies towards—towards——" He broke off suddenly, unable to find the words he wanted.
"I'm illegitimate, born of a pagan passion," mentioned the other calmly. "In that sense, if you like, I have in me a 'complex' against the race, against humanity—as such."
He smiled patiently, and it was the patience, the evident conviction of superiority that exasperated his cautious, accurate colleague.
"If I love humanity, I also tolerate it perhaps, for I try to heal it," added Fillery. "But, believe me, Paul, I do not lose my scientific judgment."
"Edward," burst out the other, "how can you think it possible, then—thatheis other than the result of tendencies transmitted by his mad parents, or acquired from Mason, who taught him all he knows, or—if you will—that he has these hysterical faculties—supernormal as we may call them—which tap some racial, even, if you will, some planetary past——"
He again broke off, unable to express his whole thought, his entire emotion, in a few words.
"I accept all that," said Fillery, still calmly, quietly, "but perhaps now—in the interest of truth"—his tone was grave, his words obviously chosen carefully—"if now I feel it necessary to go beyond it! My strange heritage," he added, "is even possibly a help and guide. How," he asked, a trace of passion for the first time visible in his manner, "shall we venture—how decide—for we are not wholly ignorant, you and I—between what is possible and impossible? Is this trivial planet, then," he asked, his voice rising suddenly, ominously perhaps, "our sole criterion? Dare we not venture—beyond—alittle? The scientific mind should be the last to dogmatize as to the possibilities of this life of ours...."
The authority of chief, the old tie of respectful and affectionate friendship, the admiring wonder that pertained to a daring speculator who had often proved himself right in face of violent opposition—all these affected Devonham. He did not weaken, but for an instant he knew, perhaps, the existence of a vast, incredible horizon in his friend's mind, though one he dared not contemplate. Possibly, he understood in this passing moment a huger world, a new outlook that scorned limit, though yet an outlook that his accurate, smaller spirit shrank from.
He found, at any rate, his own words futile. "You remember," he offered—"'We need only suppose the continuity of our own consciousness with a mother sea, to allow for exceptional waves occasionally pouring over the dam.'"
"Good, yes," said Fillery. "But that 'mother sea,' what may it not include? Dare we set limits to it?"
And, as he said it, Fillery, emotion visible in him, rose suddenly from his chair. He stood up and faced his colleague.
"Let us come to the point," he said in a clear, steady voice. "It all lies—doesn't it?—in that question you asked——"
"Who?" came at once from Devonham's lips, as he stood, looking oddly stiff and rigid opposite his Chief. There was a touch of defiance in his tone. "Who?" He repeated his original question.
No pause intervened. Fillery's reply came sharp and firm:
"'N. H.,' " he said.
An interval of silence followed, then, between the two men, as they looked into each other's eyes. Fillery waited for his assistant to speak, but no word came.
"LeVallon," the older man continued, "is the transient, acquired personality. It does not interest us. There is no real LeVallon. The sole reality is—'N. H.'"
He spoke with the earnestness of deep conviction. There was still no reply or comment from the other.
"Paul," he continued, steadying his voice and placing a hand upon his colleague's shoulder, "I am going to ask you to—consider our arrangement—cancelled. I must——"
Then, before he could finish what he had to say, the other had said it for him:
"Edward, I give you back your promise."
He shrugged his shoulders ever so slightly, but there was no unpleasant, no antagonistic touch now either in voice or manner. There was, rather, a graver earnestness than there had been hitherto, a hint of reluctant acquiescence, but also there was an emotion that included certainly affection. No such fundamental disagreement had ever come between them during all their years of work together. "You understand," he added slowly, "what you are doing—what is involved." His tone almost suggested that he spoke to a patient, a loved patient, but one over whom he had no control. He sighed.
"I belong, Paul, myself to the unstable—if that is what you mean," said his old friend gently, "and with all of danger, or of wonder, it involves."
The faint movement of the shoulders again was noticeable. "We need not put it that way, Edward," was the quiet rejoinder; "for that, if true, can only help your insight, your understanding, and your judgment." He hesitated a moment or two, searching his mind carefully for words. Fillery waited. "But it involves—I think"—he went on presently in a firmer voice—"hisfate as well. He must become permanently—one or other."
No pause followed. There was a smile of curious happiness on Fillery's face as he instantly answered in a tone of absolute conviction:
"There lies the root of our disagreement, Paul. There is no 'other.' I am positive for once. There is only one, and that one is—'N. H.'"
"Umph!" his friend grunted. Behind the exclamation hid an attitude confirmed, as though he had come suddenly to a big decision.
"You see, Paul—Iknow."
IT was not long after the scene in the Studio that the Prometheans foregathered at dinner in the back room of the small French restaurant in Soho and discussed the event. The prices were moderate, conditions free and easy. It was a favourite haunt of Members.
To-night, moreover, there was likely to be a good attendance. The word had gone out.
The Studio scene had, of course, been the subject of much discussion already. The night of its occurrence it had been talked over till dawn in more than one flat, and during the following days the Society, as a whole, thought of little else. Those who had not been present had to be informed, and those who had witnessed it found it an absorbing topic of speculation. The first words that passed when one member met another in the street was: "Whatdidyou make of that storm? Wasn't it amazing? Did your solar plexus vibrate? Mine did! And the light, the colour, the vibrations—weren't they terrific? What do you thinkheis?" It was rumoured that the Secretary was asking for individual reports. Excitement and interest were general, though the accounts of individual witnesses differed extraordinarily. It seemed impossible that all had seen and heard the same thing.
The back room was pleasantly filled to-night, for it was somehow known that Millington Povey, and possibly Father Collins, too, were coming. Miss Milligan, the astrologist, was there early, arriving with Mrs. Towzer, who saw auras and had already, it was rumoured, painted automatically a strange rendering of "forces" that were visible to her clairvoyantly during the occurrence. Miss Lance, in shiningbeads and a glittering scarf, arrived on their heels, an account of the scene in her pocket—to be published in her magazine "Simplicity" after she had modified it according to what she picked up from hearing other, and better, descriptions.
Kempster, immaculate as ever, ordering his food as he ordered his clothes, like a connoisseur, was one of the first to establish himself in a comfortable seat. He knew how to look after himself, and was already eating in his neat dainty way while the others still stood about studying the big whitemenuwith its illegible hieroglyphics in smudged violet ink. He supplemented his meals with special patent foods of vegetarian kind he brought with him. He had dried bananas in one pocket and spirit photographs in another, and he was invariably pulling out the wrong thing. Meat he avoided. "A man is what he eats," he held, and animal blood was fatal to psychic development. To eat pig or cow was to absorb undesirable characteristics.
Next to him sat Lattimer, a lanky man of thirty, with loose clothes, long hair, and eyes of strange intensity. Known as "occultist and alchemist," he was also a chemist of some repute. His life was ruled by a master-desire and a master-fear: the former, that he might one day project his double consciously; the latter, that in his next earthly incarnation he might be—the prospect made him shudder—a woman. He sought to keep his thought as concrete as possible, the male quality.
He believed that the nervous centre of the physical body which controlled all such unearthly, if not definitely "spiritual," impulses, was the solar plexus. For him it wastheimportant portion of his anatomy, the seat of intuition. Brain came second.
"The fellow," he declared emphatically, "stirred my solar plexus, mykundalini—that's all I know." He referred, as all understood, to the latent power theyogisclaim lies coiled, but only rarely manifested, in that great nervous centre.
His statement, he knew, would meet with general approval and understanding. It was the literal Kempster who spoiled his opening:
"Paul Devonham," said the latter, "thinks it's merely a secondary personality that emerged. I had a long argument with him about it——"
"Never argue with the once-born," declared Povey flatly, producing his pet sentence. "It's waste of time. Only older souls, with the experience of many earthly lives stored in their beings, are knowledgeable." He filled his glass and poured out for others, Lattimer and Mrs. Towzer alone declining, though for different reasons.
"It destroys the 'sight,'" explained the former. "Alcohol sets up coarse vibrations that ruin clairvoyance."
"I decided to deny myself till the war is over," was Mrs. Towzer's reason, and when Povey reminded her of the armistice, she mentioned that Turkey hadn't "signed yet."
"I think his soul——" began Miss Lance.
"If hehasa soul," put in Povey, electrically.
"—is hardly in his body at all," concluded Miss Lance, less convincingly than originally intended.
"It was love at first sight. His sign is Fire and hers is Air," Miss Milligan said. "That's certain.Of coursethey came together."
"A clear case of memory, at any rate," insisted Kempster. "Two old souls meeting again for the first time for thousands of years, probably. Love at first sight, or hate, for that matter, is always memory, isn't it?" He disliked the astrology explanation; it was not mysterious enough, too mathematical and exact to please him.
"Secondary personalitiesareinvariably memories of former selves, of course," agreed young Dickson, the theosophist, who was on the verge now of becoming a psycho-analyst and had already discarded Freud for Jung. "If not memories of past lives, then they're desires suppressed in this one."
"The less you think, the more you know," suggestedMiss Lance. She distrusted intellect and believed that another faculty, called instinct or intuition, according to which word first occurred to her, was the way to knowledge. She was about to quote Bergson upside down, when Povey, foreseeing an interval of boredom, took command:
"One thing we know, at any rate," he began judiciously; "we aren't the only beings in the universe. There are non-human intelligences, both vast and small. The old world-wide legends can't be built on nothing. In every age of history—the reports are universal—we have pretty good evidence for other forms of life than humans——"
"Though never yet in humanform," put in Lattimer, yet sympathetically. "Their bodies, I mean, aren't human," he added.
"Exactly. That's true. But the gods, the fauns, the satyrs, the elemental beings, as we call 'em—sylphs, undines, gnomes and salamanders—to say nothing of fairies et hoc genus omne—there must besomereasonable foundation for their persistence through all the ages."
"They all belong to theDevaEvolution," Dickson mentioned with conviction. "In the East it's been known and recognized for centuries, hasn't it? Another evolutionary system that runs parallel to ours. From planetary spirits down to elementals, they're concerned with the building up of form in the various kingdoms——"
"Yes, yes," Povey interrupted impatiently. Dickson was stealing what he had meant to say himself and to say, he flattered himself, far better. "We know allthat, of course. They stand behind what we call the laws of nature, non-human activities and intelligences of every grade and kind. They work for humanity in a way, are in other space and time, deathless, of course, yet—in some strange way, always eager to cross the gulf fixed between the two and so find a soul. They are impersonal in a sense, as impersonal as, say, wind and fire through which some of them operate as bodies."
He paused and looked about him, noting the interested attention he awaked.
"Theremaybe times," he went on, "there probablyarecertain occasions, when the gulf is more crossable than others." He laid down his knife and fork as a sympathetic murmur proved that the point he was leading up to was favourably understood already. "We have had this war, for instance," he stated, his voice taking on a more significant and mysterious tone. "Dislodged by the huge upheaval, man's soul is on the march again." He paused once more. "They," he concluded, lowering his voice still more, and emphasizing the pronoun, "are possibly already among us! Who knows?"
He glanced round. "We do; we know," was the expression on most faces. All knew precisely what he meant and to whom he referred, at any rate.
"You might get him to come and lecture to us," said Dickson, the first to break the pause. "You might ask Dr. Fillery.Youknow him."
"That's an idea——" began the Secretary, when there was a commotion near the door. His face showed annoyance.
It was the arrival of Toogood that at this moment disturbed the atmosphere and robbed Povey of the effect he aimed at. It provided Kempster, however, with an idea at the same time. "Here's a psychometrist!" he exclaimed, making room for him. "He might get a bit of his hair or clothing and psychometrize it. He might tell us about his past, if not exactlywhathe is."
The suggestion, however, found no seconder, for it seemed that the new arrival was not particularly welcomed. Judging by the glances, the varying shades of greeting, too, he was not fully trusted, perhaps, this broad, fleshy man of thirty-five, with complexion blotchy, an over-sensual mouth and eyes a trifle shifty. His claim to membership was two-fold: he remembered past lives, and had the strangepower of psychometry. An archæologist by trade, his gift of psychometry—by which he claimed to hold an object and tell its past, its pedigree, its history—was of great use to him in his calling. Without further trouble he could tell whether such an object was genuine or sham. Dealers in antiquities offered him big fees—but "No, no; I cannot prostitute my powers, you see"—and he remained poor accordingly.
In his past lives he had been either a famous Pharaoh, or Cleopatra—according to his audience of the moment and its male or female character—but usually Cleopatra, because, on the whole, there was more money and less risk in her. He lectured—for a fee. Lately, however, he had been Pharaoh, having got into grave trouble over the Cleopatra claim, even to the point of being threatened with expulsion from the Society. His attitude during the war, besides, had been unsatisfactory—it was felt he had selfishly protected himself on the grounds of being physically unfit. Apart from archæology, too, his chief preoccupation, derived from past lives of course, was sex, in the form of other men's wives, his own wife and children being, naturally, very recent and somewhat negligible ties.
His gift of psychometry, none the less, was considered proved—in spite of the backward and indifferent dealers. His mind was quick and not unsubtle. He became now au fait with the trend of the conversation in a very few seconds, but he had not been present at the Studio when the occurrence all discussed had taken place.
"Hair would be best," he advised tentatively, sipping his whisky-and-soda. He had already dined. "It's a part of himself, you see. Better than mere clothing, I mean. It's extremely vital, hair. It grows after death."
"If I can get it for you, I will," said Povey. "He may be lecturing for us before long. I'll try."
"With psychometry and a good photograph," Kempster suggested, "a time exposure, if possible, we ought to getsomeevidence, at any rate. It's first-hand evidence we want,of course, isn't it? What do you think of this, for instance, I wonder?" He turned to Lattimer, drawing something from his pocket and showing it. "It's a time exposure at night of a haunted tree. You'll notice a queer sort of elemental forminsidethe trunk and branches. Oh!" He replaced the shrivelled banana in his pocket, and drew out the photograph without a smile. "This," he explained, waving it, "is what I meant." They fell to discussing it.
Meanwhile, Povey, anxious to resume his lecture, made an effort to recover his command of the group-atmosphere which Toogood had disturbed. The latter had a "personal magnetism" which made the women like him in spite of their distrust.
"I was just saying," he resumed, patting the elbow of the psychometrist, "that this strange event we've been discussing—you weren't present, I believe, at the time, but, of course, you've heard about it—has features which seem to point to something radically new, or at least of very rare occurrence. As Lattimer mentioned, a human body has never yet, so far as we know, been occupied, obsessed, by a non-human entity, but that, after all, is no reason why it should not ever happen. What is a body, anyhow? What is an entity, too?" Povey's thought was wandering, evidently; the thread of his first discourse was broken; he floundered. "Man, anyway, is more than a mere chemical machine," he went on, "a crystallization of the primitive nebulæ, though the instrument he uses, the body he works through, is undoubtedly thus describable. Now, we know there are all kinds of non-human intelligences busy on our planet, in the Universe itself as well. Why, then, I ask, should not one of these——?"
He paused, unable to find himself, his confusion obvious. He was as glad of the interruption that was then provided by the arrival of Imson as his audience was. Toogood certainly was not sorry; he need find no immediate answer. He sipped his drink and made mental notes.
Imson arrived in a rough brown ulster with the collarturned up about his ears, a low flannel shirt, not strictly clean, lying loosely round his neck. His colourless face was of somewhat flabby texture, due probably to his diet, but its simple, honest expression was attractive, the smile engaging. The touch of foolishness might have been childlike innocence, even saintliness some thought, and though he was well over forty, the unlined skin made him look more like thirty. He enjoyed a physiognomy not unlike that of a horse or sheep. His big, brown eyes stared wide open at the world, expecting wonder and finding it. His hobby was inspirational poems. One lay in his breast pocket now. He burned to read it aloud.
Pat Imson's ideal was an odd one—detachment; the desire to avoid all ties that must bring him back to future incarnations on the earth, to eschew making fresh Karma, in a word. He considered himself an "old soul," and was rather weary of it all—of existence and development, that is. To take no part in life meant to escape from those tangles for whose unravelling the law of rebirth dragged the soul back again and again. To sow no Causes was to have no harvest of Effects to reap with toil and perspiration. Action, of course, there must be, but "indifference to results of action" was the secret. Imson, none the less, was always entangled with wives and children. Having divorced one wife, and been divorced by another, he had recently married a third; a flock of children streamed behind him; he was a good father, if a strange husband.
"It's old Karma I have to work off," he would explain, referring to the wives. "If I avoid the experience I shall only have to come back again. There's no good shirking old Karma." He gave this explanation to the wives themselves, not only to his friends. "Face it and it's done with, worked off, you see." That is, it had to be done nicely, kindly, generously.
An entire absence of the sense of humour was, of course, his natural gift, yet a certain quaint wisdom helped to fill the dangerous vacuum. He was known usually as "Pat."
"Come on, Pat," said Povey, making room for him at his side. "How's Karma? We're just talking about LeVallon and the Studio business. What do you make of it? You were there, weren't you?" The others listened, attentively, for Imson had a reputation for "seeing true."
"I saw it, yes," replied Imson, ordering his dinner with indifference—soup, fried potatoes, salad, cheese and coffee—but declining the offered wine. The group waited for his next remark, but none was forthcoming. He sat crumbling his bread into the soup and stirring the mixture with his spoon.
"Did you see the light about him, Mr. Imson?" asked Miss Lance. "The brilliant aura of golden yellow that he wore?Ithought—it sounds exaggerated, I know—but to me it seemed even brighter than the lightning. Did you notice it?"
"Well," said Imson slowly, putting his spoon down. "I'm not often clairvoyant, you know. I did notice, however, a sort of radiance about him. But with hair like that, it's difficult to be certain——"
"Full of lovely patterns," said Mrs. Towzer. "Geometrical patterns."
"Like astrological designs," mentioned Miss Milligan. "He's Leo, of course—fire."
"Almost as though he brought or caused the lightning—as if it actually emanated out of his atmosphere somehow," claimed Miss Lance, for it washerconversation after all.
"I saw nothing of that," replied Imson quietly. "No, I can't say I saw anythingexactlylike that." He added honestly, with his engaging smile that had earned for him in some quarters the nickname of "The Sheep": "I was looking at Nayan, you see, most of the time."
A smile flickered round the table, for rumour had it that the girl had once seemed to him as possible "Karma."
"So was I," put in Kempster with kindly intention, though his sympathy was evidently not needed. Imson was too simple even to feel embarrassment. "She came to life suddenlyfor the first time since I've known her. It was amazing." To which Imson, busy over his salad-dressing, made no reply.
Povey, lighting his pipe and puffing out thick clouds of smoke, was cleverer. "LeVallon's effect upon her, whatever it was, seemed instantaneous," he informed the table. "I never saw a clearer case of two souls coming together in a flash."
"As I said just now," Kempster quickly mentioned.
"They are similar," said Imson, looking up, while the group waited expectantly.
"Similar," repeated Kempster. "Ah!"
"It was the surprise in her face that struck me most," observed Povey quickly, making an internal note of Imson's adjective, but knowing that indirect methods would draw him out better than point-blank questions. "LeVallon showed it too. It was an unexpected recognition on both sides. They are 'similar,' as you say; both at the same stage of development, whatever that stage may be. The expression on both faces——"
"Escape," exclaimed Imson, giving at last the kernel of what he had to say. And the effect upon the group was electrical. A visible thrill ran round the Soho table.
"The very word," exclaimed Povey and Miss Lance together. "Escape!" But neither of them knew exactly what they meant, nor what Imson himself meant.
"LeVallon has, of course, already escaped," the latter went on quietly. "He is no longer caught by causes and effects as we are here. He's got out of it all long ago—if he was ever in it at all."
"If he ever was in it at all," said Povey quickly. "You noticed that too. You're very discerning, Pat."
"Clairvoyant," mentioned Miss Lance.
"I've seen them in dreams like that," returned Imson calmly. "I often see them, of course." He referred to his qualification for membership. "The great figures I see in dream have just that unearthly expression."
"Unearthly," said Mrs. Towzer with excitement.
"Non-human," mentioned Kempster suggestively.
"Not of this world, anyhow," suggested Miss Lance mysteriously.
"Divine?" inquired Miss Milligan below her breath.
"Really," murmured Toogood, "I must get a bit of his hair and psychometrize it at once." He was sipping a second glass of whisky.
Imson looked round at each face in turn, apparently seeing nothing that need increase his attachment to the planet by way of fresh Karma.
"TheDevaworld," he said briefly, after a pause. "Probably he's come to take Nayan off with him. She—I always said so—has a strong strain of the elemental kingdom in her. She may be hisDevi. LeVallon, I'm sure, is here for the first time. He's one of the non-human evolution. He's slipped in. ADevahimself probably." It was as though he said that the waiter was Swiss or French, or that the proprietor's daughter had Italian blood in her.
Povey looked round him with an air of triumph.
"Ah!" he announced, as who should say, "You all thought my version a bit wild, but here's confirmation from an unbiased witness."
"Oh, well, I can't be certain," Imson reminded the group. If he deceived them enough to change their lives in any respect, it involved fresh Karma for himself. Care was indicated. "I can't be positive, can I?" he hedged. "Only—I must say—the great deva-figures I've seen in dream have exactly that look and expression."
"That's interesting, Pat," Povey put in, "because, before you came, I was suggesting a similar explanation for his air of immense potential power. The elemental atmosphere he brought—we all noticed it, of course."
"Elementalisthe only word," Miss Lance inserted. "A great Nature Being." She was thinking of her magazine."He struck me as being so close to Nature that he seemed literally part of it."
"That would explain the lightning and the strange cry he gave about 'messengers,'" replied Imson, wiping the oil from his chin and sprinkling hispetit suissewith powdered sugar. "It's quite likely enough."
"I wish you'd jot down what you think—a little report of what you saw and felt," the Secretary mentioned. "It would be of great value. I thought of making a collection of the different versions and accounts."
"They might be published some day," thought Miss Lance. "Let's all," she added aloud with emphasis.
Imson nodded agreement, making no audible reply, while the conversation ran on, gathering impetus as it went, growing wilder possibly, but also more picturesque. A man in the street, listening behind a curtain, must have deemed the talkers suffering from delusion, mad; a good psychologist, on the other hand, similarly screened, and knowing the antecedent facts, the Studio scene, at any rate, must have been struck by one outstanding detail—the effect, namely, upon one and all of the person they discussed. They had seen him for an hour or so among a crowd, a young man whose name they hardly knew; only a few had spoken to him; there had been, it seemed, neither time nor opportunity for him to produce upon one and all the impression he undoubtedly had produced. For in every mind, upon every heart, LeVallon's mere presence had evidently graven an unforgettable image, scored an undecipherable hieroglyph. Each felt, it seemed, the hint of a personality their knowledge could not explain, nor any earthly explanation satisfy. The consciousness in each one, perhaps, had been quickened. Hence, possibly, the extravagance of their conversation. Yet, since all reported differently, collective hysteria seemed discounted.