Therewas a light visible from the chinks and crevices of drawn curtains in the window of Dr. Roupert’s study as I passed it on my way back from dinner one night. He lived some six doors farther up the same street as I, and since it had long been a frequent custom for us to smoke the “go-to-bed” cigarette together, I rang and asked if he was at leisure. His servant told me that he had already sent a message across to my house, asking me to look in on him if I got home while the evening was not too far advanced for a casual conversational quarter of an hour; and accordingly I took off my coat, and went straight into the pleasant little front room, about which hung the studious fragrance of the books that lined it from floor to ceiling.
Arthur Roupert was not alone this evening; there was sitting on the near side of the fire, which sparkled prosperously in this clear night of early December frost, a young man whom I was sure I had never seen before. As I entered, he stopped in the middle of a sentence, turning towards the door, and I looked on the most handsome and diabolical face that I had ever beheld.
Simultaneously Roupert got up.
“I hoped you would look in,” he said. “Let me introduce to you my cousin, Mr. Hampden, who is spending a day or two with me. This is Mr. Archdale, Frank, of whom I was speaking just now.”
As the other rose, I saw that Roupert’s almost foolishly amiable fox-terrier shrank away from where she had been sitting by her master’s chair, instead of giving me her accustomed and effusive greeting, and retreated into a far corner of the room, where she sat quivering with raised hackles, and with vigilant eyes full of hate and terror fixed on young Hampden. His right arm was in a sling, and he held out his left hand to me.
“You must excuse me,” he said, “but I am only just recovering from a broken arm. My cousin’s dog doesn’t approve of it; she would like to get her teeth into it.”
“The oddest thing I ever saw, Archdale,” said Roupert. “You know Fifi’s usual amiability. Call her, Frank.”
Frank Hampden whistled, and clicked his fingers together in an encouraging manner.
“Fifi—come here, Fifi!” he said.
For a moment I thought that this most confiding of ladies was going to fly at him. But apparently she could not find the courage for an attack, and, snapping and growling, retreated behind the window curtains.
“And that to me,” said Hampden, licking his lipsas he spoke. “Me, who adore dogs. Don’t you, Mr. Archdale?”
As he said that I knew that he lied; that Fifi’s detestation of him was met with a hatred quite as vivid but more controlled. I can no more account for that conviction than for the sense of hellish evil that my first glance at him had conveyed to me. He was quite young, twenty-two or twenty-three for a guess, and yet from behind the mask of that soft boyish face there looked out a spirit hard and malignant and mature, an adept in terrible paths. The impression was quite inexplicable but perfectly clear. Then, looking across to Roupert, I saw he was watching his cousin with eager intentness.
I had to answer the direct question he had put to me, but it required an effort to speak to him or to look at him.
“No; personally I don’t care about dogs,” I said. “I rather dislike them, and so enjoy a most unwelcome popularity among them. Fifi, for instance: your cousin will tell you how blind is her adoration for me!”
“See if Fifi will come to you if I stand by you,” said Hampden. Fifi had half-emerged from her ambush behind the curtains, and I called to her. But she would not leave the retreat where her rage and terror had driven her. She gave a little apologetic whine, as if to signify that I was asking an impossible thing, and beat with her stumpy tail on the carpet.
“Now go back to your chair again, Frank,” said Roupert.
Fifi needed no further invitation when he had left my neighbourhood. She bundled herself across the room to me, her thin white body curled like a comma, wriggling with delight and making incomprehensible little explanations of her previous conduct. But the moment that Hampden moved in his chair, she bolted away from me again.
He laughed and got up.
“Well, I think I shall go to bed now that you have come to keep Arthur company,” he said. “By the way, where’s your cat, Arthur? I haven’t seen her about all day.”
He was facing sideways to Roupert as he spoke, and I noticed that he did not turn his head towards him. This gave a certain casual cursory tone to his question, making it appear a mere careless inquiry.
“I haven’t seen her either,” said Roupert. “Perhaps, after taking counsel with Fifi, she has thought it prudent to fly from your baleful presence. Good night, Frank. Can you manage for yourself with your bandaged arm, or shall I come and help you?”
“Oh, I’m all right, thanks,” he said; “good night. A kind good night, Fifi. We shall be good friends before long.”
Arthur Roupert had retired some two years before from regular medical practice, in which, as all theworld knows, he was undoubtedly the first authority on disease and aberrations of the brain and nervous system, devoting his attention more particularly to those riddles of obscure and baffling disorders to which he so often supplied strange and correct answers. He was possessed of an ample competence, and so, finding that his large professional practice did not permit him the leisure which was necessary for these exploratory studies, he had, though always willing to be consulted by his colleagues, thrown up an active career for one of research. He wanted to learn rather than to practise, and without precisely mistrusting the methods which had earned him so brilliant a success, had inferred the presence of huge fields of the unknown, huge expanses of further possibilities which would perhaps put utterly out of date the most advanced of theories and treatments hitherto recognized in his profession. At the time of his retirement he had once talked to me about the uncharted seas on to which he proposed to push forth.
“The most advanced of actual practitioners,” he said, “are but groping in the dark on the threshold of real knowledge, feeling for the handle, fumbling for the bell. At the most, that is to say, in cases of brain disease and nerve disorder we try to get at the mind of the patient, and influence that, so that it, not we, may exert its healing power, and cure the imperfect functioning of the material part. Ofcourse that is a tremendous step forward when we look at what medical science was twenty years ago, when doctors prescribed tonics, tonics to heal the physical damage caused by a disordered mind. But mind itself is but a very subordinate denizen in that house of mystery which we call man.
“Mind is no more than the servant who comes to the door, and takes your hat and coat, and tells you in a word or two how the patient has been. Mind is not the master of the house, whom you have really come to see, and who sits there alone, mortally sick, perhaps, and in terror and darkness for the master of the house is the spirit. We have got to examine him before we can touch the source of these diseases. For the farther that science advances, the more certain it is that there is a master sitting within to whom the mind is only the servant. As for the body, the tissues, the nerves, the grey matter, what shall we say that is? Why, it’s no more than the servant’s clothes, his jacket, or his boots. I’m not going to stay talking in the hall to ‘mind,’ the servant, any longer. I shall leave him there, and go straight up to the sick-chamber. I shall be called all sorts of names—charlatan, spiritualist, what you will—but I don’t care two straws about that. Besides, I know quite well that my colleagues will still be glad to call me in when they are puzzled, and I hope to be better equipped to help them.... I won’t reject any jungle-path without exploring it, not witchcraft, nordemoniacal possession, nor all the myths which science thinks she has exploded. In its first origin everything must be spiritual, be it comet or toothache or genius. Just as mental suggestion has taken the place of tonics, so must spiritual healing take the place of mental suggestion. The spirit is the original manifestation of God in man, and it is on prayer and on faith that the whole science of healing will some day rest. But first we have to investigate the conditions, the environment, the life....”
For these two years, then, which had followed his retirement, Roupert had given himself to these studies of occult and spiritual influences, learning about the healing powers contained in mental suggestion, and trying to get behind that into the more elemental and essential mysteries of man; leaving the servant, as he had said, in the hall of the house, while he went further into the presence of the master of the house. Often, during these “go-to-bed” cigarettes that multiplied themselves into the night, he told me tales that did not make going to sleep any easier. Nothing was too extravagant for his investigations; witchcraft, spiritualism, Satanism, the healing touch, and, above all, demoniacal possession were the subjects of this study that went deeper into the human organism than mind. There was no myth or exploded superstition that he did not examine, to see whether the explosion had been complete and shattering, or whether among the débristhere did not remain some grains of solid stuff that were still solid, though science had affirmed that a puff of scattered smoke was all that was extant.... Consequently this evening, when Frank Hampden had gone to bed, I was quite prepared to find that Roupert had something to tell, some guess to hazard that had illumined his inquiries, the more so indeed because I had not seen him for some dozen nights.
“Did you receive the message I left at your house?” he asked abruptly as the door closed behind his cousin.
“No; I haven’t been home. But your servant told me you had asked me to come in,” said I.
“Yes, I did. You have done just what I wanted. In my note I asked you to come in and observe my cousin, and tell me your impression. I saw you couldn’t help observing him, so now let us have the impression.”
“Quite frankly? All?” I said.
“Of course.”
“I never saw anyone so utterly terrible,” I said.
“Terrible? Exactly how?” he asked.
The very intensity of my feeling about Hampden blurred the outline of it, and I paused trying to put a definite shape to it.
“Incomparably terrible,” I said. “Murderous, I think: murderous for the fun of it. I felt like Fifi.”
“I saw you did,” he said; “and I suspect you are right, you and Fifi....”
He walked up and down the room once or twice, then sat down with the air of settling himself.
“Did you hear him ask about my cat?” he said. “He killed her last night; he buried her in the garden.”
There was a grotesqueness, a ludicrousness even in this after the talk of murder, but that only added horror to it.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Precisely what I say. It so happened that I slept very badly last night, because, as a matter of fact, I was thinking about Frank, and wondering if I was on the horrible track which would show me what ailed him. About three in the morning I heard the door into the garden being opened: the window of my bedroom, which was open, is just above it. The idea of burglars occurred to me, and, without turning on my light, I went and looked out. There was bright clear starlight, and I saw Frank come out of the house carrying something white in his arm. He put it down to fetch a spade from the tool-house, and I saw what it was. He dug up a couple of plants with lumps of soil round their roots, working slowly, for he could only use one arm. He buried the cat in the excavation, and very carefully replanted the Michaelmas daisies over it. Then, more terribly yet, he knelt down by the grave, and I could hear him sobbing.”
“Sobbing?” I asked.
“Yes. What he said to-night is, or was, perfectly true. He used to be devoted to dogs and, indeed, all animals, especially cats.... Now last night, out in the garden, he was in his dressing-gown. Well, when he came down to breakfast this morning he said his nose had been bleeding rather severely. He was uneasy about it, and I went up to his bedroom and found a good deal of blood in his slop-pail. His dressing-gown was lying on his bed, and there, too, was more blood and a quantity of cat’s hairs. I told him not to think about it any more; there was nothing in the least alarming, and when he had gone out, in order to make quite sure, I dug up the Michaelmas daisies for the second time. Below, I found the body of my poor cat. He had cut its throat.... He would kill Fifi if he could; he is longing to.”
“But the fellow is a fiend!” said I.
“For the present he is a fiend, or something very like it. He used not to be until the day on which he broke his arm. Pray God he will cease being what he is.”
“Till the day he broke his arm?” I asked.
“Yes. Now do you want to hear the wildest and most extravagant tale, which I believe to be literally and awfully true?”
“Concerning this?” I asked.
“Of course. Also, are you disposed to sit up late to-night? There may be some confirmatory evidenceabout my story. I expect Reid, the medium, here at twelve. There is time for me to give you my theory before he comes.”
“Till any hour,” said I.
“Good. Then listen.”
He spoke slowly, putting his hands over his eyes, as he so often does when he wants to shut out all external disturbances and concentrate himself on the history of a case.
“Two months ago,” he said, “as you may possibly remember, a man called James Rolls was hanged at Beltonborough for the most atrocious murder of his wife. The deed apparently was quite objectless; there had been no quarrel, and after it was done he seemed sometimes to be distressed at the crime, sobbing and crying, sometimes to gloat over it, recounting it with gusto. There was no question whatever about his guilt, only about his sanity, and with regard to that these fits of remorse and enjoyment might be assumed in order to produce the impression that he was not accountable for his actions. He was examined by a Government expert, who asked me to come down with him and form my conclusion. We could neither of us find any other symptom of insanity about him. But there was a certain conjecture in my head about what we call the history of the case, and I stopped down at Beltonborough for a day or two in order to make further observations.
“As I was having an interview with him, I suddenly asked him this question, ‘Did you begin by killing flies?’ Usually he was rather sullen and silent, and often would not answer; but when I asked him this, his eye brightened, and he said, ‘Yes, flies first, and then cats and dogs.’ After that I could get nothing further out of him, but I had got what I expected to get. In all other respects he was, as far as I could judge, perfectly sane, and it was scarcely possible to call him a homicidal maniac, for he had never before shown signs of wanting to take human life. As it was, he had committed an atrocious murder, and had he been shut up as a homicidal maniac, I do not think there is any doubt that by this time he would have killed a warder.
“Now no man in a fit of rage is altogether sane, and yet we do not commute the sentence of those who have killed another when beside themselves with passion, and James Rolls had not even that extenuation. He was hanged.... But I feel convinced that Frank is suffering from an early stage of James Rolls’s malady; I feel convinced also that the hanging of James Rolls infected him with it.”
“The hanging of James Rolls caused it?” I asked.
“I do not doubt it, as you will see when I state my theory. But I hope to prove that my theory is correct, and I hope to cure my cousin.”
Roupert sat up and looked at me while he said this; then he sank back in his chair again, and, as before, covered his eyes with his hands.
“Now for the theory,” he said. “There is a very steep hill in Beltonborough with a sharp, dangerous corner just outside the prison gate. Practically at the moment when James Rolls was being taken to the scaffold, Frank came tearing down this hill on his bicycle to catch an early train to town. He skidded and fell just outside the prison, and sustained compound fracture of his right arm. It was important that he should be moved as little as possible, and they carried him straight into the prison infirmary, where chloroform was administered and the prison surgeon set his arm. It was a very bad fracture, and he was under the anæsthetic for a considerable time. And when he came round, he was changed.... It seemed as if another spirit had taken possession of his body. He was not the same person: from being a charming boy, he had become something hellish.”
Roupert sat up again and looked at me.
“There is a theory,” he said, “that in certain conditions, such as deep mesmeric trance, or under the stupefaction of some complete anæsthetic, the bonds that seem so indissolubly to unite a man’s spirit to his mind and his body are strangely loosened. The condition approaches to that of temporary death: often under an anæsthetic the beat of the heart is nearly suspended, often the breathing is nearly suspended, and this happened to Frank under chloroform that morning. The connexion between his spirit and his body was loosened....
“There is another theory which you must consider also. It is proved, I think, beyond all doubt, that at the moment of death, particularly of sudden and violent death, the spirit, though severed from the body which it has inhabited, does not at once leave its vicinity, but remains hovering near to its discarded tenement, from which it has been expelled. Well, at that hour when Frank’s spirit was maintaining but a relaxed hold on his body, another spirit, violent and strong, was close at hand—a spirit that had just been disembodied.... And I believe the spirit of James Rolls entered and took possession.”
I felt then what I have felt before and since, namely, some stir of horror in my head that made my hair move. You can often see it in dogs (I had seen it to-night in Fifi) when terror or rage erects their hackles. But the experience was only momentary, and the flame of this thing, its awful and burning quality, licked hotly round me....
“And how is Reid to help?” I asked.
“He may be able to test for us part, at any rate, of my theory,” said Roupert. “He is an extraordinarily powerful medium in the way of producing materialized forms of spirits, and I believe him to be honest and high-minded. Now if Frank’s body is possessed by this murderous spirit, it is at least possible that Frank’s own spirit, now unhoused and evicted, will be hovering near its rightful habitation. We will ask if the spirit of Frank Hampden is here.We will ask if it can assume material form. If Reid can produce this materialization, it will doubtless wear the appearance of Frank. We will try, anyhow.... Ah, no doubt that is Reid....”
A very gentle tapping sounded on the front door just outside the room, and Roupert got up.
“I told Reid not to ring,” he said, “for fear that Frank should hear. I will let him in.”
He left the room, and in another moment came back with the medium, a small, perfectly commonplace looking man, smug and prosperous. Then I met his eyes and thought him commonplace no longer. They seemed to look out and through and beyond.
In a few minutes Roupert, who had often sat with Reid before, explained what was wanted. He told him that we wished to know if the spirit of Frank Hampden was about, and, if so, whether we could communicate with it, or see it. That was all.
Reid asked only one question.
“Has Frank Hampden’s spirit been long out of his body?” he said.
Roupert hesitated for a moment.
“I believe it to have been out of his body for about two months,” he answered.
The electric light was put out, but the glow from the fire was bright enough to make a red twilight in the room. I could clearly see the profile of the medium, black against that illumination, the back of the chair in which he sat, the full face of Roupert,glints of reflected light on the glass of pictures, and, with perfect distinctness, Fifi, who had curled herself up on the hearthrug. Almost immediately the medium went into trance, and I saw his head bowed over his chest, and heard his breathing, which had been short and panting, as he passed into unconsciousness, grow quiet again. How long we sat there in silence, without anything supernormal occurring, I do not know, but it appeared to me not to be many minutes before a very loud rap sounded from the table, which began to quiver under our hands. Then Roupert asked:
“Is the spirit of Frank Hampden here?”
There was the assent of three raps.
“Shall we be able to see you?” he asked.
There were two raps, and, after a pause, a third.
Again we sat in silence, this time for a much longer period, and I think the clock on the mantelpiece twice chimed the quarter-hour. Then from the direction of the door there blew across the room a very cold current of air, and the curtains in the window stirred with it. Fifi, I imagine, felt it too, for she sat up, sneezed, and drew herself a little nearer to the fire. Simultaneously I was inwardly aware that there was something, somebody in the room which had not been there before. It had not entered through the door, for when the current of air began to blow I looked at it, and certainly it had not opened.
Then Roupert whispered.
“Look; it is coming.”
The medium’s head had fallen back, and over his chest, in the region of the heart, there appeared a faint, luminous area, inside which there was going on some energy, some activity. Whorls and spirals of grey, curling and intertwining and growing thicker and extending, began building themselves up in the air. For some little while I could not make out what it was that was thus taking shape in the red twilight; then as the materialization progressed, it defined itself into a human form swathed in some misty and opaque vesture. At the top, above shoulders now quite formed, there rose the outline of a head; features growing every moment more distinct fashioned the face of it, and, pallid and silent, fading into darkness below, stood the head and torso of a human being.
The face was clearly recognizable; it was scarce an hour since I had looked on those features, but it wore so heart-broken an anguish in the curves of that beautiful mouth and in the tortured eyes, that my throat worked for very pity and compassion.
Then Roupert spoke.
“Frank,” he said.
The head bowed, the lips moved, but I heard nothing.
“Why are you not in your body?” he asked.
This time there came a whisper just audible.
“I can’t, I can’t,” he said. “Someone is there; someone terrible. For God’s sake, help me!”
The white agonized face grew more convulsed.
“I can’t bear it,” it said.... “For God’s sake, for God’s sake!...”
I looked away from that face for a moment to the hearthrug where a sudden noise attracted my attention. Fifi was sitting bolt upright looking eagerly upwards, and the noise I heard was the pleased thumping of her tail.
Then she came cautiously forward, still gazing at the image which an hour before had driven her frenzied with rage and terror, uttering little anxious whinings, seeking attention. Finally she held out a paw, and gave the short whisper of a bark with which she demands the notice of her favourites.... And if I had been inclined to doubt before, I think that I would now have been convinced that here in some inscrutable manifestation was the true Frank Hampden.
Once more Roupert spoke.
“I will do all that man can do, Frank,” he said, “and by God’s grace we will restore you.”
The figure slowly faded; some of it seemed withdrawn back into the medium, some to be dispersed in the dusk. Before long Reid’s breath again grew quick and laboured, as he passed out of trance, and then drenched with sweat he came to himself.
Roupert told him that the séance had been successful, and then, turning on the light again, we allsat still while the medium recovered from his exhaustion. Before he left, Roupert engaged him to hold himself in readiness for a further séance next day, in case he was telephoned for; and when he had gone, we drew up our chairs to the fire, while Fifi went nosing about the room as if searching for traces of a friend. For a long time Roupert sat in silence, frowning heavily at the fire, asking me some question from time to time, to satisfy himself that our impressions had been identical. Then he appeared to make up his mind.
“I shall do it,” he said; “at least, I shall make the attempt. That was Frank whom we saw just now; up to that point my theory is confirmed. Of course, there’s a risk—there’s an awful risk. But, Archdale, wouldn’t anybody take any risk to cure the anguish we looked upon? That was a human spirit, man, disembodied but not dead, and it knows that its earthly habitation is being defiled and profaned by that murderous occupant. It sees the horrors that its own hands work; the brain that was its pleasant servant is planning worse things yet. I can’t doubt that this is so. No reasonable man can doubt so incredible and so damnable a thing. But if the struggle that there must be is too much for the body that we seek to free, good Lord, what a tale for a coroner’s inquest!”
“You mean that you risk your cousin’s death?” I asked.
“Necessarily; who can tell what will happen? But that is not all. For of what nature is the spirit which we hope to expel from that poor lad’s body? A strong and a desperate one, or it could never have taken possession of it. It will cling with all its force to the tenement which it has usurped, and if we drive it out, if God helps us to do that, what awful and evil power will once more be abroad! But we can’t help that. There is holy justice and reparation to be done, and we can’t count the cost. Now, let me think again!”
He got up and began pacing up and down the room, now muttering to himself, now speaking aloud as if in argument with me.
“It’s a terrible risk for Reid, too,” he said, “for Reid most of all, for he will be in deep trance; such power of faith as we can exert must defend him first of all.... Yet, we can’t get at Rolls, I tell you, without the medium.... I must, of course, tell Reid everything, and ask him if he will take the risk.... He may refuse, though I don’t think he will, for there’s the courage of a saint in that man.... Then there’s Frank, Frank’s body, I mean. That must be absolutely unconscious when the operation takes place; no human nerves could stand it, nor with that fiend in possession would he consent to it.... Deep, the deepest possible unconsciousness.... By Jove, there’s that new German drug, which appears safe enough, and it certainly produces a sleep that comesnearest of all to death; it seems to stupefy the very spirit itself.... Hyocampine, of course; don’t tell me you haven’t heard of it.... Tasteless too; it’s a good thing that the criminal classes can’t get hold of it.... Well, there we are.... Prayer and faith in an Almighty power.... Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord.... He does too, if our motives are right; that’s one of the few facts we can be quite sure about.... You can run a lot of risks if you utterly believe that.”
Suddenly the whole burden of perplexity and anxious thought seemed lifted off his mind.
“I’ll go and see Reid to-morrow morning,” he said. “I believe he will consent when he knows all. And you? Do you want to see the end of it? And look on the glory of God? Come if you like, but if you come, you must be strung up to the highest pitch of trust and serenity that you are capable of. Yes, do be here. You believe that all evil, however deadly and powerful, is altogether inferior in calibre and fighting power to good. Also I shall like a friend at my elbow. Perhaps I oughtn’t to urge that as a reason, for I don’t want any personal feeling to influence you. Only come if you want to witness the power of God, not Reid’s, not mine; we are nothing at all except mere mossy channels.”
For one moment he paused, and I knew that he was wavering himself, in the weakness of the flesh; but instantly he got hold of himself again.
“There’s only one power thatcan’tfail,” he said. “Hell crashes into fragments against it.”
Next morning I got a note from Roupert, saying that Reid consented, and asking me to come in to his house punctually at half-past two, if I had decided to be with him. When I arrived I found Roupert and Frank Hampden sitting over their coffee in the study. Hampden had just drunk his.
“Isn’t there a home for cats somewhere in Battersea?” he was asking. “I’ll go and find a new one for you, as yours appears to have vanished entirely.”
He yawned.
“It’s a feeble habit to go to sleep after lunch,” he said, “but I really think I shall have a nap. I’ve got an astonishing inclination that way. Give me half an hour, will you, and then we’ll go down to the cats’ home, and get a large fat cat.”
I guessed that Roupert had already given his cousin the dose of hyocampine, but just as the latter was pulling a chair round so that he need not face the light, he spoke.
“Make a proper job of it, Frank,” he said, “and lie on the sofa. One always wakes feeling cramped if one goes to sleep in a chair.”
Hampden’s eyelids were already drooping, but he shuffled heavily across to the sofa.
“All right,” he mumbled, “sorry for being so rude, Mr.—Mr. Archdale, but I must have just forty—I wonder why forty——”
And immediately he went to sleep.
Roupert waited a moment, but Hampden did not stir again. Then he went out, and returned with Reid, who had been waiting in his bedroom. All explanations had already been made, and in silence we darkened the room by drawing the thick curtains across the window. Only a little light came in from their edges, but, as last night, the firelight flickered on the walls. Then Roupert locked the door, and we took our places round the table.
“Into Thy hands, O Lord, we commend our spirits,” he said.
Before many minutes were over the medium’s head dropped forward, and after a little struggle he went into trance.
“The spirit of James Rolls,” said Roupert.
In the silence that followed I could hear the slow breathing of Hampden as he slept in that remote unconsciousness. A chink of light from the window fell full on his face, and I could see it very distinctly. Then, I heard him breathing quicker, and a shudder passed through him, shaking the sofa where he lay. His face, hitherto serene and quiescent, began to twitch.
“He can’t wake,” whispered Roupert. “I gave him the full dose.”
Then, not from the door at all, but from the direction of the sofa there came an icy blast of wind, and simultaneously a shattering rap from the table.
“Is that James Rolls?” asked Roupert.
Three raps answered him.
“Then in the name of God,” said Roupert, in a loud, steady voice, “come from where you are, and be made manifest.”
Suddenly Hampden began to groan. His mouth worked, and he ground his teeth together. A horrible convulsion seized his face, a distortion of rending agony, like that which sometimes seizes on a dying man whose body clings desperately to the spirit that is emerging from it. A rattle and a strangled gulping came from his throat, and the foam gathered on his lips.
“It is there that you are, James Rolls,” said Roupert in a loud voice of exultation. “In the name of God, come out!”
The convulsions redoubled themselves; the body writhed and bent like that of a poisoned man. Then round the face, brightest about the mouth, there formed a pale greenish light, corrupt and awful. It began to wreathe itself into lines and curves, weaving and intertwining; it grew in height, like a luminous column built without hands, in the darkness; it defined itself into human form, until in the air just above the recumbent body it stood complete. With its emergence the convulsions and the groanings subsided, and at the end, when this wraith in semblance of a swathed man, with face of such murderous cruelty that I shuddered as I looked at it, stood fully fashioned and finished, the body of Frank Hampden layquite still, in that sleep which was nearest of all to death.
Then Roupert’s voice spoke again, clear and peremptory and triumphant.
“Begone, James Rolls!” he cried.
Very slowly the materialized spirit began to move, floating like a balloon in an almost windless air. Slowly it drifted towards us, with its eyes fixed on the unconscious medium and alight with awful purpose, its mouth curled into some sort of hellish smile. It came quite close to him, as if sucked there, and the edge of its outline began to extend towards him a feeler, as of a little whirlpool of water drawn down into a sink, till the end of it just touched him....
“In the name of the Holiest, and by the power of the Highest,” shouted Roupert, “I bid you go to the place that He has appointed for you.”
Then ... I can only describe what happened by saying that some shock, blinding, deafening, overwhelming every sense, shook the room. It leaped into a blaze of light, a thunder of sound rent the air, and yet I knew that all this came from within, was the echo of the spiritual crisis that raged round us made manifest to the bodily sense. And silence as of the frozen Polar night succeeded....
Then once again a light began to be built up over Hampden’s body that lay utterly still beside the curtains. It fashioned itself, but only very faintly, into the outline of a man, and this seemed to be drawninwards and absorbed by that motionless figure. We waited till it had disappeared altogether.
The medium stirred and struggled.
“It is over,” he said, and laid his head on his arms.
Roupert got up and drew back the curtains. From outside the door came scratchings and whinings, and presently he unlocked it, and let Fifi in. She saluted everybody in her exuberant fashion; then came to the sofa, sniffed and jumped up on it, wagging her tail.
It was not till late in the afternoon that Frank Hampden came to himself. A beautiful spirit looked out of those jolly boyish eyes.
Mrs. Andrewswas certainly Athenian by nature, and it was her delight not only to hear some new thing, but to put it into practice. Enjoying excellent health, she was able to take almost any liberties with her constitution, and for a long time was absorbed in the maelstrom of diets, each of which seemed to suit her to perfection. For a couple of months she adopted the Pembroke treatment, and droves of sheep were sacrificed to supply her with sufficient minced mutton, while the utmost resources of the kitchen boiler were needed to give her the oceans of hot water which she found it necessary to drink all day except at meals. Having obtained the utmost benefits derivable from this system, she nourished her ample and vigorous frame, by way of a change, on pyramids of grated nuts, carefully weighed out, and it cannot be doubted that she would enthusiastically have fed herself on chopped-up hard-boiled egg, like a canary, if she could have found any system of diet that inculcated such a proceeding.
Her husband, for all his mild and apparently yielding disposition, must at bottom have been a man of iron soul, for he absolutely refused to embark on any of these experiments, though he never dissuadedhis wife from so doing, and stuck firmly, like a limpet, to his three solid and satisfactory meals, not disdaining minced mutton, nor even a modicum of milled nuts, when he felt that they would be agreeable, but adding them to his ordinary diet, without relying on them. The two, childless and middle-aged, lived in extreme happiness and comfort together, and no doubt Mrs. Andrews’s enthusiasms, and the perennial amusement her husband derived from them, served to keep the sunlight of life shining on them. They were never bored and always busy, which, perhaps, even more than diet, secured them serenity of health.
But the time came when Mrs. Andrews, in an unacknowledged despair of feeling better and more vigorous physically than she always did, turned her Athenian mind towards mental and psychical fads. She began by telling the fortunes of her friends by means of cards, and, though she could always say how she knew, following the rules of her primer, that her husband had had scarlet fever when he was twenty-three, yet the fact that she knew it perfectly well without the help of the cards made the divination rather less amazing. She tried Christian Science, though only for a short time, since no amount of demonstration over false claims could rid her one day of the conviction that she had a raging toothache, whereas the dentist convinced her in a moment, by the short though agonizing application of the pincers,that he could remove the toothache, which had resisted all the precepts of her temporary creed.
An excursion into the realms of astrology succeeded this, and conjointly a study of palmistry, and at this point her husband, for the first time, began to take an interest in his wife’s preoccupations. It certainly did seem very odd that his horoscope should testify to the identical events which the lines in his hand so plainly showed his wife, and certain apparent discrepancies were no doubt capable of explanation. When he knew that the right hand indicated what Nature meant him to be, and the left what he had made of himself, it could not but be gratifying to find he had lived so closely up to his possibilities, and it was pleasant, again, to find his wife so enthusiastic about his plump, pink palm.
“A most remarkable hand, dear,” she said. “I never saw evidence of such pluck and determination. And look at your Mount of Jupiter! Splendid!”
Mr. Andrews did not know exactly what the Mount of Jupiter was, but he knew what pluck and determination were.
“Upon my word, my dear,” he said, “there may be something in it. I will borrow your primer, if I may. And now about the future.”
Mrs. Andrews was already peering eagerly into the future. This was as splendid as the Mount of Jupiter.
“Such a line of life!” she said. “Let me see,you are fifty-eight, are you not? Well, on it goes—sixty, seventy, eighty, without a break in it. Why, I declare it reaches ninety, Henry!”
This was very gratifying, and it showed only ordinary politeness on Henry’s part to inquire into his wife’s prospects.
“Ah, I haven’t such a line as you, dear,” she said. “But, after all, if I live in perfect health till I am eighty-two, which is what my hand tells me, I’m sure there’s no reason to complain, and I for one shan’t.”
But when Mrs. Andrews had told the fortunes of her husband and all her friends, and secured them, on the whole, such charming futures, it was no wonder that she went further into matters more psychical and occult. A course of gazing into the most expensive crystal proved disappointing, since she could never see anything except the reflection of the objects in the room, while her husband, now actively taking part in these investigations, merely fell asleep when he attempted to see anything there. They both hoped that this might not be ordinary sleep, but the condition of deep trance which they found was one of the accompanying phenomena, and productive of great results; but these trances were so deep that no recollection of what occurred therein ever remained in his mind, with the exception of one occasion, on which he dreamed about boiled rabbit. As he had partaken of this disgusting provender at lunch thatday, both Mrs. Andrews and he regarded this dream as retrospective in character, and as not possessed of prophetic significance.
It was about this time that they both became members of the Psychical Research Society, and their attention could not but be struck by the wonderful phenomena resulting from the practice of automatic writing. If you had a psychical gift in this direction—and it was now the settled conviction of both Henry Andrews and his wife that they had—all apparently that had to be done was to hold a pencil over a writing-pad conveniently placed, abstract your mind from the hand that held the pencil, and sit there to see what happened. The theory was that some controlling spirit might take possession of the pencil and dictate messages from the other world, which the pencil would record. Eager study of the psychical journals warned them that patient practice might be necessary before any results were arrived at, the reason being that the control must get used to the novel instrument of communication; and warning was given that they must not be discouraged if for a long time nothing was recorded on the paper except meaningless lines. But it appeared that most people, if they would only be patient enough, would be rewarded by symptoms of the presence of a control before very long, and when once a beginning was made, progress was apt to be very rapid. It was recommended also that practice should be regular, and, ifpossible, should take place at the same time every day.
The idea fired Mrs. Andrews at once.
“Upon my word, dear Henry,” she said, “I think it is very well worth trying, for the crystal is yielding no results at all. Psychical gifts are possessed by everybody in some degree, so this very interesting article says, and if ours do not lie in the direction of crystal-gazing, it makes it all the more probable that we shall achieve something in automatic writing. And as for a regular time for practising it, what could be more pleasant than to sit out in the garden after tea, when you have come in from your golf, and enjoy these warm evenings, with the feeling that we are occupying ourselves, instead of sitting idle, as we are apt to do?”
Henry distinctly approved of the suggestion. He was often a little fatigued after his golf, though he was going to live till ninety, and the prospect of sitting quietly in a chair in the garden, instead of feeling that he ought to be weeding, was quite a pleasant one.
“Then shall we each sit with paper and pencil, dear?” he asked.
Mrs. Andrews referred to the essay that gave elementary instruction.
“Certainly,” she said. “We will try that first. They say that two hands holding the pencil often produce extraordinary results, but we will begin, asthey suggest, singly. I declare that my hand feels quite fidgety already, as if the control was just waiting for the means of communication to be prepared.”
Everything in Mrs. Andrews’s house was in apple-pie order, and it took her no time at all to find two writing-pads and a couple of sharpened pencils. With these she rejoined her husband on the paved walk, where they had had tea, outside the drawing-room, and, with pencil in hand, fixed her eye firmly on the top of the mulberry tree at the edge of the lawn, and waited. He, with left hand free for his cigarette, did the same, but his mind kept going back to the boiled rabbit he had dreamed of after crystal-gazing, which still seemed to him a very unusual occurrence, for, to the best of his recollection, he had never dreamed of boiled rabbit before.
Within a few days’ time very promising developments had taken place. Almost immediately Mrs. Andrews had begun to trace angled lines on the paper, which, if they did not suggest anything else particular, were remarkably like the temperature chart of a very feverish patient. Her hand, seemingly without volition on her part, made energetic dashes and dabs all over the paper, and she felt a very odd tingling sensation in her fingers, which could scarcely be put down to anything else than the presence of the control.
Her husband, scarcely less fortunate, also began to trace queer patterns of irregular curves on hissheet, which looked very much as if they were words. But though they were like words, they were not any known words, whichever way up you attempted to read them, though, as Mrs. Andrews said, they might easily be Russian or Chinese, which would account for their being wholly meaningless to the English eye. Sheets of possible Russian were thus poured out by Mr. Andrews, and whole hospital records of fever charts on the part of his wife, but neither at present came within measurable distance of intelligibility. The control seemed incapable of making itself understood. Then on a memorable day Mr. Andrews’s pencil evinced an irresistible desire to write figures, and after inscribing “one, two, one, two,” a great many times, wrote quite distinctly 4958, and gave a great dash as if it had said its last word.
“And what 4958 indicates, my dear,” said he, passing it over to Mrs. Andrews, “I think we must leave to the control to determine.”
She looked at it a moment in silence; then, a great thought splendidly striking her, she rose in some excitement.
“Henry, it is as plain as plain,” she said. “I am forty-nine; you are fifty-eight. Our ages are thus wonderfully conjoined. It certainly means that we must act together. Come and hold my pencil with me.”
“Well, that is very curious,” said Henry, and did as he was told.
At this point their experiments entered the second phase, and the pencil thus jointly held at once developed an intelligible activity. Instead of mere fever charts and numerals, it began to produce whole sentences which were true to the point of being positive truisms. Before they went to dinner that night, they were told, in a large, sprawling hand, that “Wisdom is more than wealth,” and that “Fearlessness is best,” and that “Hate blinds the eyes of Love.” The very next day more unimpeachable sentiments were poured forth, and at the end was written, “From Pocky.”
Pocky, then, was clearly the control; he became to Mr. and Mrs. Andrews an established personality with a mind stored with moral generalities. Very often some practical application could be made of his dicta, as, for instance, when Mr. Andrews was hesitating as to whether to invest quite a considerable sum of money in a rather speculative venture. But, recollecting that Pocky had said that “Wisdom is better than wealth,” he very prudently refrained, and had the satisfaction of seeing the speculative concern come a most tremendous smash very soon after. But it required a good deal of ingenuity to fit Pocky’s utterances into the affairs of daily life, and Mr. Andrews was getting a little tired of these generalities, when the curtain went up on the third phase.
This was coincident with the outbreak of the German war, when nothing else was present in theminds of husband and wife, and Pocky suddenly became patriotic and truculent. For a whole evening he wrote, “Kill them. Treacherous Germans. Avenge the scrap of paper,” and very soon after, just when England generally was beginning to be excited over the rumour that hosts of Russians were passing through the country to the French battle-front, he made a further revelation of himself.
“The hosts of Russia are with you,” he wrote, “Cossacks from the Steppes, troops of the Great White Tsar. Hundreds and thousands, Russia to England, England to France. The Allies triumph. From Pocksky.” The pencil gave a great dash and flew from the fingers that held it.
It was all most clearly written, and in a voice that trembled with excitement, Mrs. Andrews read it out.
“There, my dear,” she said, “I don’t think we need have any further doubt about the Russians. And look how it is signed—not Pocky any longer, but Pocksky. That is a Russian name, if ever there was one!”
“Pocksky—so it is,” said Mr. Andrews, putting on his spectacles. “Well, that is most wonderful. And to think that in those early days, when my pencil used to write things we couldn’t read, you suggested it might be Russian!”
“I feel no doubt that it was,” said Mrs. Andrews firmly. “I wish now that we had kept them, and my writing, too, which you used to call the fever charts.I dare say some poor fellow in hospital had temperatures like that.”
Mr. Andrews did not feel so sure of this.
“That sounds a little far-fetched, dear,” he said, “though I quite agree with you about the possibility of its being Pocksky who wrote through me. I wonder who he was? Some great general, probably.”
You can easily imagine the excitement that pervaded Oakley in the weeks that followed, when every day brought some fresh butler or railway porter into the public press, who had told somebody who had told the author of the letter in question that he had seen bearded soldiers stepping out of trains with blinds drawn down, and shaking the snow off their boots. It mattered nothing that the whole romance was officially denied; indeed, it only made Mrs. Andrews very indignant at the suppression of war news.
“The War Office may say what it likes,” she exclaimed, “and, indeed, it seems to make it its business to deny what we all know to be true. I think I must learn a few words of Russian, in case I meet any soldier with a beard—‘God Save the Tsar!’ or something of the kind. I shall send for a Russian grammar. Now, let us see what Pocksky has to tell us to-night.”
That no further confirmation of Pocksky’s announcements on this subject ever came to light was scarcely noticed by the automatic writers,for Pocksky was bursting with other news. He rather terrified his interpreters, when there was nervousness about possible Zeppelin raids, by saying: “Fires from the wicked ones in the clouds. Fourteen, twelve, fourteen, cellar best,” since this could hardly mean anything but that a raid was to be expected on the fourteenth of December; and Mr. and Mrs. Andrews—and, indeed, a large number of their friends—spent the evening in their cellars, coming out again when it was definitely after midnight. But the relief at finding that no harm had been done speedily obliterated the feeling that Pocksky had misled them, and when, on Christmas Eve, he said, “Spirit of Peace descends,” though certain people thought he meant that the War would soon be over, the truce on the Western Front for Christmas Day was more generally believed to bear out this remarkable prophecy.
All through the spring Pocksky continued voluble. He would not definitely commit himself over the course that Italy was to take, but, as Mrs. Andrews triumphantly pointed out, Italy would not definitely commit herself either, which just showed how right Pocksky was. He rather went back to the Pocky style over this, and said: “Prudence is better than precipitation; Italy prepares before making decision. Wisdom guides her counsels, and wisdom is ever best. From Pocksky.” Intermittently the forcing of the Dardanelles occupied him.
Now, here a rather odd point arose. Mr. Andrews at this time had to spend a week in town, and only Mrs. Andrews held the pencil which the intelligence of Pocksky used to express himself with. In all these messages Pocksky spelled the name of the straits “Dardanels,” which, for all I know, may be the Russian form. But two days ago Mrs. Andrews kindly sent me one of his messages, which I was glad to see was most optimistic in tone. She enclosed a note from herself, saying:
“You will like to see what Pocksky says about the Dardanels. Isn’t he wonderful?”
So Mrs. Andrews, writing independently of Pocksky, spells Dardanelles the same way as Pocksky does when he controls the pencil. I cannot help wondering if the control is—shall we say?—quite complete. I wonder also how the straits will get themselves spelt when Mr. Andrews returns. It is all rather puzzling.
Hugh Marshamhad spent the day, as a good tourist should, in visiting the temples and the tombs of the kings across the river, and the magic of the hour of sunset flamed over earth and heaven as he crossed the Nile again to Luxor in his felucca. It seemed as if the whole world had been suddenly transferred into the heart of an opal, and burned with a myriad fiery colours. The river itself was of the green that beech trees are clad in at spring-time; the columns of the temple that stood close to its banks glowed as if lit from within by the flame of some perpetual evening sacrifice; the cloudless sky was dusky blue in the east, the blue of turquoise overhead, and melted into aqua-marine above the line of desert where the sun had just sunk. All along the bank which he was fast approaching under the press of the cool wind from the north were crowds of Arabs, padding softly home in the dust from their work, and chattering as sparrows chatter among the bushes in the long English twilights. Even the dust that hovered and hung and was dispersed again by the wind was rainbowed; it caught the hues from the river and the sky and the orange-flaming temple, and those who walked in it were clad in brightness.
Here in the South no long English twilight lingered, and as he walked up the dusky fragrant tunnel of mimosa that led to the hotel, night thickened, and in the sky a million stars leaped into being, while the soft gathering darkness sponged out the glories of the flaming hour. On the hotel steps the vendors of carpets and Arabian hangings, of incense and filigree work, of suspicious turquoises and more than suspicious scarabs were already packing up their wares, and probably recounting to each other in their shrill incomprehensible gabble the iniquitous bargains they had made with the gullible Americans and English, who so innocently purchased the wares of Manchester. Only in his accustomed corner old Abdul still squatted, for he was of a class above the ordinary vendors, a substantial dealer in antiques, who had a shop in the village, where archæologists resorted, and bought,sub rosa, pieces that eventually found their way into European museums. He was in his shop all day, but evening found him, when serious business hours were over, on the steps of the hotel, where he sold undoubted antiquities to tourists who wanted something genuine.
The day had been very hot, and Hugh felt himself disposed to linger outside the hotel in this cool dusk, and turn over the tray of scarabs which Abdul Hamid presented to his notice. He was a wrinkled, dried-up husk of a man, loquacious and ingratiating in manner, and welcomed Hugh as an old customer.
“See, sir,” he said, “here are two more scroll-scarabs like those you bought from me before the week. You should have these; they are very fine and very cheap, because I do no business this year. Mr. Rankin, you know him? of the British Museum, he give me two pounds each last year for scroll-scarabs not so fine, and to-day I sell them at a pound and a half each. Take them; they are yours. Scroll-scarabs of the twelfth dynasty; if Mr. Rankin were here he pay me two pounds each, and be sorry I not ask more.”
Hugh laughed.
“You may sell them to Mr. Rankin then,” he said. “He comes here to-morrow.”
The old man, utterly unabashed, grinned and shook his head.
“No; I promised you them for pound and a half,” he said. “I am not cheat-dealer. They are yours—pound and a half. Take them, take them.”
Hugh resisted this unparalleled offer, and, turning over the contents of the tray, picked out of it and examined carefully a broken fragment of blue glaze, about an inch in height. This represented the head and shoulders of an ape, and the fracture had occurred half-way down the back, so that the lower part of the trunk, the forearms which apparently hung by its sides, and the hind legs were missing. On the back there was an inscription in hieroglyphics, also broken.Presumably the missing piece contained the remainder of the letters. It was modelled with extreme care and minuteness, and the face wore an expression of grotesque malevolence.
“What’s this broken bit of a monkey?” asked Hugh carelessly.
Abdul, looking much like a monkey himself, put his eyes close to it.
“Ah, that’s the rarest thing in Egypt,” he said, “so Mr. Rankin he tell me, if only the monkey not broken. See the back? There it says: ‘He of whom this is, let him call on me thrice’—and then some son of a dog broke it. If the rest was here, I would not take a hundred pounds for it; but now ten years have I kept half-monkey, and never comes half-monkey to it. It is yours, sir, for a pound it is yours. Half-monkey nothing to me; it is fool-monkey only being half-monkey. I let it go—I give it you, and you give me pound.”
Hugh Marsham felt in one pocket, then in another, with no appearance of hurry or eagerness.
“There’s your pound,” he said casually.
Abdul peered at him in the dusk. It was very odd that Hugh did not offer him half what he asked, instead of paying up without bargaining. He regretted extremely that he had not asked more. But the little blue fragment was now in Hugh’s pocket, and the sovereign glistened very pleasantly in his own palm.
“And what was the rest of the hieroglyphic, do you think?” Hugh asked.
“Eh, Allah only knows the wickedness and the power of the monkeys,” said Abdul. “Once there were such in Egypt, and in the temple of Mut in Karnak, which the English dug up, you shall see a chamber with just such monkeys sitting round it, four of them, all carved in sandstone. But on them there is no writing; I have looked at them behind and before; they not master-monkeys. Perhaps the monkey promised that whoso called on him thrice, if he were owner of the blue image of which gentleman has the half, would be his master, and that monkey would do his bidding. Who knows? It is of the old wickedness of the world, the old Egyptian blackness.”
Hugh got up. He had been out in the sun all day, and felt at this moment a little intimate shiver, which warned him that it was wiser to go indoors till the chill of sunset had passed.
“I expect you’ve tried it on with the half-monkey, haven’t you?” he said.
Abdul burst out into a toothless cackle of laughter.
“Yes, effendi,” he said. “I have tried it a hundred times, and nothing happens. Else I would not have sold it you. Half-monkey is no monkey at all. I have tried to make boy with the ink-mirror see something about monkeys, but nothing comes, except the clouds and the man who sweeps. No monkey.”
Hugh nodded to him.
“Good-night, you old sorcerer,” he said pleasantly.
As he walked up the broad flagged passage to his room, carrying the half-monkey in his hand, Hugh felt with a disengaged thumb in his waistcoat pocket for something he had picked up that day in the valley of the tombs of the kings. He had eaten his lunch there, after an inspection of the carved and reeking corridors, and, as he sat idly smoking, had reached out a lazy hand to where this thing had glittered among the pebbles. Now, entering his room, he turned up the electric light, and, standing under it with his back to the window, that opened, door fashion, on to the three steps that led into the hotel garden, he fitted the fragment he had found to the fragment he had just purchased. They joined on to each other with the most absolute accuracy, not a chip was missing. There was the complete ape, and down its back ran the complete legend.
The window was open, and at this moment he heard a sudden noise as of some scampering beast in the garden outside. His light streamed out in an oblong on to the sandy path, and, laying the two pieces of the image on the table, he looked out. But there was nothing irregular to be seen; the palm trees waved and clashed in the wind, and the rose bushes stirred and scattered their fragrance. Only right down the middle of the sandy path that ranbetween the beds, the ground was curiously disturbed, as by some animal, heavily frolicking, scooping and spurning the light soil as it ran.
The midday train from Cairo next day brought Mr. Rankin, the eminent Egyptologist and student of occult lore, a huge red man with a complete mastery of colloquial Arabic. He had but a day to spend in Luxor, for he wasen routefor Merawi, where lately some important finds had been made; but Hugh took occasion to show him the figure of the ape as they sat over their coffee in the garden just outside his bedroom after lunch.
“I found the lower half yesterday outside one of the tombs of the kings,” he said, “and the top half by the utmost luck among old Abdul’s things. He told me you said that if it was complete it would be of the greatest rarity. He lied, I suppose?”
Rankin gave one gasp of amazed surprise as he looked at it and read the inscription on the back. Marsham thought that his great red face suddenly paled.
“Good Lord!” he said. “Here, take it!” And he held out the two pieces to him.
Hugh laughed.
“Why in such a hurry?” he said.
“Because there comes a breaking-point to every man’s honesty, and I might keep it, and swear that I had given it back to you. My dear fellow, do you know what you’ve got?”
“Indeed I don’t. I want to be told,” said Hugh.
“And to think that it was you who only a couple of months ago asked me what a scarab was! Well, you’ve got there what all Egyptologists, and even more keenly than Egyptologists all students of folk-lore and magic black and white—especially black—would give their eyes to have found. Good Lord! what’s that?”
Hugh was sitting by his side in a deck-chair, idly fitting together the two halves of the broken image. He too heard what had startled Rankin; for it was the same noise as had startled him last night, namely, the scampering of some great frolicsome animal, somewhere close to them. As he jumped up, severing his hands, the noise ceased.
“Funny,” he said, “I heard that last night. There’s nothing; it’s some stray dog in the bushes. Do tell me what it is that I’ve got.”
Rankin, who had surged to his feet also, stood listening a moment. But there was nothing to be heard but the buzzing of bees in the bushes and the chiding of the remote kites overhead. He sat down again.
“Well, give me two minutes,” he said, “and I can tell you all I know. Once upon a time, when this wonderful and secret land was alive and not dead—oh, we have killed it with our board-schools and our steamers and our religion—there was a whole hierarchy of gods, Isis, Osiris, and the rest, of whomwe know a great deal. But below them there was a company of semi-divinities, demons if you will, of whom we know practically nothing. The cat was one, certain dwarfish creatures were others, but most potent of all were the cynocephali, the dog-faced apes. They were not divine, rather they were demons, of hideous power,but”—and he pointed a great hand at Hugh—“they could be controlled. Men could control them, men could turn them into terrific servants, much as the genii in the ‘Arabian Nights’ were controlled. But to do that you had to know the secret name of the demon, and had yourself to make an image of him, with the secret name inscribed thereon, and by that you could summon him and all the incarnate creatures of his species.
“So much we know from certain very guarded allusions in the Book of the Dead and other sources, for this was one of the great mysteries never openly spoken of. Here and there a priest in Karnak, or Abydos, or in Hieropolis, had had handed down to him one of those secret names, but in nine cases out of ten the knowledge died with him, for there was something dangerous and terrible about it all. Old Abdul here, for instance, believes that Moses had the secret names of frogs and lice, and made images of them with the secret name inscribed on them, and by those produced the plagues of Egypt. Think what you could do, think what he did, if infinite power over frog-nature were given you, so that the king’s chamber swarmed with frogs at your word. Usually, as I said, the secret name was but sparingly passed on, but occasionally some very bold advanced spirit, such as Moses, made his image, and controlled——”
He paused a moment, and Hugh wondered if he was in some delirious dream. Here they were, taking coffee and cigarettes underneath the shadow of a modern hotel in the yearA.D.1912, and this great savant was talking to him about the spell that controlled the whole frog-nature in the universe. The gist, the moral of his discourse, was already perfectly clear.
“That’s a good joke,” Hugh said. “You told your story with extraordinary gravity. And what you mean is that those two blue bits I hold in my hand control the whole ape-nature of the world? Bravo, Rankin! For a moment, you and your impressiveness almost made me take it all seriously. Lord! You do tell a story well! And what’s the secret name of the ape?”
Rankin turned to him with the shake of an impressive forefinger.
“My dear boy,” he said, “you should never be disrespectful towards the things you know nothing of. Never say a thing is moonshine till you know what you are talking about. I know, at this moment, exactly as much as you do about your ape-image, except that I can translate its inscription, which Iwill do for you. On the top half is written, ‘He, of whom this is, let him call on me thrice——’”
Hugh interrupted.
“That’s what Abdul read to me,” he said.